Considering most music files are MP3, yes it’s still cared about. It’s easy and small.
You don’t need lossless all the time.
I would argue that most people never need lossless, because most people don’t use speakers/headphones with high enough fidelity to produce any acoustic difference to a high-bitrate MP3 in the first place.
I used to work with a guy who swore by his FLAC collection, and would listen to it through some $40 Skullcandy earphones. I never understood why.
A teacher in my highschool (~16 years ago) “demonstrated” that lossless and mp3 are indistinguishable by playing the same song in different formats… On 10€ pc speakers
That sounds like conclusive proof that sound quality is determined by the shittiest component in the signal chain.
If you are using the files played back at different tempos or keyshifted, the difference between lossy and lossless is a lot more apparent. For standard playback at normal pitch, mp3 is just fine.
Well they have the skulls on them. They must be good! People wouldn’t have died for them otherwise! Duh!!!
Are you a baddie?
A family member is an audio engineer (now also a producer) who owns a good recording studio, and we’ve A/B tested lossy vs lossless on good equipment. He hears things that I don’t, my ear is somewhat untrained. But at mp3 bitrates below 320, I can hear compression artifacts, especially in percussion instruments and acoustic guitar. But if you’re listening in your car or while wearing Bluetooth earbuds while you’re out walking, you probably won’t notice unless the mp3 bitrate is really dismal.
Are you sure? From everything I’ve heard MP3 bitrates at 192 or above are generally considered to be transparent.
In case you want to do it more scientifically, try ABX testing. It’s a bit time consuming but it should provide clearer results.
Not OP, but I promise you that I can hear what sounds like digital water being thrown over the cymbals when listening to mp3 files below 320 kbps. Even then, every now and then I hear that sound here and there across whatever record I’m listening to.
I don’t experience it when listening to records, CDs, or cassettes.
My hearing used to be very sensitive. When the whole world was using CRTs, I could tell you who had their tv on just standing outside their house.
No, they’re not sure. You’re correct.
The main benefit to lossless is for archival purposes. I can transcode to any format (such as on mobile) without generational quality loss.
And it means if a better lossy format comes out in the future, I can use that without issue.
Exactly, sometimes you just wanna jam to some mp3’s out of an iPod like the good ol days. It’s about the ✨vibes✨
There are better lossy formats, like opus.
But MP3 still has its place as it’s supported everywhere.
Most music files may be MP3s, but music files are rare these days. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people under 30 have never interacted with a music file at all, they just use streaming services.
I am under 30, and I have interacted with music files.
edit: I don’t know about where you live, but I am definitely not the exception.
I listen to mp3 all the time. Back in the Napster days I collected a ton of music, but moreover I’m a fan of Old Time Radio from the 30s and 40s, so I accumulated around 10,000 of those shows. More than I’ll ever have time to listen to. Audiophiles may deride the quality level, but I don’t believe in letting perfection be the enemy of good. And even if “computers” - whatever that even means anymore lol - drop support for mp3, there will always be software that plays it as long as there are people with big collections of files they don’t want to take the trouble to convert to something else.
I freaking love old time radio, that stuff is great!
That sounds fascinating. If I were interested in those shows, where would I start? Are there at least some that are easily listenable to on the open internet?
Check out the many OTR Gold podcasts that have the serialized shows as episodes.
Biggest free download site is probably https://www.oldradioworld.com/
There’s also the Internet Archive - https://archive.org/details/oldtimeradio
If you like sci-fi I highly recommend X Minus One - https://www.oldradioworld.com/shows/X_Minus_One.php
The man with the action packed expense account.
Sure, it’s like JPG.
It may not be the newest or best compression ratio, but it works, and even the shittiest old hardware supports it. And I know it won’t whine about licences being missing or some shit.
Podcasts are almost exclusively mp3. There is no need for lossless fidelity on those. And when you are subscribed to 200 podcasts like I am a small file size matters. And when listening at 2.5x speed lossless is a complete waste.
All my podcasts appear to use the AAC spoken audio profile? It’s much smaller and cleaner than MPEG layer 3 audio.
Apple broke metadata compatibility with a recent update. The podcast producer I know with an explicit AAC feed decided to just redirect to the MP3 feed. Unrelated to that, they also increased the MP3 bitrate for better audio quality. The increased file size doesn’t really matter that much compared to 15 years ago and people without unlimited data can just set their automated syncs to WiFi only.
… I’m out of the loop. Why don’t people care about mp3s?
Its mostly been superseded by AAC, Opus and FLAC.
Mhmm I haven’t heard of the first two. I still listen to mp3s that I got from the 90s.
You might not have heard of the formats but you’ve definitely listened to them. For example, Youtube has only served audio in aac and opus for years now. Most instant messaging apps also use opus during calls to reduce bandwidth usage. And those are just some big examples. Basically almost any online service has dumped mp3 in favor of aac and opus since they’re better in every way (in the sense that they have better quality at the same bitrate as mp3, so you can reduce the filesize by a lot and still preserve the same audio quality)
Mp3 has been dead to me for nearly a decade. Flac is superior in every way.
@daggermoon Ogg is actually my preference, but so much stuff still doesn’t support it these days.
Yeah only the most popular formats are guaranteed support sadly. Support seems to be relegated to formats that are 20+ years old.
Edit: Just realized vorbis is 24 years old. Nevermind lol.
Except file size. 😁 I convert everything from flac to mp3 before I put it on my phone. I’m lucky in that I can’t tell the difference in quality at all.
It’s just one of those things where once you hear the difference you can’t go back. It’s sort of the difference between a 360p vs 1440p youtube video. The compression artifacts make the music sound so artifical to me. I don’t really know how to describe it. But yes, there is a considerable increase in file size. For me it’s a non issue because I have my music collection on an 8tb hdd. Though I wish phones still had micro sd slots so I could take them with me. My music collection is at 1.2 tb I think. I’m not trying to be an elitist asshole here. I’m just sharing my experience.
I should add that I have a hackish python script for that conversion. It basically mirrors the tree of MP3s and FLAC files, converting the FLACs and hard linking everything else. So it doesn’t use too much more disk. Then I copy that to my phone. I could put it up somewhere if it would be useful.
But I don’t have as much music as you, either.
No, I don’t think you’re as asshole at all, and don’t doubt you can hear the difference. I just can’t, myself. Or at least I’ve never been able to.
But I also watch DVDs and didn’t really notice the resolution, either. (Old TV shows, that I can notice. 😅)
I’m curious if you’ve tried listening to lossy compressed audio through a vacuum tube output stage? I use a cheap tube compressor with the attack and release turned to minimal and just a little bit of extra makeup gain so that the tube colors the audio a small amount. Think of it like sanding the layer lines of a 3d print, but for audio. It does introduce a small amount of hiss and colors the midrange a bit more prominently, but you can eq that out.
I’ve never had access to any tube equipment. I did listen to lossy audio from a late '80s Technics reciever which had a similar effect to what you describe. It made the music much more berable to listen to. I do most of my music consumption on my PC now. I do love the mixes used for vinyl records however, It makes me sad they’re not available digitally. Most modern music is brickwalled sadly. I’ll buy a few records now and again because of the dynamic sound. Sorry for the rant but I love dynamic recordings and I’m sad they’re a rarity now outside of expensive vinyl records.
Edit: I just noticed your username. I love it.
If you can, I highly recommend you try it out. There’s relatively inexpensive tube amps, even on Amazon that you could play with and box back up if it’s not your cup of tea. I just looked at the compressor I use and the price has gone up to a point where it doesn’t make much sense anymore, but it is SUPER useful to add some warmth in between a digital source and the class d amps I use in my PA system.
It might be worth trying. I’ve heard people replace the factory tubes with better ones. Is that something worth considering? What tube amp would you reccomend?
Swapping out tubes (and opamps on your DAC) is very much a thing, and I’m convinced that I can hear the difference between a sovtek tube and a Chinese clone, but that could be all in my head, as it wasn’t a blind test. Do some research on the amps, but for computer use, Fosi mc331 has an integrated DAC and puts out about 100w per channel. If my computer didn’t already have active studio monitors, I’d have pulled the trigger on it by now. For $116, it’s hard to resist.
I would say its more like 60hz refresh vs 90. The difference isn’t super huge but when you notice it, you can’t un-notice it, so it’s almost better to stay ignorant to it. You still get the same core information, but god damn if 90hz/FLAC isn’t smoother
Mp3’s just don’t sound good to me. It’s a very old format that was pretty much the first of it’s kind. Audio compression (while I don’t like it) has improved greatly over the years. I saw another user bring up OGG OPUS and it’s really impressive what it can do. I was able to compress a song to fit on a floppy disk while still being listenable. It kind of sucks that formats like mp3 and jpg are the standard when open formats that are major improvements over older formats fail to recieve significant adoption. AAC 320 is the 60/90 difference to me. I was shocked how close a 320 kbps m4a file is to CD quality flac.
I personally enjoy PNG image format for my compressed web images, but I’ll be damned if JPG isn’t “good enough” while also being magnitudes smaller, especially when I have to start embedding things as base64 encoded text in outlook and teams at work, or when I don’t want my screenshots folder at home taking 2TB of disk space (Spectacle can change image format).
JPG is absolutly fine for web based images. I was thinking more of jpeg-xl. Smaller files size and identical quality to jpeg. Also it supports lossless too. WebP is also good but I don’t like that it’s developed by Google.
PNG is really designed for images that are either flat color or use an ordered dither. I mean, we do use it for photographs because it’s everywhere and lossless, but it was never really intended to compress photographs well.
There are formats that do aim for that, like lossless JPEG and one of the WebP variants.
TIFF also has some utility in that it’s got some sort of hierarchical variant that’s useful for efficiently dealing with extremely-large images, where software that deals with most other formats really falls over.
But none of those are as universally-available.
Also, I suppose that if you have a PNG image, you know that – well, absent something like color reduction – it was losslessly-compressed, whereas all of the above have lossless and lossy variants.
I haven’t looked into this so deeply in a while. Thanks for the post! I use VLC, precisely because it plays most anything I throw at it. Cell coverage is spotty, so it’s common to play from files rather than stream. We have a bike ride, doubtless like many cities, social ride meets on the regular. Since Bluetooth, and everyone has a speaker. When I’m riding solo it lets people know I’m coming. Safer that way. I’ve heard people complain they don’t care to hear that cyclists taste in music, which tells me you heard them and weren’t harmed. You’ll hear that music, for a moment, and safely continue on your way. On the group ride everyone plays their own music, call it The Cacophony, if you will. Sometimes the music to the left, to the right match up in interesting ways.
You’ve never heard about bicycle bells, have you?
Perhaps you have heard of people stepping out from behind a bush, unaware that there was an approaching cyclist because that cyclist didn’t realize that there was a need to ring the bell? Have you ever noticed when you phrase a question with a negative assumption it tends to affect how the person responds to that question? Communication takes practice, and with practice can improve over time. I believe in you, and think you have the ability to improve.
Well it would hardly be the cyclist fault if pedestrians and others don’t pay attention to their surroundings?
I don’t see that as a legitimate reason to be a noise complaint.
A noise complaint before 10pm? I’m more concerned with not harming people in the first place, than I am with placing blame. Have you ever been on a bike path, see a pedestrian, rung your bell. No response. Getting closer, start ringing bell more rapidly. Finally decide to call out, , “ on your left”. While slowing down to minimize consequences. Finally seeing a response from the pedestrian, as they turn and step to the left. As you notice the earbuds in their ears. That’s a common experience for me.
My music folder is 40GB of MP3s. To this day I use an online YouTube converter to collect music.
I am very slightly annoyed that people haven’t moved onto Opus which gives you better compression and quality than MP3. MP3s are still useful for any older devices that have hardware decoding like radio sets, handheld players, etc. Otherwise, every modern device should support Opus out of box.
Hilariously, x264 has the same problem where there are direct upgrades with H.265 and AV1, but the usage is still low due to lack of hardware accelerated encoding (especially AV1), but like everyone uses FLAC for the audio which is lossless lol.
I just use ogg vorbis and vp9 in webm container, also webp for images. No proprietary nonsense in this house. AV1 sucks on my hardware, but yes eventually.
I use it to (re)compress audiobooks, podcasts and such, they still sound very good at 32 kbps.
Fun fact, Opus has been supported by a hobby OS like MorphOS for years, my ancient hardware doesn’t break a sweat playing it.I think SW Republic Commando sounds were stored in Vorbis. Back then.
I use Opus when I rip something. It’s been a long time since the last case. I’ve left FreeBSD for Linux and returned back to
LinuxFreeBSD again since then.I think SW Republic Commando sounds were stored in Vorbis. Back then.
Unreal Tournament also used Vorbis starting from either 2003 or 2004.
Yep with the music compressed to hell, still sad about it after all this years
But think about the 5 MB they saved!
Yeah my car plays the 11,000 MP3s from a SDcard inside the armrest compartment.
Found the fellow Volvo user? :)
deleted by creator
2013 Ford, but I know they shared some technology for a while.
Afaik Ford Focus == Volvo V40/V50 in those years, basically with a different chassis and insignia :)
And Mazda 3. The platforms are the same but engines and interiors a lot different between the Fords and the Mazdas at least.
the randomizer in my car sucks so it’s the same 100 of those 11,000 songs. :-/
Yeah WTF is up with that? My car does the same thing with a USB drive full of songs. It will literally play the same “shuffled” sequence over and over every time you drive. I have to take out the drive and change the files on it sometimes to make it actually Shuffle the songs’ order and that’s too much BS
The randomizing n my Focus ST is good, but when I tell it to shuffle play it always starts with 1 of 2 different songs, every time.
So not a much different experience than Spotify
At least the shuffle is partly coherent.
I read the manual for my cars radio. It has a max file size limit of like 256 songs or so per folder. But it can also accept 256 folders.
So if your cars is anything like mine you can probably play your songs just by splitting them up into more folders.
no such luck for me there. the music is in /artist/album directories. I had considered flattening it all out to see if that makes a difference.
Apart from my home hifi (which is built around flac) everything i liaten to ia mp3. Podcasts - mp3. Car audio system? Max 192kbps mp3. My phone? Full of mp3. And I’m sure I’m not alone. To say mp3 is not relevant anymore is just misguided.
About a year ago I was saying how I wanted Winamp to come back. Then they tried coming back, but making their old player open source. But they totally didn’t grasp the concept of open source. The whole thing blew up when people took the source code and…get this…forked it! gasp!
Still to this day, I don’t see how Winamp didn’t see that coming. Well it turns out, their source code had dependancies that THEY didn’t even have authorization to use. So they tried asking everyone to not fork their source code, but also, here it is, please be good boys!
Now some people swear that Winamp are just idiots. Other people swear that they HAD to know that would happen. Like it was deliberate.
Whereas I believe that the most simple explanation more often than not is the right explanation. So if they WERE that dumb, let’s take a look at the implications of that. That would mean that there were executives up top who got word that people would like an open source product. These executives would have to have had ZERO understanding of what that meant. At all. And I like to think if they had somebody on their payroll who relayed the message that open source was being requested, that the messenger at the very least, could have informed them of what that means. This implies that NOT AS SINGLE PERSON ON STAFF STOOD UP AND SAID “HEY, WHOA! WHAT ARE WE DOING???”
So that doesn’t seem too simple. That seems like a stretch.
Well then the other option is that it WAS deliberate, and that they knew exactly what they were doing. One problem is, I don’t know what they were doing. If this was deliberate, what’s the end goal here? You get people to fork a source code and find dependencies that you don’t have the rights to distribute. Which then in turn opens YOU up to a legal vulnerability if Microsoft decides they want to be assholes. Then, on top of this, you start threatening legal suits against ANYONE who forked your code. I’m not getting the intention here. No matter how this plays out, it already feels like a stretch to say this was intentional.
So, if it wasn’t them being blundering idiots, and it wasn’t them deliberately doing this…what the fuck DID happen?
My only takeaway is that I no longer want anything to do with winamp. It really just seems like the Chernobyl of audio players at this point.
Always remember that in some places executive just means the dumbest person in the room and most developers won’t lift a finger if it means they get to see the owners embarrassing themselves in public.
So, if it wasn’t them being blundering idiots, and it wasn’t them deliberately doing this…what the fuck DID happen?
An error in the simulation, probably.
The average person does not deal with files anymore. Many people use online applications for everything from multimedia to documents, which happily abstract away the experience of managing file formats.
I remember someone saying that and me having a hard time believing it, but I’ve seen several people say that.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files.
Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.
Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAcademia/comments/1dkeiwz/is_genz_really_this_bad_with_computers/
The OS interfaces have followed this trend, by developing OS that are more similar to a smartphone design (Windows 8 was the first great example of this). And everything became more user-friendly (my 65+ yo parents barely know how to turn on a computer, but now, use apps for the bank and send emails from their phone). The combined result is that the younger generations have never learned the basic of how a computer works (file structure, file installation…) and are not very comfortable with the PC setup (how they prefer to keep their notes on the phone makes me confused).
So the “kids” do not need to know these things for their daily enjoyment life (play videogames, watch videos, messaging… all stuff that required some basic computer skills even just 10 years ago, but now can be done much more easily, I still remember having to install some bulky pc game with 3 discs) and we nobody is teaching them because the people in charge thought “well the kids know this computer stuff better than us” so no more courses in elementary school on how to install ms word.
For a while I was convinced my students were screwing with me but no, many of them actually do not know the keyboard short cuts for copy and paste. If it’s not tablet/phone centric, they’re probably not familiar with it.
Also, most have used GSuite through school and were restricted from adding anything to their Chrome Books. They’ve used integrated sites, not applications that need downloading. They’re also adept at Web 3.0, creation stuff, more than professional type programs.
As much as boomers don’t know how to use PCs because they were too new for them, GenZs and later are not particularly computer savvy because computers are too old for them.
I can understand some arguments that there’s always room to advance UI paradigms, but I have to say that I don’t think that cloud-based smartphone UIs are the endgame. If one is going to consume content, okay, fine. Like, as a TV replacement or something, sure. But there’s a huge range of software – including most of what I’d use for “serious” tasks – out there that doesn’t fall into that class, and really doesn’t follow that model. Statistics software? Software development? CAD? I guess Microsoft 365 – which I have not used – probably has some kind of cloud-based spreadsheet stuff. I haven’t used Adobe Creative Cloud, but I assume that it must have some kind of functionality analogous to Photoshop.
kagis
Looks like off-line Photoshop is dead these days, and Adobe shifted to a pure SaaS model:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Creative_Cloud#Criticism
Shifting to a software as a service model, Adobe announced more frequent feature updates to its products and the eschewing of their traditional release cycles.[26] Customers must pay a monthly subscription fee. Consequently, if subscribers cancel or stop paying, they will lose access to the software as well as the ability to open work saved in proprietary file formats.[27]
shakes head
Man.
And for that matter, I’d think that a lot of countries might have concerns about dependence on a cloud service. I mean, I would if we were talking about China. I’m not even talking about data security or anything – what happens if Country A sanctions Country B and all of Country B’s users have their data abruptly inaccessible?
I get that Internet connectivity is more-widespread now. But, while I’m handicapped without an Internet connection, because I don’t have access to useful online resources, I can still basically do all of the tasks I want to do locally. Having my software unavailable because the backend is unreachable seems really problematic.
Godamn this made my job feel secure
I can understand some arguments that there’s always room to advance UI paradigms, but I have to say that I don’t think that cloud-based smartphone UIs are the endgame.
I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories), but also had different file types for a library, an executable, a plaintext file. Then there were filesystems where directories could only list files, not other directories.
Slowly and gradually over time they evolved to the abstractions of directories listing files and other directories. I think in early Unix even a directory was a usual file, just differently interpreted.
Now, instead of teaching clueless people they’ve made a whole culture of computing for clueless people only, unfit for proper usage.
One might see how representation of something like a lent of objects is the flat layout again. At some point it doesn’t matter that there’s a normal filesystem under it, or something.
One might also see how using tags to somewhat organize objects into another lent is similar to a two-level layout, where a directory can only list files.
If one is going to consume content, okay, fine.
How would one know if they want to use computers seriously if they haven’t been taught, don’t know where to start teaching themselves, probably have, mild or not, executive dysfunction (a lot of conditions) and, if put in the right situation, would be very capable and interested, but in the wrong situation just can’t learn a single thing?
That was me, I could only reduce distractions and non-transparency after moving to Linux (and then OpenBSD, and then FreeBSD) with obscure WMs and setups. I’m born in 1996, so I had it easier.
I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories),
That is true for MS-DOS 1.0. But Unix had a tree structured directory system from the very beginning (early 1970s). And the directory listing command “ls” was basically the same in the first Unix 50 years ago as it is in modern Linux.
I meant - before Unix.
I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories), but also had different file types for a library, an executable, a plaintext file. Then there were filesystems where directories could only list files, not other directories.
The original Macintosh filesystem was flat, and according to WP, used for about two years around the mid-1980s. I don’t think I’ve ever used it, personally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_File_System
MFS is called a flat file system because it does not support a hierarchy of directories.
They switched to a new, hierarchical filesystem, HFS, pretty soon.
I thought that Apple ProDOS’s file system – late 1970s to early 1980s – was also flat, from memory. It looks like it was at one point, though they added hierarchical support to it later:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_ProDOS
ProDOS adds a standard method of accessing ROM-based drivers on expansion cards for disk devices, expands the maximum volume size from about 400 kilobytes to 32 megabytes, introduces support for hierarchical subdirectories (a vital feature for organizing a hard disk’s storage space), and supports RAM disks on machines with 128 KB or more of memory.
Looks like FAT, used by MS-DOS, early 1980s, also started out flat-file, then added hierarchical support:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table
The BIOS Parameter Block (BPB) was introduced with PC DOS 2.0 as well, and this version also added read-only, archive, volume label, and directory attribute bits for hierarchical sub-directories.[24]
Seems to confirm the tendency, except I was thinking about higher-end and more professional systems.
Oh, yeah, not saying that they were the first filesystems, just that I can remember that transition on the personal computer.
This was actually something I found interesting with the brief TikTok shutdown in the US. A lot of creators only had their content in the editing software owned by TikTok or the app itself, meaning they lost access to all of their content.
The biggest risk of cloud only setups is you don’t own it.
I wouldn’t expect most users to understand how to use it, but has there not been a tiktok downloader made yet? If not that’s a good opportunity for someone looking for a project.
I think most of the tools have a way to download content, the issue is no one does or has a system for their backups. Which is the risk with the cloud, you’re putting all your eggs in someone elses basket.
I would guess that at least part of the issue there is also that the data isn’t all that useful unless it’s also exported to some format that other software can read. That format may not capture everything that the native format stores.
In another comment in this thread, I was reading the WP article on Adobe Creative Cloud, which commented on the fact that the format is proprietary. I can set up some “data storage service”, and maybe Adobe lets users export their Creative Cloud data there. Maybe users even have local storage.
But…then, what do you do with the data? Suppose I just get a copy of the native format. If nothing other than the software on Adobe’s servers can use it, that doesn’t help me at all. Maybe you can export the data, export to an open format like a PNG or something, but you probably don’t retain everything. Like, I can maybe get my final image out, but I don’t get all the project workflow stuff associated with the work I’ve done. Macros, brushes, stuff broken up into layers, undo history…
I mean, you have to have the ability to use the software to maintain full use of the data, and Adobe’s not going to give you that.
You’re absolutely right a out data formatting being an issue and something that really does cause vendor lockin.
I would just think content creators would still want archive/backup of the final products (the video itself). For example could you imagine if a movie just disappeared because Adobe or someone shutdown.
Ms 365 just assumes that your company has a Ms azure cloud solution, exchange server or just defaults to onedrive. You have to wrestle the software into giving you a local storage folder browser when picking the place to save a new document to. It’s frustrating.
@dustyData Oh my gosh. I see this every single day at work. So many people have no idea where any of their documents are saved, until they can’t find them. I’ll be honest, I use a lot of streaming services for music as well, but I think I might actually go back to simply buying music. Who knows. Call me old-fashioned and only 35 years old, but I still see a point in local storage in traditional desktop type software. There’s not enough of it around here.
The abstraction away of the idea of files and folders is a deliberate user disempowerment strategy by app and mobile OS creators. The underlying concept is that the app owns the data, you don’t. It also conceals the fact that use of standard file formats and directory structure conventions were developed to facilitate interoperability: apps come and go, but the data was meant to live on regardless. Of course, vendors want to break interoperability since doing so enables lock-in. Even when the format of the underlying content is standarized, they’ll still try to fuck you over by imposing a proprietary metadata standard.
Just another example of enshittification at work.
I owned Adobe CS 4. CS 5 and 6 had nothing new I needed. When my OS no longer supported CS 4, I purchased Affinity Suite; it still works great with no subscription or cloud hosting.
Back when the iTunes Music Store still existed, I took advantage of their feature to convert my library of audio to digitally mastered DRM-free 256 bit AAC. All my recordings of tapes and LPs replaced by professionally remastered tracks. Since then, I’ve supplemented with tracks purchased directly from the bands I’m interested in, plus some lower value stuff from YouTube.
In fact, the only cloud service I depend on is NextCloud, which I host myself, and which lives behind a VPN.
I run my own JellyFin server with all my DVD rips hosted on it. That’s a large part of my streaming video that I’d want to watch more than once.
Probably not a huge number of people do what I do, but enough to keep people employed who still make products you download once and enjoy forever.
I hear you for sure. I very much prefer local software and saved files local as well. The problem is there’s more money to be made doing it the other way. Unless it’s FOSS you can pretty much count on the company to follow the money.
Current students generally have horrendous computer literacy. There was only about a 20ish year window where using a computer meant you were forced to become vaguely proficient in how it worked. Toward the end of the 90s into the 2000s plug and play began to work more reliably, then 10 years after that smartphone popularity took off and it’s been apps ever since.
Students in high school this year were born from ~2007-2011. Most of them probably had a smartphone before a computer, if they even had the latter at all.
Even university students studying computer science don’t have this basic knowledge anymore.
Damn, I never even thought of the implications for compsci. That’s gotta be an interesting challenge for profs these days.
It’s a sample of 1, but we hired a young guy with a CS Master’s degree. I told him in polite ways that he should not use ChatGPT and his code sucked. When he was told to fix something, he rewrote it completely with a new prompt instead of understanding bugs. He didn’t last more than 2 months.
First people didn’t really understand computers, so we taught about them to children - back in late 90’s when I was in school, we had a few school years of dedicated computer classes every week.
People then started to assume kids just “know” computers (“digital native” and all that) and we stopped teaching them because hey, they know it already.And now we are suddenly surprised that kids don’t know how to use computers.
I agree with that to a certain extent, but computer classes (at least where I grew up) weren’t very comprehensive or germane to the skills people are talking about in this thread. If I think back, in elementary school we mostly had a few educational programs (typing, spelling, oregon trail, etc), and in middle school we did some stuff with excel and I’m sure some other things I’m forgetting, but we definitely didn’t have anything about how computers fundamentally worked. Maybe there was some very simple coding in basic, but it would’ve been very limited.
The reason I learned how to mess around with files and things was because computers simply weren’t very easy to use. Trying to get games running when they didn’t work just out of the box was a great teaching tool. Early on you had to learn the DOS commands (which by necessity meant learning file menus), and in windows (I can’t speak to anything Mac related) before plug and play worked well there was still endless tinkering you had to do with config files. Like you get the game installed but the sound doesn’t work, so you have to edit the config files to try different channels for your soundblaster. Or maybe your new printer won’t print, so you have to search online for the dll files you need.
There just stopped being a need to learn how to do anything like that, so the functioning of computers became that much less understood. I agree that the whole digital native narrative was dumb and hurt children’s learning (if anything the generation who dealt with the problems outline above are much closer to digital “natives”), and there’s a ton of stuff computer classes should be teaching these days. But classes will always only be effective in a limited capacity compared to learning about something because you need or want it to work for you in your life outside of school.
the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
This is so weird to me. Aren’t people at all curious? Like, I would never try to fix a car’s engine, but I have a basic understanding of how one works. I wouldn’t install a toilet, but I know about J-traps. I wouldn’t write my own 3D engine, but I know the basics of how they work.
Files and folder is such a fundamental and basic thing. Where’s the basic curiosity?
Honestly, I’m a little surprised that a smartphone user wouldn’t have familiarity with the concept of files, setting aside the whole familiarity-with-a-PC thing. Like, I’ve always had a file manager on my Android smartphone. I mean, ok…most software packages don’t require having one browse the file structure on the thing. And many are isolated, don’t have permission to touch shared files. Probably a good thing to sandbox apps, helps reduce the impact of malware.
But…I mean, even sandboxed apps can provide file access to the application-private directory on Android. I guess they just mostly don’t, if the idea is that they should only be looking at files in application-private storage on-device, or if they’re just the front end to a cloud service.
Hmm. I mean, I have GNU/Linux software running in Termux, do stuff like
scpfrom there. A file manager. Open local video files inmpvor in PDF viewers and such. I’ve a Markdown editor that permits browsing the filesystem. Ditto for an org-mode editor. I’ve a music player that can browse the filesystem. I’ve got a directory hierarchy that I’ve created, though simpler and I don’t touch it as much as on the PC.But, I suppose that maybe most apps just don’t expose it in their UI. I could see a typical Android user just never using any of the above software. Not having a local PDF viewer or video player seems odd, but I guess someone could just rely wholly on streaming services for video and always open PDFs off the network. I’m not sure that the official YouTube app lets one actually save video files for offline viewing, come to think of it.
I remember being absolutely shocked when trying to view a locally-stored HTML file once that Android-based web browsers apparently didn’t permit opening local HTML files, that one had to set up a local webserver (though that may have something to do with the fact that I believe that by default, with Web browser security models, a webpage loaded via the
file://URI scheme has general access to your local filesystem but one talking to a webserver on localhost does not…maybe that was the rationale).
I have thousands of mp3s so I’d say they still matter. As far as audio quality goes I doubt my ears, at least at my age, can tell the difference between them and a lossless format.
Anyone telling you they can hear the difference between a 320kbps MP3 and lossless audio is full of shit, anyway. It’s still a great format for keeping file sizes small, though I prefer ogg these days.
I’m in the same boat: can’t hear any difference.
But, I have GBs of 320k MP3s… is it worth converting to Ogg ?
I’m a big fan ogg opus, but I wouldn’t convert between lossy formats
Sounds fine at good bitrates, universally supported, small, efficient, everywhere.
Yeah, MP3 is just fine. Found zero reason to use any other format. And of course, while the rest of the world streams everything I’ll be happily using my massive MP3 library I can fit on a tiny little storage device and take everywhere I go without the need for the interbutts and big brother keeping tabs of what I listen to.
I used to think this but the convenience won out. Now over holiday break, my teen discovered my crate of CDs that he doesn’t remember seeing in his lifetime!
And now I need to decide whether to buy a CD or DVD player to transfer to a more usable format - the last one I had was an old Xbox that is no longer with us
You can buy an external drive that plays both CD and DVD
Find somewhere that accepts/generates ewaste and you might be able to score an internal CD/DVD drives. We were doing some reorganizing at work and I saw a literal box full of 5.25" drives
That’s a great idea, especially since I’m also trying to purge old stuff
I don’t use any one format. No idea what audio formats I have but probably a lot. Never cared, VLC takes them all.
