Technology

You can also just buy digital downloads from sites like Bandcamp and Quobuz, and even iTunes if you click past the Apple Music streaming part.

Noob question, should I use a VPN for Soulseek?

What's your discovery means now? How do you get exposed to things not currently in your wheelhouse? And once you find that thing, how do you integrate that into your library for listening on an often enough basis?

I find that I binge explore, grab 12 new artists like an old mix CD and see what sticks, but then feel like a hoarder when it sits unplayed in my library for a year.

Well hey old man, go to bandcamp and pay a quarter or an eighth of the price of that frisbee to get lossless audio files that you can download and backup to your heart's content.

Spotify was always for chumps.

I remember that time and it was kind of awful. It was brutal in terms of packaging, and lugging around all those cds sucked. It was way more expensive and the money still all went to record companies, not to mention how terrible it felt to pay full price for a mostly garbage cd just for one song (singles existed though but not for everything).

Records companies also had final say on who we listened too and completely controlled the whole scene essentially.

I get the nostalgia but it was 100% worse both for artists and consumers. Well it has always been rough for artists tbh, I don't know if it's harder right now or not.

When I discovered that it was possible to buy and download drm free lossless flac-files i went back to buying music again. Never looked back tbh.

My GOG games aren't, my Steam library's still chugging along after 11 years, my Linux installs haven't failed or started spying on me and my offline, modular 3d printer still works.

It's all about understanding what you're using/buying and what's the incentives for those on the other end. We shouldn't have to think about that all the time, but on the bright side there are cool things happening outside of enshittification by publicly traded corpos.

Also VLC is free and is one of the best media players there is, and yt-dlp is so easy to acquire music with I'm surprised people thought spotify was a good long term idea for their music consumption.

It really whips the llamas ass.

Unfortunately, Spotify's streaming quality is rather low, even if you pay for a monthly subscription.

I switched to Tidal when I bought a dedicated DAC and a pair of very highend headphones and have not regretted it - you can hear the difference on good gear.