Google Play Music was a piece of shit. I used it for years but you know what? If you had a better copy of something weird, it didn't care - whatever shite 64kbps garbagetrack recorded directly off cassette tape that some monkey uploaded, it would forever trump your own shit. Fortunately it let you back up your music. Except it didn't, which you discovered if you ever tried to recover a library and were given unexplained errors on 98% of your tracks. On the plus side it was a great recommendation engine except it was apparently recommending based on names not play history but it was great for letting you group things except it wasn't because it didn't give a shit what you thought the genre was, it knew better. Google Play Music let me loop iTunes through Android, badly. It let me stream my local iTunes over T-Mobile for free, sometimes. Usually it let me stream someone else's inferior iTunes over T-Mobile. And it totally stole - Buddy of mine liked a band I introduced him to but Google only had one album. then I put a couple more albums in my iTunes, which were scraped by Google Play Music, and suddenly Google Play Music had three albums. No rights no nuthin' traded hands there. Google Play Music was a piece of shit that everyone loves only because everything else is worse. Fortunately I'm a rich asshole that can run my own Plex server with Tidal on it but goddamn music technology took a turn for the worse about 2003.
Rose-tinted glasses off, this was a trash feature especially for, say, ripping YT audio into MP3's. All the more jank when going back in a re-formatting the track to categorize properly. That or uploading music like flac's or rando metal bands that somehow made their way onto the Play Store later. (Guess that's where this comes from) --- It was iTunes or Google Play for a long ass time, and straddling both OS was a pain anyways. Might be why I'm enjoying Spotify a bit more now. Lemme tell ya, the shuffle feature might suck, but the radio function cranks out bangers for finding new bands. Living the good life with Tidal, hmmm? I'll take a peek at this. If you had a better copy of something weird, it didn't care - whatever shite 64kbps garbagetrack recorded directly off cassette tape that some monkey uploaded, it would forever trump your own shit.
then I put a couple more albums in my iTunes, which were scraped by Google Play Music, and suddenly Google Play Music had three albums. No rights no nuthin' traded hands there.
Google Play Music was a piece of shit that everyone loves only because everything else is worse. Fortunately I'm a rich asshole that can run my own Plex server with Tidal on it but goddamn music technology took a turn for the worse about 2003.
Yeah and Apple did a yeoman's job of making iTunes unusable. It's like, "you speak XML. Why does it take a 230MB database to span 120GB of audio, Apple? In PLAINTEXT? I transcoded my CDs to MP3 at 192kbps because in 2004 on a Gen 1 ipod, 192kbps was the sweet spot for playback. Sounded better than anything else because of the limits of the DACs. I was mostly happy until 2018 because the difference between 192 and 320 is negligible. Then I made the mistake of listening to kind of good headphones which pushed me into buying stupidly good headphones and then buying brainslugs and hot-rodding them to make things even worse. At which point oh fuck yes you can tell the difference between FLAC and literally anything else with no real difficulty at all. Then I got off my lazy ass and hit my obnoxiously good monitors through a decent DAC and yeah, once you hear the difference you can't do Youtube if you have half a choice. But if I hadn't removed the beam from mine own eye I'd probably still be fat'n'happy with shitty earbuds because they're plenty good enough for Spotify. I already had a Plex server so Tidal was worth checking out. I use mostly Tidal now for music. Sometimes Bandcamp. I'd been stuck in my own shit for so many years when What.CD died that Tidal lets me explore. Especially since T-Mobile doesn't hit me for data while it does for Plex. So my shit is scattered across Bandcamp and Plex but maybe 70,80% of it is on Tidal so I use Tidal to find other stuff. It's expensive but it also remunerates artists at the highest rate and I drive a Porsche and have thousand dollar headphones so I'm kind of obligated to pay more.
Noted on Plexand Tidal. Snooping on Plex's site now - seeing dublinben consider it, too, is worth a double take. Never ever got my hands on comfortable earbuds. These pups have served me well from my pop's DJ days. Tinnitis got them in my hands, but hot damn if I could find a well-fitted earbud with good quality for running. Brothers are pushing AirPods like they get a commission. Those SE215's don't quite have the price tag of an airpod, now...
I sweat through everything with a mic. It's ugly. I run in Koss FitClips. 7506s are the only headphone used in audio post or audio mixing. Literally. Anyone who uses anything else is a poseur. I have 7509s, which have better low end response, but I don't use them on gigs because you hear stuff that won't matter in the final mix anyway.
With cheap earbuds, I found myself turning my phone volume almost all the way up when listening to podcasts on the train to work. With the SE215s I was comfortable on the lowest volume level. They’re such an investment in protecting my hearing that I’ll actually just wear them with nothing playing just for the peaceful quiet it brings.
Exactly! I went for the 425s, and just love how isolating the earplug-rubbers are. Only downside is that there’s only one freaking expensive usb-C adapter / DAC (from Shure themselves) which isn’t very good an also broke after a few months. Got a new one and it hasn’t lasted two months. Complete garbage.