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SLOSifl
Aug 10, 2002


My Lovely Horse posted:

I recently got into Spotify and I'm torn between "this is fantastic" and "but what if they ever lose a license or the business folds or or". I mean, I remember other services that I used to use a lot and none of those is around anymore, meanwhile I've still got MP3s on my hard drive that I remember ripping years before then. I'm hesitant to really rely on streaming services but I'm definitely discovering a lot of good stuff through Spotify.
I'll tell you what I sure as poo poo don't have anymore - CDs in usable condition. I do have some very old rips of some of my favorite CDs from the late 90s, in WMA format DRM'd into digital trash, following my music collection around. Now I just stream anything anytime and don't particularly care about the back-alley licensing poo poo because whatever it is, it seems to be somewhere.

Yesterday I liked a song during some TV show's credits, and without even moving I had figured out what it was, legally purchased it, and downloaded it to my NAS before the credits ended. If there's anything to be worried about it's how easy that was. And that was only because I'm a loving loser with only a CD player in my car instead of a bluetooth-equipped system.

SLOSifl has a new favorite as of 21:27 on May 11, 2015

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Horace
Apr 17, 2007

Gone Skiin'

My Lovely Horse posted:

I recently got into Spotify and I'm torn between "this is fantastic" and "but what if they ever lose a license or the business folds or or". I mean, I remember other services that I used to use a lot and none of those is around anymore, meanwhile I've still got MP3s on my hard drive that I remember ripping years before then. I'm hesitant to really rely on streaming services but I'm definitely discovering a lot of good stuff through Spotify.

Just make sure you go into settings and turn on "show unavailable tracks in playlists", so you notice when something is removed.

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

Oh yes. Just today I looked over my CD collection and thought "that one's gotta be dodgy by now, that one too, that one definitely doesn't work anymore..." And I'm still buying CDs even though I keep telling myself it's impractical, as well as more expensive than at least only buying MP3s on amazon.

Back in the day I kept my MP3 collection on CD-Rs and thought, well, that's that taken care of. It was a situation not unlike the Betamax guy's wall of obsolescence. Last year I spent some very fun days trying to get the files back off there and praying more than once that a given CD-R would pull itself together just once more.

Not to be all :smug: about my rare grooves, but I've got some pretty fantastic stuff that's not on Spotify or anywhere, too, so I'm pretty fond of my "local copy" approach. But Spotify is still incredibly helpful as a "try before you buy" thing to me. Youtube used to cover that, but Spotify is usually better.

My Lovely Horse has a new favorite as of 21:38 on May 11, 2015

SLOSifl
Aug 10, 2002


Obviously that's a perfect reason. It's more likely those tracks will be on at least one service eventually, whereas the chance of your accessible collection dropping is pretty small though. On the other hand, my current opinion of my musical taste from 15 years ago is not very good. I'm willing to lose a little for the sake of sweeping up.

robodex
Jun 6, 2007

They're what's for dinner
Spotify is slightly better than other streaming services because you can import your own music into it. So there's that.

I don't think the big ones are going anywhere (Spotify, Rdio) but I'd be leery about signing up for one of the smaller ones. That being said, if they lose a license or they fold you could always just sign up for another one? They all cost the same and it's not like you're losing something you bought.

SymmetryrtemmyS
Jul 13, 2013

I got super tired of seeing your avatar throwing those fuckin' glasses around in the astrology thread so I fixed it to a .jpg

robodex posted:

Spotify is slightly better than other streaming services because you can import your own music into it. So there's that.

I don't think the big ones are going anywhere (Spotify, Rdio) but I'd be leery about signing up for one of the smaller ones. That being said, if they lose a license or they fold you could always just sign up for another one? They all cost the same and it's not like you're losing something you bought.

Google music also supports music uploading, for what it's worth. I also like their radio function much more than Spotify.

TotalLossBrain
Oct 20, 2010

Hier graben!
RS-232 may be old, but it is far from obsolete at least in anything not end user consumer electronics. I use it in industrial electricity control products almost daily. Plenty of current hardware costing tens of thousands of dollars uses RS-232.
I used to have an old Dell laptop with a native serial port for just that purpose. It got too slow with Win 7 though, so now I'm using a slightly newer Dell with a separate expansion port cradle that has a serial port.

It's also a great protocol for microcontrollers and microcomputers like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. Very easy to implement and program.

George RR Fartin
Apr 16, 2003




TotalLossBrain posted:

RS-232 may be old, but it is far from obsolete at least in anything not end user consumer electronics. I use it in industrial electricity control products almost daily. Plenty of current hardware costing tens of thousands of dollars uses RS-232.
I used to have an old Dell laptop with a native serial port for just that purpose. It got too slow with Win 7 though, so now I'm using a slightly newer Dell with a separate expansion port cradle that has a serial port.

It's also a great protocol for microcontrollers and microcomputers like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. Very easy to implement and program.

Hospitals use it for connecting laboratory instruments to the network via termservers, though thankfully it seems a lot are moving towards connecting via TCP/IP as newer instruments gain ethernet ports. I've learned altogether too much about termservers, pinouts, cabling and common issues and solutions (high ASCII, transmit to receive issues) in troubleshooting that stuff. But even then, I too would be surprised if they're gone in the next decade. They're reliable enough (the biggest cause of failure is just the server itself making GBS threads the bed, though I have encountered rare scenarios where the connectors themselves corroded, but I support hospitals on a large enough scale that the latter is statistically insignificant) and nobody wants to reroute that poo poo through the ceiling/walls and whatever rats nest is up there.

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

Spotify is obsolete and failed for a lot of potential users (myself included) because it just doesn't have the music I'd like to listen to. I stopped using it altogether when they pulled all the Agit Prop tracks.

Inco
Apr 3, 2009

I have been working out! My modem is broken and my phone eats half the posts I try to make, including all the posts I've tried to make here. I'll try this one more time.
Canada's telecom infrastructure is obsolete and lovely because afaik Spotify service only has plans with one subsidiary of one cell carrier, and most people I know don't have the money to get a data cap of more than 1GB, which still costs me $90/month, so using it without a plan is a good way to get dinged for overages.

DONT TOUCH THE PC
Jul 15, 2001

You should try it, it's a real buzz.

My Lovely Horse posted:

I recently got into Spotify and I'm torn between "this is fantastic" and "but what if they ever lose a license or the business folds or or". I mean, I remember other services that I used to use a lot and none of those is around anymore, meanwhile I've still got MP3s on my hard drive that I remember ripping years before then. I'm hesitant to really rely on streaming services but I'm definitely discovering a lot of good stuff through Spotify.

I've met tons of people with no cd/music collection to speak of and they are rediscovering tons of music through services like spotify or pandora. downloading was never that mainstream as people would like you to believe.

Jerry Cotton posted:

Spotify is obsolete and failed for a lot of potential users (myself included) because it just doesn't have the music I'd like to listen to. I stopped using it altogether when they pulled all the Agit Prop tracks.

I hear this a lot and this is mostly due to distribution rights and copyright being such a mess that no service to date has been able to solve. If anything, the way these rights work is obsolete, not spotify or music streaming in general.

SymmetryrtemmyS
Jul 13, 2013

I got super tired of seeing your avatar throwing those fuckin' glasses around in the astrology thread so I fixed it to a .jpg
It's even worse when they have some of an artist, but not the album you want to listen to. I wanted to listen to Moonsorrow's Jumalten Kaupunki on Spotify the other day, but the album's missing...and I'm pretty sure I listened to it before.

I wish they would give you some notice, at least.

bigtom
May 7, 2007

Playing the solid gold hits and moving my liquid lips...

TotalLossBrain posted:

RS-232 may be old, but it is far from obsolete at least in anything not end user consumer electronics. I use it in industrial electricity control products almost daily. Plenty of current hardware costing tens of thousands of dollars uses RS-232.
I used to have an old Dell laptop with a native serial port for just that purpose. It got too slow with Win 7 though, so now I'm using a slightly newer Dell with a separate expansion port cradle that has a serial port.

It's also a great protocol for microcontrollers and microcomputers like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. Very easy to implement and program.

Radio station equipment loves RS-232: most satellite relay closures come over RS-232, older RDS units use it to be pushed updated text from the encoder, and even for updating firmware in some cases on older audio processors. I keep one of those USB to serial adapters on hand at all times just in case - saved my rear end a few times trying to interface with an older RDS encoder that lacked Ethernet. It works great so long as all the settings are correct.

Still prefer Ethernet or USB, but it's not going away for a long time in my line of work either.

mostlygray
Nov 1, 2012

BURY ME AS I LIVED, A FREE MAN ON THE CLUTCH

Code Jockey posted:

Jesus christ why

Also gently caress crlf or god help me, other nonprintable characters as delimiters, just use a god drat ~ like god intended :argh: and no ISA/GS wrapper? I just don't... :psyduck:

Yeah you win. My worst problem is vendors who send, for one example, price change requests in message segments instead of 855s with proper codes, and carriers... Well, just carriers. Oh my god freight carriers are bad at standards.

When in doubt, shove it in the message segment. Someone will totally read it...

I tried to explain the issue to the vendor referenced. They didn't understand why standards are important. They also were unable to provide a remittance for the payments they made. They just did straight 10% hold-back for everything outstanding without ever telling us what they were paying. Just a check without even a memo line.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
why would anyone willingly use up a data plan rather than storing their music locally? Music doesn't take up much space on a modern 32 or 64gb ipod/iphone/android device.

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer

DoctorWhat posted:

why would anyone willingly use up a data plan rather than storing their music locally? Music doesn't take up much space on a modern 32 or 64gb ipod/iphone/android device.

T-Mobile doesn't count streaming against your data caps for most music services.

Net Neutrality in your face!

Necrothatcher
Mar 26, 2005




DoctorWhat posted:

why would anyone willingly use up a data plan rather than storing their music locally? Music doesn't take up much space on a modern 32 or 64gb ipod/iphone/android device.

Don't most (all?) of the streaming services have a toggle to stop music being downloaded over 3/4G? Just download what you want over Wifi and it's not an issue.

SLOSifl
Aug 10, 2002


DoctorWhat posted:

why would anyone willingly use up a data plan rather than storing their music locally? Music doesn't take up much space on a modern 32 or 64gb ipod/iphone/android device.
I have Sprint with no data cap, and you can just cache songs (or more conveniently, playlists) locally for travel if needed. I have a few Google Music playlists that I pin to my phone and tablet, and just add things to those to download them locally. There is no case where I (specifically me) need more than a few gigs of offline music at absolute most.

DONT TOUCH THE PC
Jul 15, 2001

You should try it, it's a real buzz.

DoctorWhat posted:

why would anyone willingly use up a data plan rather than storing their music locally? Music doesn't take up much space on a modern 32 or 64gb ipod/iphone/android device.

My current 4g plan gives me free spotify that doesn't count towards my 10GB cap, which gives me plenty of space to stream plex during my commute.

ElwoodCuse
Jan 11, 2004

we're puttin' the band back together
Cell phone battery life is lovely enough as it is, using it to play music too would be rotten for me.

The biggest reason I still buy CDs is because a lot of back catalog stuff on Amazon costs less to buy and have shipped to you (and get a free instant download of the MP3s) than to buy just the MP3 album

WIFEY WATCHDOG
Jun 25, 2012

Yeah, well I don't trust this guy. I think he regifted, he degifted, and now he's using an upstairs invite as a springboard to a Super Bowl sex romp.

ElwoodCuse posted:

Cell phone battery life is lovely enough as it is, using it to play music too would be rotten for me.

The biggest reason I still buy CDs is because a lot of back catalog stuff on Amazon costs less to buy and have shipped to you (and get a free instant download of the MP3s) than to buy just the MP3 album

LoL, my cellphone battery works fine.

SierraEchoBravo
Jun 23, 2010

Dr. Tim Whatley posted:

LoL, my cellphone battery works fine.

Right? If I'm driving it's charging in my car and if I'm running/boarding/whatever then the battery lasts at least a couple hours.

moller
Jan 10, 2007

Swan stole my music and framed me!
The obsolete/failed technology of flip-phones and candy-bar phones often had batteries that lasted a week or two.

Of course all they did was make phone calls, so in retrospect dumb phones were roughly as useful to the average person as keeping a flashlight in your pocket or a change of clothes in your car.

Geoj
May 28, 2008

BITTER POOR PERSON

DoctorWhat posted:

why would anyone willingly use up a data plan rather than storing their music locally? Music doesn't take up much space on a modern 32 or 64gb ipod/iphone/android device.

I have a very eclectic taste and only listen to albums by bands you've never heard of one time and then will never listen to them again/all of my local collection is encoded at a bit rate above studio master quality and I could only fit seven hours of music onto a 64 GB storage device and would literally die if I was limited to such a small sampling of my vast collection :smug:

Not my actual views, this is just what I generally hear when the question about local storage gets asked.

Geoj has a new favorite as of 01:44 on May 13, 2015

Last Chance
Dec 31, 2004

moller posted:

The obsolete/failed technology of flip-phones and candy-bar phones often had batteries that lasted a week or two.

Of course all they did was make phone calls, so in retrospect dumb phones were roughly as useful to the average person as keeping a flashlight in your pocket or a change of clothes in your car.

This post is bait for people to come out and brag about their flip phones.

...

Speaking to PYF in general: Are you going to take it?

Horace
Apr 17, 2007

Gone Skiin'

I'm pissed because I just had to buy a CD from eBay to get a track which vanished from not only Spotify but also iTunes, Amazon Music Store and every other digital outlet I searched. Now I've got to use someone else's computer to 'rip it' (don't think I've even used that expression in half a decade) then use Dropbox or something to get it onto my laptop.

I used to spend hours making poo poo mixtapes to listen to on the bus, a bus ride I had to take into town to buy a single track for £4 or an album for £15. I can't believe how spoiled I've been by digital music.

Mercedes Colomar
Nov 1, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

DoctorWhat posted:

why would anyone willingly use up a data plan rather than storing their music locally? Music doesn't take up much space on a modern 32 or 64gb ipod/iphone/android device.

Or 160GB if you still have a working ipod Classic like I've got. Hopefully it doesn't die anytime soon. I don't even have it full and I'm somewhere around 16k songs currently.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Manuel Calavera posted:

Or 160GB if you still have a working ipod Classic like I've got. Hopefully it doesn't die anytime soon. I don't even have it full and I'm somewhere around 16k songs currently.

Mine just died a couple of months ago. Hard drive stopped spinning up. Managed to recover all the data but maaan, being able to cart around my entire audiobook/radio drama library was nice.

Karasu Tengu
Feb 16, 2011

Humble Tengu Newspaper Reporter
The good news is that if you have about an hour, you can flash the firmware to a CF card and slot that in with zero modification since they shipped with either Microdrives or CF cards.

Microdrives totally go here I guess.



They're literally tiny hard drives that used an expanded CF bus for data and power transfer. They've been completely out performed in stability, speed, power draw, and capacity by the regular flash memory CF cards these days.

Ultimate Mango
Jan 18, 2005

Elliotw2 posted:

The good news is that if you have about an hour, you can flash the firmware to a CF card and slot that in with zero modification since they shipped with either Microdrives or CF cards.

Microdrives totally go here I guess.



They're literally tiny hard drives that used an expanded CF bus for data and power transfer. They've been completely out performed in stability, speed, power draw, and capacity by the regular flash memory CF cards these days.

I remember buying the first Garmin portable gps system (the size and weight of a brick mind you) that had the entire U.S. Street map on it using an IBM micro drive. Worked great for business travel, if slow as poo poo to do anything.

Stand alone GPS units will go here soon. Between in car systems and phone apps there isn't much need (they will still exit for marine and aeronautics and such of course, but the portable unitaskers need to due).

SLOSifl
Aug 10, 2002


I noticed Google maps added very specific lane instructions. Use the middle lane to turn right, and so on. Very handy for me on a recent trip to San Francisco. On the cab ride from the airport I noticed the car's GPS didn't.

That's the real killer for the standalone GPS unit - even a 'simple' feature might be a full firmware update...might even have to plug it in to something. But if it does anything else it's just a lovely tablet at most.

SLOSifl has a new favorite as of 04:00 on May 13, 2015

Space Kablooey
May 6, 2009



D'awww :3:

Depending on the weight, they would make pretty cool keychains.

Zopotantor
Feb 24, 2013

...und ist er drin dann lassen wir ihn niemals wieder raus...

Elliotw2 posted:

Microdrives totally go here I guess.



They're literally tiny hard drives that used an expanded CF bus for data and power transfer. They've been completely out performed in stability, speed, power draw, and capacity by the regular flash memory CF cards these days.

Ahem.


This is a Microdrive.

Code Jockey
Jan 24, 2006

69420 basic bytes free
I love the Sinclair aesthetic so much, I really need to pick up a ZX Spectrum someday.

I always wanted a microdrive too, I thought the concept was so cool. A teeny tiny hard drive!

atomicthumbs
Dec 26, 2010


We're in the business of extending man's senses.

Elliotw2 posted:

They're literally tiny hard drives that used an expanded CF bus for data and power transfer.

The CF interface is IDE :ssh:

crosshatch
Dec 10, 2006

Elliotw2 posted:

The good news is that if you have about an hour, you can flash the firmware to a CF card and slot that in with zero modification since they shipped with either Microdrives or CF cards.

Microdrives totally go here I guess.



They're literally tiny hard drives that used an expanded CF bus for data and power transfer. They've been completely out performed in stability, speed, power draw, and capacity by the regular flash memory CF cards these days.

I threw in a CF to SD adapter and got my old iPod classic working great that way. I'm waiting for the 256GB SD's to have a price drop then I'll swap one of those in there. Of course I also have a smartphone so the iPod just sits in my glovebox plugged into the USB port for my stereo now.

Karasu Tengu
Feb 16, 2011

Humble Tengu Newspaper Reporter

atomicthumbs posted:

The CF interface is IDE :ssh:

Yes, but the Microdrives are the about the only things that used the extra Type-II stuff for extra power.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
I actually just dumped the old iPod Classic anyway. Alas alack.

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

SymmetryrtemmyS posted:

It's even worse when they have some of an artist, but not the album you want to listen to.
More than once now I looked at artist entries and they only had albums from the mid-2000s onwards. Actually that ties in with another issue: if there's an album from the 80s that got reissued in the 00s, Spotify will usually have that reissue and have it tagged with "2004". Not how it works!

Horace posted:

I can't believe how spoiled I've been by digital music.
See, I always liked tracking down rare or just old albums in stores, it was a good excuse to make a trip, but it's really only cool until you've spent a day in all the used CD stores in a city with nothing to show for and then you just go home and get the drat thing off of youtube.

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JayKay
Sep 11, 2001

And you thought they were cute and cuddly.

Elliotw2 posted:

The good news is that if you have about an hour, you can flash the firmware to a CF card and slot that in with zero modification since they shipped with either Microdrives or CF cards.

Microdrives totally go here I guess.



They're literally tiny hard drives that used an expanded CF bus for data and power transfer. They've been completely out performed in stability, speed, power draw, and capacity by the regular flash memory CF cards these days.

I can't remember which Creative portable media player it was, but I had a photographer buddy in the early 2000's who was snatching them up just for the Microdrives. Apparently it was cheaper to buy the PMP and harvest the Microdrive than it was to buy a Microdrive on it's own.

JayKay has a new favorite as of 13:46 on May 13, 2015

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