Yep, first did my entire cd collection to 256k ogg vorbis files. Then went back and reripped them to flac, used musicbrainz Picard to tag everything and just did conversations to mp3 so my car stereo could play them.
Now I’m about to go back through my dvd/blueray collection and do full rips without transcoding.
How would one go about doing this? I’ve been maintaining my bluray collection because I want my favourite films always available but I haven’t tried to rip anything in over a decade and I think I did it badly even then.
A software recommendation would be brilliant. Cheers.
My kids have a music player called Yoto. It takes little cards which tells it which playlist to use. This is easy for kids to understand, and lets them listen to stories and music without adding more screen time. The cards don’t actually store the music, just tell the player where to download it from.
On that one hand, that’s kind of cute and cool. But on the other, I find it a bit depressing that the main difference between this and CD wallets of the past is that the CDs actually did store the data.
With the CDs, you literally were holding the information, and you could use it as you wish without reliance or permission from anyone else. Whereas the cards, as you say, they just point to where the data is. You still need to rely on a whole chain of different services to get access to it. Access can be revoked at any time, either deliberately, or by some error, or by some critical service shutting down. It’s just like the past, but worse. Isn’t it?
Yeah, pretty much. In their defense they’re more resilient to greasy kid fingers and being dropped behind the couch, but I still wish the data was actually stored on the card, or on some form of local storage. We had an mp3 player with an SD card before that, but then you can’t switch playlist as easily.
I still buy CDs. Do I listen to them directly? No, I rip them and go with the FLACs, but it’s still nice to have something physical, especially if buying directly from the artist (e.g. at a concert).
Yes, but that’s hardly something I rely on. I prefer just copying my whole music library across several hard drives, some of them staying outside of my home. If I have to rip everything again, it would be quite a lot of work.
Yes, but your audio will sound shit compared to listening to lossless audio with wired headphones. Oh, you also probably don’t own that music also, once those servers go down you’ll lose everything.
Bluetooth is 1.4Mb/s. At 74 minutes, the recommended length of a CD per the standard, you will have transferred 777MB, or more than fits on a CD. Even ignoring all the massive advancements in audio compression, and massive advancements in computational power afforded to decompression hardware (thus allowing better compression to be used), you will have more bandwidth, or “quality” in a Bluetooth stream than a CD-player compatible CD.
Bluetooth audio codecs still leave a lot to be desired, and are pretty far from the cutting edge of compression to put it mildly. You can get good audio, but you have to be very careful with your combination of headphones and output device, because a lot of combinations don’t have the same codecs, and you end up with the lowest common multiple. There are new standards in development, though, so I think this will be largely solved in about 5 years.
Yeah, what bus_factor said, the codecs compress it and loses a bunch of audio quality. I know because I along with friends who are not extreme audiophiles can tell the difference.
If it’s truly awful you might be in phone call mode. If the microphone is enabled it switches to the phone call profile which only supports a single, extremely shitty codec, so if it sounds like you’re listening to FM radio with very poor signal, you should probably switch to a microphone not attached to your headphones.
Yeah those are good points, sure. I shouldn’t wear headphones while driving, and the door speakers are basic anyway, so I don’t see that a priority right now, but have considered that before. TBH, the only music I do listen to via steaming service is the stuff I haven’t bought physical copies of yet, and copied over.
I kinda miss the days of pirating a movie, burning it to a disk, and then popping it into a DVD player. Like it’s objectively more convenient now, with Jellyfin/Emby/Plex media servers that can stream to any device in your home, but it has lost some of the analogue charm of feeling like a hackerman dressed like Neo when you gave a friend or a family member a DVD with sharpie writing on it, and them thinking you were some tech genius lmao.
I remember some software where you could include like a custom DVD menu, where you could press chapters and subtitles and stuff before starting the film, and thinking I was the coolest person in the world when I showed my friends hahahha. Ah good times. Thanks for the nostalgia trip.
Early piracy was just so fun. Like I’m glad that it’s more simple, and accessible now, and that you are less likely to use your dial-up internet to download a virus over 3 days… But, it was so exciting lmao. Like it felt like you were stepping into some underground club that no one knew about - even though you were a 12 year old nerd with no prospects of a girlfriend in the near future hahahaha. But it was really fun, and it helped me learn to like problem-solving, and the idea of piracy, and open-source software def also helped me develop some ideas about the world around sharing, and stuff.
Anyway I think that’s enough gushing about that hahaha, just wanted to indulge in my nostalgia for a minute.
Did you spend 33 minutes downloading an MP3 of “Eyes on Me” from FFVIII, praying that nobody picks up the phone, then nearly crying while listening to it because your family computer plays MIDI files so poorly compared to your friends’ family computers?
Early piracy for me was getting PC games on floppy disks from friends and relatives. It was kind of just accepted everyone who had a computer would copy their games and software for everyone else.
Burned Dreamcast games too! It had no copy protection, so you could just download Ikaruga or a bunch of NES or Gameboy ROMs and play them with no modifications.
The DC did have copy protection, it would’ve made no sense to release a disc-based console in the late 90s without it considering CD burners were becoming ubiquitous (some early CD-based consoles like Sega CD didn’t have copy protection because nobody really had the means to write CDs at home). Sega believed their proprietary GD-ROM format would prevent piracy, but ironically it was another format called MIL-CD Sega introduced with the DC that allowed it to be exploited and cracked games to be run without the need to modify the console. Info here.
Am I remembering it wrong? I was huge on DCEmulation back in the early 2000s. Also I’m too lazy to read that link. I recall having to burn a weird music track… partition? To have my CD read. But I was able to play NEA/GB/SNES (with frameskip, unfortunately) and the only way my young broke butt could play Ikaruga was to pirate it and burn it to a CD.
We have maybe 4 or 5 of these babies loaded with dvds and TV series. We basically lived so rural we couldn’t stream for years at our old place. But we did have dvds and used these cases since we could haul them from the bedroom to the living room or basement depending what our plan was.
Now we’re lucky enough to have starlink (yes, initiate the Musk circlejerk) and we still sometimes will go through the albums and watch dvds occasionally.
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