š¾ Archived View for republic.circumlunar.space āŗ users āŗ korruptor āŗ blog āŗ 2023-12-13-RipMixBurnBabā¦ captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:26:31. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Not sure whatās prompted this, but a few of my friends have ended up on Apple Music recently. This is OK! Fuck Spotify.
And bad. iTunes is a rotting piece of crap, the Apple Music web-frontend is merely āOKā on its best day, and holy-shit-why-canāt-I-copy-an-MP3-onto-my-bastard-iPhone-and-just-play-it *without it being connected to a fucking Mac*ā¦
Sigh.
Anyway, if youāre like me, and youāre wishing the slowest, most painful death imaginable upon Spotify, but meanwhile you need something for Apple Music that isnāt a phone and works on Windows & Linux, then you could do a lot worse than [Cider](https://cider.sh/).
Iāve been using it for a few months. Itās reasonably fast, and bar some Airplay instability, hasnāt given me any grief at all. AFAICT itās an Electron based front-end to the Apple Music web-portal-API-thingy, so you know, not the most svelte of things. But itās a damn sight better than iTunes. And the Music app on iOS. And itās free.
What if youāre on Windows and your Electron based front-end to a popular streaming service refuses to connect to any of your Airplay supporting amps? Well, if youāre willing to spend 8 quid, [Tuneblade](http://www.tuneblade.com/) is a tray-utility that grabs the default audio from Windows, and pings it across to your Airplay devices.
Thereās a smidge of lag (as youād expect), but other than that, itās absolutely rock solid. Never let me down.
Yes, Iām one of *those* people that still has actual files, of actual music, on actual hard drives. And a couple of iPods. And a NAS. And donāt get me started on my film collectionā¦
I know it isnāt fashionable, but itās a side effect of being a DJ. I need .WAVs, and Iām not going to stream them from Beatport Cloud, in the middle of a Welsh field, at 2 in the morning.
We can all see that weāre past āpeak streaming serviceā. Theyāre retreating into ever more costly bundles, with more aggressive, frequent adverts. And some of the content that you think you own, wellā¦ You might find out that you donāt.
On the plus side; thereās never been a better time to scoop up cheap CDs (and Blurays), rip āem, and stash āem. 2nd hand CDs are *cheap*. Storage is *cheap*. Backup is mostly-cheap. A 2TB SD card in an iPod holds a *surprising* amount of music, and it means the battery lasts for actual months. You donāt even need to keep the CDs; make a rip-ring, pass āem around, bung āem back on eBay. But mostly, go get those tracks, remixes, and original masters that are just *flat out missing* from the streaming services, and curate your collection like itās 2001!
Do it now, while itās cheap and easy to get hold of all the stuff, then, when the inevitable shit hits Spotify in the face, and weāre all too skint to afford this stuff anyway, youāll be laughing in your headphones.