It’s a Creative Zen Stone that I got as a Christmas gift in 2008. I just found it in a drawer, and it’s still holding charge. The last thing I put on it was The Life And Times Of Scrooge by Tuomas Holopainen, in 2015 – I don’t know why, at that time I definitely had a smartphone.

It has a headphone jack, which immediately makes it better than every smartphone produced in the last several years, and it can easily drive my 80-ohm Beyerdynamic. The audio quality is as good as one can expect. The only drawback is that it only holds 1GB… my old CD rips had to be compressed to hell and back.

Let me reiterate that this has been sitting untouched for a decade and was immediately ready for action. No login, no annoying software updates, expired subscription, or remote bricking by the manufacturer. Eat my shorts, Spotify Car Thing.

P.s. A Lifetime Of Adventure is a banger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWwSVOo5K_k

  • Milk_Sheikh@lemm.ee
    1·
    2 days ago

    I wasn’t trying to say streaming is wrong, I definitely use it from time to time, and though I trend heavily towards BandCamp and Soulseek I’ll cop to fidelity rarely being important for me outside of certain genres with heavier bass or effects that make flac worthwhile. Generally it’s very diminished returns for bloated file size - especially so on mobile devices and Bluetooth/car playback

    I rarely see removed songs, but do occasionally see them. Since my library is well curated it is easy to see which tracks are unavailable. I would guess I have been impacted on less than 0.1%.

    I have both fringe and mainstream taste, so I do semi-regularly encounter outright missing artists/groups, or occasionally entire genres, especially so in electronic - that alone is worth the effort of building and managing a collection to me. It is very disappointing to find an artist available via streaming, but not their self released/indie albums because of licensing agreements

    It is extremely rare for me to not find the songs I want on Apple Music, but I have uploaded many tracks to Apple Music that I had to procure from other locations.

    You can upload your tracks to the cloud storage for later streaming? That’s actually pretty neat, and solves a lot of the ‘wrong’ live version/acoustic rendition/etc problems nicely.

    It’s been a pretty good experience—not one I would have predicted 20 years ago.

    Tbh same! Looking at the music industry after the vinyl era where pressing was cheaper but albums weren’t, it’s nice that they eventually were dragged kicking and screaming to digital distribution - “piracy is a service problem” and they refused to learn for decades while disruptive competition grew online