circuitfarmer

+1 for Pop. I fully expected to distro hop but have had it on my main rig for over a year now. Surprisingly pleasant.

Streaming.

It’s the new cable, in that it sells to customers based on intentional market fragmentation. It’s actually a worse, because anything you “buy” on a streaming platform is actually just leased.

This is the right approach, but also want to mention, some sites actively block VPN IPs. Sometimes I see 403s which don’t persist if I switch servers.

The media library is the ONE reason I haven’t switched to Deadbeef. Everything else seems close enough.

Annoyingly, there is apparently an updated Medialib plugin for Deadbeef, but only on the Mac, since the dev is a Mac person.

Oops, I just commented about Foobar2k before seeing this comment.

Just want to mention that it does run on Linux as a Snap (though then you have to have a Snap installed, lol). I’m sure it runs fine with regular Wine too.

I use Foobar2000 for music. It is feature packed and so customizable. It’s available as a snap using Wine (I think it’s the only snap I have installed, in fact).

I really wish there were a Linux binary available but it has been Windows-only forever. The closest Linux player I’ve seen is Deadbeef, but Deadbeef’s library plugin does not work at all like Foobar’s (the later stays updated by monitoring the music folder and shows things by tags, not folder structure). Apparently the Deadbeef plugin is being updated to be more Foobar-like, but it isn’t there yet.

I’m not sure that’s actually true. I’m not a lawyer but I suspect it would take more than an internet comment saying “I did it.”

Also, the elephant in the remains in the room: discussing piracy is not piracy.

Apparently LUnix was originally designed for the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128. I didn’t know such a thing existed for 6502-based systems.

Sounds like it’s time for me to raid the closet. The Commodore 128 is a strange beast (considering the Z80 coprocessor that effectively does nothing, unless you boot CP/M) but playing with a tiny Unix-like OS on it seems like a fun project.

One thing to keep in mind that may be relevant: copies of non-digital things are different than digital copies.

Digital (meant here as bit-for-bit) copies are effectively impossible with analog media. If I copy a book (the whole book, its layout, etc., and not just the linguistic content), it will ultimately look like a copy, and each successive copy from that copy will look worse. This is of course true with forms of tape media and a lot of others. But it isn’t true of digital media, where I could share a bit-for-bit copy of data that is absolutely identical to the original.

If it sounds like an infinite money glitch on the digital side, that’s because it is. The only catch is that people have to own equipment to interpret the bits. Realistically, any form of digital media is just a record of how to set the bits on their own hardware.

Crucially: if people could resell those perfect digital copies, then there would be no market for the company which created it originally. It all comes down to the fact that companies no longer have to worry about generational differences between copies, and as a result, they’re already using this “infinite money glitch” and just paying for distribution. That market goes away if people can resell digital copies, because they can also just make new copies on their own.