Tocky on 7/4/2021 at 12:43
Whatever happened with being able to defrag the hard drive anyway? Do new computers not need it?
Kolya on 7/4/2021 at 13:05
Windows 10 does it itself. And with SSD drives defragging is useless and degrades the drive.
You can still check the drive for errors of course (to be found in the properties of the drive).
If you want, maybe (
https://perguth.js.org/peertransfer/) share a file that used to play and now doesn't anymore?
Tomi on 10/4/2021 at 13:10
I'm glad that we're having this vinyl discussion. I must confess that I'm a bit of a vinyl collector myself, but I can't stand the "proper way to listen to music" crap. I started getting into music when the cassette era was already dying (apparently they're in fashion now too!) and the age of CD was about to really kick off, so there's no nostalgia here for me. I bought my first vinyls (the word "vinyls" annoys most vinyl hipsters, but I think it's a perfectly appropriate word for "vinyl records") around twenty years ago when they were dirt cheap, I didn't even have a turntable but it felt nice to own some of my favourite albums on vinyl.
Fast forward ten years, I inherited a pretty good turntable and actually got to listen to some of my vinyl records. There's something almost magical about listening to The Beatles or some old classics on vinyl, and I don't even know why that is. The sound quality certainly isn't better with all the cracks and pops and background noise, but maybe all that just adds to the charm. I couldn't imagine listening to some modern music on vinyl, although there are a few exceptions. As a technical device I've always found a record player much more fascinating than a CD player for example - it seems fairly obvious that a CD player reads a bunch of zeros and ones from a disc and turns them into something meaningful, but how did someone figure out more than a hundred years ago how to store music on grooves of a shellac disc, and use a needle to turn it into music? :confused:
But yeah, apart from being charming and fascinating, I can't think of many other positive things about vinyl records. They're fragile (both the disc and the sleeve) and really quite inconvenient in just about every way. But that inconvenience might also be the biggest strength of the format, as silly as that may sound. The way how we listen to music has changed a lot over the years, everything is so nice and convenient these days. With a few clicks or taps or voice commands I can listen to just about any song that I can ever think of, no matter where I am. It's so easy that I often just put some music on and let it play on the background. With my vinyl records it's quite different. Having to actually make an effort to put a record on, maybe clean the disc and the needle a bit, and then turn/change the record every twenty minutes or so kind of forces you to pay more attention to the music. Can't shuffle or easily skip songs that you don't care about, you actually have to listen to the whole thing. That's nice to do every now and then.
I suppose I'm a bit of a vinyl hipster after all.
Aja on 10/4/2021 at 16:37
Quote Posted by Kolya
Windows 10 does it itself. And with SSD drives defragging is useless and degrades the drive.
You can still check the drive for errors of course (to be found in the properties of the drive).
If you want, maybe (
https://perguth.js.org/peertransfer/) share a file that used to play and now doesn't anymore?
Well, I recall that one of the files that didn't work was a White Stripes track, and I just went through all of the Icky Thump album, which I have on my external drive, and all the files play fine. So who knows; maybe it was a player incompatibility or Windows 7 or whatever. All these years I've assumed they were broken!
Cipheron on 10/4/2021 at 18:25
Quote Posted by Aja
I dunno! I ripped my entire music collection years ago using EAC with error correction, and later on some of the files that used to play fine stopped working. I'd be glad to be proven wrong because it's discouraged me from keeping a proper digital archive. I never really investigated what actually happened to the files. Maybe it was a different issue.
The issue is using the term "degraded" because that makes it sounds like you think the actual quality of the stored music dropped. "degraded" usually means loss of signal quality in the audio world, so using it here caused confusion.
The salient term is "file corruption" to explain what happened. It's the same type of thing as a word document getting corrupted or a save game that won't load, and isn't specific to music. The real takeaway there is how important it is to have backups. But also, to test your backups. You don't want to store a master copy of a file, a song in this case, then find out the backup file got over-written with a junked one.
Back to "degraded" that's only the appropriate term to use when actually encoding a track. I knew someone back in the late 1990s who actually believed that copying an mp3 to another drive / device would degrade the audio quality each time, like it would for a tape. The thing is, if you copy a tape to another tape that's the same as running the song through an encoder again. The equivalent would be encoding a track in mp3 320kbps, then re-encoding that track to mp3 128kbps. The results would be worse than just encoding it at 128kbps in the first place. But you can copy the digital file itself an infinite amount of times without anything happening. Consider the analogy of me copying a game for you then you making a copy of that game for someone else: you'd expect the game to still play identically. That's a digital copy.
Aja on 10/4/2021 at 18:59
I did transfer it to a new hard drive a while back, but how could the old hard drive fail without damaging the data?
Cipheron on 10/4/2021 at 20:57
Quote Posted by Aja
I did transfer it to a new hard drive a while back, but how could the old hard drive fail without damaging the data?
File glitches happen from time to time and it's not always apparent something went wrong. It probably happened at some point before the files were transferred. I'm not talking about complete drive failure, but it making mistakes. This is a risk with any writable media.
If you copied all your old games from CD to ISO files and stored them on a hard-drive that would have the same issues of failure as converting all your music CDs the same way. Hard drives fuck up. Don't rely on them.
EDIT: however this is definitely a relevant example for the thread. There are pros and cons to either having CDs or having a music collection on your hard-drive.
With CDs, we learn how to handle the CDs properly, and about the importance of putting the correct disc back into the correct case. Those are things you don't need to worry about with a digital-only collection. But of course, the "how to handle CDs correctly" rules get replaced by new rules about how to maintain and handle your digital collection. Files getting corrupted and not knowing that was a possibility is the digital equivalent of you didn't put your CD back in the case and someone spilled coffee on the table and now it won't play.
EDIT2: the problem with maintaining digital collections of *anything* on drives you own are clear. You're now responsible for hardware issues, maintaining backups, etc. Also the more digital files you collect, the larger a percentage of your time is spent *maintaining and sorting* files rather than actually consuming the content. And that's not even taking things like hardware failures or file corruption into account.
Most people have now leap-frogged to music streaming services because then you don't have the overhead of even maintaining a collection. The result is they spend more of a percentage of their time actually consuming content rather than maintaining a collection, but the drawback is having less control.
Kolya on 11/4/2021 at 02:09
Less control sounds a bit vague. It's leasing music vs. owning it.
@Aja I don't know how your HD failed but HDs get partially corrupted quite regularly and the OS just works around the corrupted sectors.
Aja on 11/4/2021 at 03:01
Quote Posted by Cipheron
File glitches happen from time to time and it's not always apparent something went wrong. It probably happened at some point before the files were transferred. I'm not talking about complete drive failure, but it making mistakes. This is a risk with any writable media.
I get that, but if the old hard drive failed and the files were corrupted, why would they be working now on the new drive?
Cipheron on 11/4/2021 at 03:16
Quote Posted by Kolya
Less control sounds a bit vague. It's leasing music vs. owning it.
I actually don't think that analogy works out that well. If you pay a monthly subscription to Spotify for example, you're not leasing any specific piece of music, you're paying for access to all the musics, which have been curated and have had all the storage issues handled by someone else. So it's more like a library with a membership fee than it is like a Blockbuster video store and renting out titles.
So, if the subscription is $5 a month for premium then you can either pay $60 a year to have access to thousands of titles, or you can save up and buy two $30 new release CDs per year with that same money. The cost/benefit analysis shifts quickly in favor of streaming unless you really only have a few albums you like to listen to and don't want to get new ones very often. Additionally, if you collect a lot of physical media then the cost and difficulty in managing all that stuff keeps going up.
A lot of younger people don't even have a CD player or music collection. Holding onto them at this point is mostly sunk-cost thinking. I haven't bought new CDs in years, and the only ones I'd consider would be some by a couple of new favorite artists of mine: stuff I'd buy as collectables **not to listen to**.
The lease vs buy question works best for things like your house, car, fridge or TV. Things that you probably want exactly one of. Taking out a loan to get a house works out cheaper than renting, especially in the long run, for example. So in these cases you can say "buying it outright means you save money - they're gouging you on those lease fees!" But this argument doesn't work for things such as books that you can get from the library, or other library-like arrangements.