[plainnoodles]

This is absurdly sad to me. I like to own my media (in the most practical sense that current IP laws let me do so). I run a Plex server and use PlexAmp as my primary way of listening to music, and my criteria are always this:

* FLAC or similar, I want this to be a lossless preservation of what was on the best-available source.

* No DRM. No mandated player. Just let me download a dang file.

* "Real" flac: this is technically already covered under the first bullet, but I call it out because I've seen it happen before: if I can open the flac in audacity and see it's obviously just a re-encode of a lossy format that clips the upper and lower frequency ranges off, that's a smell and I don't like it. (I know, most people can't tell etc, but this is less for listening purposes and more for archival purposes).

* Supports the artist!

Now, I'll admit, when push comes to shove, I drop the last bullet point first. So previously, my source for music was:

1. CD's (and I would follow What's guide for making Perfect Flacs)

2. What

But then what shut down and I lost my main music discovery mechanism. Enter bandcamp! Now I've been very happy with:

1. Bandcamp (I buy CDs because I like the artwork and they're cool).

2. CD's (+ Perfect Flac ripping guide still)

Now I'm not sure what to do. Epic has really soured me on their brand already, and I already boycott their launcher and any EGS exclusives. I guess I have to find some other way to get stuff now.

[duped]

Some people put a 17.5kHz low pass and high pass at 20Hz on the master. It's dumb and you have very few reasons to do it, but people still do it and keep it as default settings in "mastering chains" that get passed around and dropped on random tracks.

So you can't be sure if you're looking at a reencoding or a lossy file or not.

[munificent]

There are definitely good reasons to high pass at something low like 20 Hz. Very low frequency signals eat up a lot of headroom, make speakers work harder, and make it more likely to encounter distortion during parts of the signal path, all for zero audible benefit.

Having what is practically a DC offset in your signal doesn't do anyone any good.

[duped]

There's definitely good reasons to do it, they're just kind of rare to see in a modern digital stack. DC offset is hard to introduce unintentionally and subsonic content is usually removed early in the mix, not on the master (if they aren't, it's arguable a bad mix).

[alternatetwo]

You can still see the difference in a high detail spectrogram like RX9 produces. There are some artifacts beyond just cutting off above 20khz.

There are also full range mp3s, since iTunes by default doesn't apply a hard 20khz lowpass like LAME does.

[heleninboodler]

> Now I'm not sure what to do

I mean, why not continue doing what you are doing until the thing that you like actually goes to shit?

[johnnyanmac]

Yeah, Epic's acquisitions don't really affect the aquired's day to day.

IDK why "protesting a launcher" means disassociating with every single thing a company does. Kind of hard to avoid every single Unreal Engine game, or Blender/Godot or any other company/game they gave no-strings grants to. Or games you played already but are on EGS when they get a PC port.

[heleninboodler]

I certainly understand being skeptical of the "nothing's going to change," which seems almost guaranteed to be wrong, but still, we don't need to lament the downfall before it actually happens, even if we think it's inevitable. If they change the amount of money going to artists, or cripple the feature set, or stop supporting a platform you like, or disable downloads... that's when we lament.

Edit: for one thing, anyone who pops up with a "bandcamp replacement" right now is going to have a very difficult time arguing that their replacement is actually better as long as bandcamp is still exactly the same thing they were emulating.

[breakfastduck]

Because, and fairly so, people don't want their spending to go into the pockets of companies that get kids interested in gambling or buy exclusivity.

[mfost]

But there is no gambling in Fortnite and shortly after Epic acquired Rocket League they removed their loot boxes too.

The only gambling there was in Fortnite was in the paid version of the game that nobody really played anyway. The game that is actually popular doesn't have it.

[breakfastduck]

Completely and utterly inaccurate.

[branon]

Consider alternatives to Plex (Jellyfin being the main competitor).

With Plex, you may own the media, but Plex, Inc. owns the authentication. You're not allowed to access the service running on your own hardware unless you can log in with a Plex account.

Also: losing What was indeed a massive blow, but there are others still carrying that torch...

[paularmstrong]

Unfortunately, nothing currently beats Plexamp in terms of quality music listening, shuffle, smart playlists, etc.

You can still set up local login for Plex to avoid their auth on your own network or list of allowed IPs. It's not 100% what people want, but it's something.

[banana_maker]

Navidrome [0] has been a solid replacement for me. It has all the features I want aside from Keycloak/generic oidc integration, and the author is very responsive.

0: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome

[paularmstrong]

I haven't seen this before, but at a quick glance, here's what I love about Plexamp that's missing for me:

* Similar artists, tracks, etc * Auto-playing similar after listening to an album * "sonically similar" tracks/artists - not just some arbitrary decision that some artist is in the same genre, but that the songs have similar sonic profiles * Artist/track radio based on all of the above * "library radio": smart shuffling * artist mix builder: creates playlists based on some artists that you choose (and includes tracks from similar artists automatically)

I have too much music to know what I want to listen to all of the time and I don't want to sit there carefully curating playlists and trying to discover things: Basically, I want a system that's smarter than I am to tell me what to listen to (but with my own music that I own, obviously)

[andrewzah]

Fair enough, I don't really use features like that as I manually explore artists. I use discogs credit lists + wikipedia entries to find albums based on a particular person or a rhythm section in a time frame.

In navidrome I view the random albums page until I find something I want to listen to. The only algo that I've found to bear fruit is youtube's recommendations, occasionally. I mostly just listen to music on there while working and occasionally it just drops great albums.

[BaseballPhysics]

Second this. Navidrome is an impressive piece of work. Solid UX, decent core feature set, good performance, trivial to deploy (it's a single statically linked Go binary). I've definitely had some glitches with playback and so forth, so it's not flawless, but it's still very good.

[andrewzah]

Navidrome uses react-music-player [0], which unfortunately the author has very little bandwidth to maintain it. I've opened an issue about a bug where if you scrub the player to a different timestamp, and then move the mouse out of the tab so it unfocuses, it stutters. The issue got auto-closed as wontfix after inactivity, so yay...

Other than a few UX bugs I haven't had any real issues, so I'm happy with it.

0: https://github.com/lijinke666/react-music-player

1:

[Semaphor]

I just checked their demo, do they really completely ignore genres? I can neither find a node for music by genre, nor are they shown in the tables by default.

[andrewzah]

It does show genres if they're set in the files' metadata.

[Semaphor]

Found it now. Certainly looks like a second class citizen

[bobsmooth]

Emby is pretty good.

[branon]

Emby unfortunately decided to take their code closed-source a year or two ago. Jellyfin is the resulting fork.

I will agree that they're pretty good, however Jellyfin has grown to become better in terms of both licensing model and feature set.

[antris]

> Now I'm not sure what to do.

Just FYI there's sites that take in What refugees

[22c]

I'm only really familiar with RED (I know there are others) but it didn't bounce back even close to What, unfortunately. Perhaps others did significantly better, but I think without a dump of the catalog, it's going to be next to impossible to ever get back everything that What had.

Also FTR I'm a heavy Bandcamp user and I'm disappointed by this acquisition.

[od1nos]

RED does not have the amount of users that What had, but it vastly surpasses the amount of flacs it had on the day it went down: 864k 'perfect' flacs vs 1,360k on RED currently.

[cauthon]

Would you mind sharing any names? I don’t mind whatever ratio limits exist for new accounts, but I deeply miss finding music through staff picks and the forums

[chx]

orpheus and redacted are the big ones. Getting in, of course, will be a challenge.

rutracker is a pretty open alternative.

[Naracion]

Having experience with these platforms, they wane in comparison to the gem that What was. It wasn't just a repository / archive, it was also a thriving community.

However, we need to move on. These are currently probably the best alternatives, so thank you for pointing these out. It's just What was too damned good.

[ironmagma]

I get FLACs from hdtracks.com

[hackernewds]

Can I ask your logic in why you go to these lengths? Almost seems like hoarding.

[plainnoodles]

Part of it is just for fun. I like to collect the CDs. I like knowing the files I have are very faithful representations of the released media. And so on.

I really don't think it's hoarding - the overall data sizes here are small (relative to the fact that a 12TB WD Red is 250-300 dollars on amazon) and it's not like I spend my nights scouring ebay for this stuff. I just make sure I get best-available media while it's still widely and easily available.

Some of it is also that I just don't trust the current system to archive media. Sure, most popular things will be fine. But there's a lot of music that's not quite underground but also isn't popular and I wouldn't be surprised if it became hard to get ahold of the quality standards I have in 10-20 years.