Offline Music

[Smigger]

Does anybody else have a collection of records by their favorite artists and a solar powered record player? You are going to need it for the downfall of America.

 

[Badungus Kabungus]

Or you could just learn some bawdy songs to sing around the campfire, like people have done since the dawn of humanity.

 

[Meat Target]

Or you could just learn some bawdy songs to sing around the campfire, like people have done since the dawn of humanity.

Better yet, learn to play an instrument. It will alleviate the boredom. Buy a backpacker guitar.

 

[Dr. Ricearoni]

In an event where you'd need a solar powered record player to ever hear music ever again, records will not last long. They're fragile, big, and get dirty and scratched up easy. They're a form of media that prefers to be stored and rarely touched.

Just learn to play an instrument.

 

[Badungus Kabungus]

Better yet, learn to play an instrument. It will alleviate the boredom. Buy a backpacker guitar.

If going for the Eastern bloc vibe, can replace the guitar with a balalaika. It has sharp corners for fighting.

Or could just do the cowboy classic and carry a harmonica.

 

[mold]

https://fasola.org/

This is the lowest of tech American folk music.

 

[tehpope]

Does anybody else have a collection of records by their favorite artists and a solar powered record player? You are going to need it for the downfall of America.

You can get a portable turntable. I have one by Numark that will run off a usb battery pack (Ion sells the exact same one under a different product name). It runs off DC. So you'll need to get a dc voltage step up to usb adapter to get it to run. (https://www.amazon.com/12V-Voltage-Step-Converter-Cable/dp/B07J6NYVJV) It only uses like 300mA. Very small amount of energy. It has a built-in speaker, but probably not that good quality. Not a lot of bass. Mostly Treble.

If you really want to have music offline, just use an android phone with an sd card slot. Most modern phones support up to 2tb. Using opus at 128kbps, that's a ton of space for music. 96k is still listenable and would give you slightly more room. If you use opusenc, you can set the frame size to 40ms and it shrinks the file down even smaller without affecting the music.

If you're worried about EMPs, you can get an older phone that can be rooted. Look on GSMArena for ones with removable batteries. I got a Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo. Put Lineage OS + MicroG. Uses less power since it removes google services. Still can take 2tb cards (in theory).

The program I use for music playback is PowerAmp. Works well with folder view. Can be bought from the dev. without having to go through Google Play.

Regardless, you'll probably want a bluetooth speaker to connect to. Just get one that has 3.5mm aux in and from a known good brand.

 

[spacko]

open up your flacs in notepad and print them out on paper in plain text

 

[gampboonerisms]

I still have all my cd's from highschool. I dont have solar, but i do have a 5.1 sound system from 15 years ago. Aint failed me yet.

My question is how do you find new music without falling into regular normie radio shit?

 

[Whatevermancer]

I still have all my cd's from highschool. I dont have solar, but i do have a 5.1 sound system from 15 years ago. Aint failed me yet.

Same, I have a pretty big CD collection and a 90's boombox that can be battery powered.

how do you find new music without falling into regular normie radio shit?

I mainly listen to music on Bandcamp, it has suggestions.

 

[Casshern]

I would also consider storing your music collection via Bluray discs, as a single 25GB disc can store like 175hrs of 320kbps audio and you don’t have to worry about EMPs in that unlikely situation. Plus rigging up a low power single board computer to read a USB BD player sounds pretty managable.

Having the OG CDs, assuming physical presses, will be the best bet though.

 

[Null]

I mentioned this in a media storage thread but I do intend to collect vinyls of my favorite albums for precisely this reason. There's a lot of good songs out there that are pressed to vinyl. One of the ones I really want is the OST to Far Cry 5. They sold vinyl presses of the OST in the collector's box, which makes it sort of a rare commodity.

 

[Briarthorn Addict]

Vinyl records are a pretty crappy medium. They're large, brittle, wear out from use, unwieldy to handle, have intrinsic distortion the further along a record you get, etc. People will moan about vinyl's "vintage feel" and warm tone, but those aren't a property of the medium, or not significantly anyways; they're a consequence of various quirks in analog audio gear that was used to produce the record and reproduce the sound.

Mind you, the vinyl tone comes from records from a pre-digital era, when signal processing was done with analog components, which were hard to produce with the consistency and high precision studio applications required. Audio gear was also niche, and less consumer oriented than nowadays, with the small market serving things like recording studios, telephone companies, radio stations, etc. This meant you only had a handful of options to pick from for any one effect, each of which had a characteristic sound to it. In this sense, record producers and mixing engineers weren't aiming to sound any one particular way, much so they were aiming to sound the best given the limited tools they had on hand.
Most, if not all, albums that get pressed nowadays have gone through a digital signal chain at some point during production, if not in its entirety.

In the same vein, vinyl records were a great medium - at the time. A turntable has a very simple operating principle, and increasing fidelity is an entirely mechanical problem; something which we were really good at.

Musically, vinyl is a pretty poor choice. However, there's more to music than null tests. Listening to a record is form of ritual, and (for particularly important/influential records) it's probably the closest to holding a piece of history most of us will get. I own and listen to vinyl records myself. I just hate the misdirected appreciation vinyl gets whenever it's brought up.

That being said, if you're okay with lossless, Opus blows every other codec out of the water. At a max bitrate of 128kbps, its difference to source is probably below the noise floor of most people's listening conditions. Here's a few links explaining digital audio in simple terms by an engineer over at Xiph.org (the ones behind FLAC and Opus)

 

[tehpope]

My question is how do you find new music without falling into regular normie radio shit?

https://rateyourmusic.com

https://www.scaruffi.com/music.html

https://breezewiki.catsarch.com/4chanmusic/wiki/Essential_Charts

There's a lot of great lists on RYM. If you find one you like, you'll probably want to archive it. Cause these are user generated. They can disappear if the user deletes the list, their account, or if they don't login to their account after a certain amount of time.
Scaruffi is a meme, but he does include some more obscure albums and artists in his top genre albums lists.

If you wanna find the best pressing, just use "site:stevehoffman.tv *insert artist or album here*" on your favorite search engine. They're pretty great about that. Vinyl, CD, or digital.

 

[Blue Booze]

I've been buying vinyl and CDs a lot for the last two-wish years. I have a really schizo "they'll take it from me" mindset.
As for finding new music it's usually suggested to me on YouTube. If I hear something I really like I download it and make my own CD. I autistically design the CD booklet and case too. Same with cassettes. It's a hobby I guess. It just gives me a hard on to not have to use YouTube when I want to listen to music.

 

[vanta pilled]

My question is how do you find new music without falling into regular normie radio shit?

Historically, forums. And since most of my friendships are due to the music we listen to, I'd get recommendations from them too. For modern times, I find the spotify "Similar Artists" page to be really good.

 

[tehpope]

For playback:
if you're in a situation with a lot of people, you can use something like Navidrome to create a personal spotify.
There's a decent amount of services here:

https://git.nixnet.services/pluja/awesome-privacy#media-streaming-platforms

All open source and free.

If you just want to play back through some speakers remotely, you can setup MPD on a device and then control it with the proper app. If you have a sbc, dietpi is a great os to use. It has a few mpd services it can auto install and configure for you.

Nextcloud has a music addon that does support subsonic apps.

https://github.com/owncloud/music

 

[DavidS877]

That being said, if you're okay with lossless, Opus blows every other codec out of the water

But Opus is lossy.
Storage is so cheap these days I can't even think of a reason to use a lossy codec for music. Even my phone trivially fits my 400GB lossless collection. And by archiving lossless I can transcode if I ever needed to for devices with limited storage.

 

[tehpope]

Storage is so cheap these days I can't even think of a reason to use a lossy codec for music. Even my phone trivially fits my 400GB lossless collection. And by archiving lossless I can transcode if I ever needed to for devices with limited storage.

I download all my music in lossless formats and convert to opus for my phone. When dealing with over 10k tracks, Opus really does help out.

 

[Casshern]

I mentioned this in a media storage thread but I do intend to collect vinyls of my favorite albums for precisely this reason. There's a lot of good songs out there that are pressed to vinyl. One of the ones I really want is the OST to Far Cry 5. They sold vinyl presses of the OST in the collector's box, which makes it sort of a rare commodity.

You may also consider having your favorite digital tracks professionally remixed for vinyl and looking into lathe cut records.