You didn’t have to do that. :/
Sorry to be the bearer of difficult news.
You didn’t have to…
I’m gen-x. This ain’t no problem for me. I don’t pay for a subscription to listen to music. I’ve known where to find music since the summer of 99. I’m not worried about any of that nonsense in life. I’m mad that I’m more than likely not going to get health coverage, social security, or friggin retire for that matter. I may not even make it to that golden age even. Especially with how my health has declined over the last 4 years. 45 was a trip yall. Ain’t no lie.
Also, I was bit young at the time for a record collection. I remember them of course. But I never owned any. So all I had known was Cassette Tapes til probably around 1996 or so when I finally got a CD player. Then, Napster happened and I never looked back. Fuck em. I got a 500Gb USB Drive with thousands of Albums on it still.
Sorry I don’t mean to be buzzkill or “Pooolltical”… sheesh. But yeah I see shit like this, and I’m like “Hah! This is the least of my damn worries!”. I steal music. Fuck em. Peace!.. also Fuck Gen-X… We suck.
As a millennial, I had the same path through media just without starting at vinyl. You apparently chose to throw your shit out, I’ve still got all of it and converted most to digital formats. Fuck a subscription though.
I bought some vinyl today. I have every CD I’ve ever purchased. I ripped them to lossless and have them in the cloud.
This feels like angry wanking because these things are choices.
Still Pirating After All These Years… and that’s a reference to a song all you young uns never heard of. BTW: held on to every piece of vinyl.
Me with my thumbdrive collection 😎
I have no hopes of ever recovering tapes and some CDs I lost beyond my control over the years. Shit like flooding and had to evacuate.
Now if there’s a song that I actually love, I’d copy it to a hard disk rather than have it at the mercy of the streaming service. Then archive them as mix discs.
that’s just one aspect that ties into the real problem: we had so much ‘fuck the man’ and anti-corporate horseshit shoveled into our mouths, and look how the world turned out–it’s a corporate, gentrified hellhole.
not every gen-xer became ‘the man.’
but a sizable portion of the straight-laced, 100k a year set feel it on some level. the despair of 2026 america isn’t limited to certain demographics; when there’s a perpetual storm you’re bound to get wet even if you have an umbrella.
I’m mad that a CD selling for 15 bucks has 20 bucks shipping attached to it.
Me, the millinial who bought all your “old” records, tapes, CDs, VHS tapes, and who has pirated digital files since digital piracy was born: kingbugsbunny.jpg
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…and now the subscription turned to shit and they need to find FLACs of all their favorite music, because they encoded their MP3s in shitty quality in the 2000s.
Soulseek is right there if you want to sail the high seas. Bandcamp and other online retailers have offered FLAC for decades. If you didn’t trash your CDs you can still rip them to FLAC, an external drive (if you need one) is like $30.
I get it, I have hundreds of GB of old shitty downloads from YouTube, poorly done cd rips, downloads from god knows where. All in various stages of completely absent labelling and tagging.
But I’m not going to pretend it’s anyone’s problem but my own due to my previous choices, and I’m not going to pretend like there aren’t plenty of tools to help fix it like MusicBrainz Picard.
Soulseek is a godsend, but it’s a bit clunky. I’m looking for some other fronted and stumbled onto nicotine+ that I haven’t tried yet, any ideas or pointers?
I didn’t trash my CDs time did. A decade spent in a carry case in my car in the southern heat has caused a lot of them to have the foil start separating. So the vast majority have at least one or two tracks that won’t play or rip now.
That’s still your decision and thermodynamics being a cunt.
Try music brains picard if you want to fix that problem. Still takes time but it helps ALOT (it’s free)
I love this!
Just be sure to use something like Spek to to inspect the files if you use Soulseek. I’ve used it to find some obscure music I couldn’t purchase, and sometimes people literally just re-encode MP3 files to FLAC, the data is still lost, reconverting won’t recover it.
Yep, many times I’ve found a .flac that actually sounds worse than the 128kbit .aac from YouTube…
Where you getting external drives for $30? The 2TB Toshiba drive I’ve purchased many times over the past 5 years for under $70 is now $150. Even the 1TB drives are over $100 these days
I think they meant an external CD/DVD drive for ripping the discs
Ah, that makes sense. Thx
If you still have the discs, it’s really easy to rip CDs to FLACs.
Soulsync will automatically do that for you.
This is a roving banner about consumerism and why its bad. Stop buying sooooo much shit and fix the things you do have. The jones’s suck and they can fuck right off into the sunset.
Cassettes degrade over time so they needed to be replaced by CDs or mp3s eventually. But it’s about the device you’re listening to it on and buying a new device.
As it turns out after a few decades, CDs also degrade over time.
I have a small ~$5 desk fan that I got from AliExpress. First time it broke, it was because the mount points for the micro USB charge port were glued on instead of soldered in place. Then the tiny crappy button which presses a smaller surface mount button inside got bent and no longer clicked the actual internal component. Then the button snapped off completely so I replaced it with a 3D printed one. Then my initial soldering broke loose because I admittedly half-assed it the first time. When it was sitting on my desk, disassembled for the 5th time, I mentioned how many times I’d cracked it open to someone and they bought me a different fan as a gift, essentially freeing me from the curse of repairing the cheap fan again, and giving me permission to just trash it…
I still fixed it and now I have 2 fans. I must’ve fixed it pretty well this last time because I’ve dropped it twice pretty hard and it’s still holding up. Repairing shit is awesome. It usually doesn’t take that many tries though…
I bought a cheap electric heater from Lowe’s a few years ago. It surprised me greatly because it would occasionally rewire itself. It had a rotating switch with Off, Fan, Low Heat and High Heat settings, but once in a while these switch settings would change. Like, Low Heat would actually by the Fan setting, Off would actually be the High Heat setting etc. It turns out the rotating switch just travelled over some printed solder lines and occasionally these would melt and re-form into new positions.
How there was not an epidemic of homes burning down because of these things is a mystery. But there’s just no way engineers could have ever guessed something like this would happen.
My current headphones are a Frankenstein mix of drivers from a pair that sounded nice but were uncomfortable, a headband and housing from a different pair that fits my weirdly shaped head, cushions from a third pair because they were the perfect size for my ears and soo comfortable and a cable from a fourth pair because it was the perfect length, thickness and has a good plug. They’re my favorite headphones now.
How do assemble them? Have a picture of them?
I used screwdrivers, hot glue and soldering to assemble them. They just look like mid-tier Creative Labs headphones with Turtle Beach cushions.
If a first fix doesn’t succeed, fix it and fix it and fix it and fix it… You get the idea.
My small 4in fan I take hammocking with me had the charging port break on me and while I have the soldering station to fix it, I hate soldering tiny pcbs and have just been removing the lipo cell and charging it with my 18650 charger I had made an adapter for awhile back. I basically just stick two ribbon cable pins into the adapter and the other ends go to the appropriate +/- wires on the jst connector to the lipo. Takes about 4x longer than my largest capacity 18650 but it saves me a little annoying soldering.
Also I lost the on button when I was disassembling it so now I just shove my longest nail down into the housing. I COULD print a new one but I’d have to set my printer back up and tune it just for one small piece… I have a piece of paper taped to my printer that I keep writing the things I wasn’t to print and once it gets long enough I’ll set it up, it’s just a lot of work and I don’t have much space.
“had to replace” lol no one is making you get rid of your records and tapes bro. They still work fine.
Why did you copy 62.5% of my username?
I thought I was your inspiration!
I dunno, my 25 year old tapes are worbly as hell now. Vinyl records still play great though!
Have you tried playing them on different devices? There’s an old Tech Moan video where he replaced the springs and rubber bands on an old warbly tape deck, and the warble-ing stopped. Your tape deck may just need a springy-bits refresh.
Ooh, I should try that! Thank you!
All those records were really heavy to haul from one renoviction to another hovel, so we recorded to tape and sold the records cheap in the 90s.
The tapes stuck around until we could afford a car that was new enough to have a cd player, sometime around the economy crashing.
Now we have a home that we will own some day and for a while, it was great cruising thrift stores for $3 old vinyl for the turntable inherited from boomer parents, but hipsters caught on and all that is left now are nana mouskouri and henry mancini and bill cosby.
Hey hey hey…
The pink panther is a great release!
That’s an evil earworm if you grew up with it
