I didn't trash my CDs time did. A decade spent in a carry case in my car in the southern heat has caused a lot of them to have the foil start separating. So the vast majority have at least one or two tracks that won't play or rip now.

Where you getting external drives for $30? The 2TB Toshiba drive I’ve purchased many times over the past 5 years for under $70 is now $150. Even the 1TB drives are over $100 these days

Try music brains picard if you want to fix that problem. Still takes time but it helps ALOT (it's free)

Just be sure to use something like Spek to to inspect the files if you use Soulseek. I've used it to find some obscure music I couldn't purchase, and sometimes people literally just re-encode MP3 files to FLAC, the data is still lost, reconverting won't recover it.

Soulseek is a godsend, but it's a bit clunky. I'm looking for some other fronted and stumbled onto nicotine+ that I haven't tried yet, any ideas or pointers?

I think I do have a narrow taste in music, it's just that the taste is "sad anger about love and lonliness" and that's the vibe of so, so many songs. 🤣

My current headphones are a Frankenstein mix of drivers from a pair that sounded nice but were uncomfortable, a headband and housing from a different pair that fits my weirdly shaped head, cushions from a third pair because they were the perfect size for my ears and soo comfortable and a cable from a fourth pair because it was the perfect length, thickness and has a good plug. They're my favorite headphones now.

If a first fix doesn't succeed, fix it and fix it and fix it and fix it.... You get the idea.

My small 4in fan I take hammocking with me had the charging port break on me and while I have the soldering station to fix it, I hate soldering tiny pcbs and have just been removing the lipo cell and charging it with my 18650 charger I had made an adapter for awhile back. I basically just stick two ribbon cable pins into the adapter and the other ends go to the appropriate +/- wires on the jst connector to the lipo. Takes about 4x longer than my largest capacity 18650 but it saves me a little annoying soldering.

Also I lost the on button when I was disassembling it so now I just shove my longest nail down into the housing. I COULD print a new one but I'd have to set my printer back up and tune it just for one small piece... I have a piece of paper taped to my printer that I keep writing the things I wasn't to print and once it gets long enough I'll set it up, it's just a lot of work and I don't have much space.

I bought a cheap electric heater from Lowe's a few years ago. It surprised me greatly because it would occasionally rewire itself. It had a rotating switch with Off, Fan, Low Heat and High Heat settings, but once in a while these switch settings would change. Like, Low Heat would actually by the Fan setting, Off would actually be the High Heat setting etc. It turns out the rotating switch just travelled over some printed solder lines and occasionally these would melt and re-form into new positions.

How there was not an epidemic of homes burning down because of these things is a mystery. But there's just no way engineers could have ever guessed something like this would happen.

As it turns out after a few decades, CDs also degrade over time.

Have you tried playing them on different devices? There's an old Tech Moan video where he replaced the springs and rubber bands on an old warbly tape deck, and the warble-ing stopped. Your tape deck may just need a springy-bits refresh.

Hey hey hey....

The pink panther is a great release!

I thought I was your inspiration!

No I had a box full of DVDs and cases and when we cleaned out the garage I kept a few but almost all I had already replaced with digital copies anyway. And sure I still have those now but my kids are big on watching DVDs and videos the "old fashioned" way.

I threw out all my old CDs, but I've since converted all the stuff I wanted to keep to FLAC and everything is digital now. I really, really hate clutter.

I've also had to move house a lot over the years, so cutting down anything you have to haul around is a good bet. Learned the hard way some 15 years back when I had to leave my books behind on a cross country move and I could only take what fit in the back of my hatchback. I moped around sad about it for a while after the move and my wife insisted I get a Kindle. It was life changing. Now all my books, games, and music are digital, stored on my NAS in RAID5, as well as with offline backups for most of it.

Guessing you've never had to panic move from a 2400 sqft house into an 600 sqft loft. Physical media was one of the first cuts. Actually most of it still may exist with my parents and friends who took maybe like 2/3 of it, but at that point when you have mere days to figure it all out, priorities change rapidly.

OGG is great for space, but still lossy. I keep my collection as FLAC. Modern phones have a ton of storage and not much to do with it anyway, so I've got like 20+ GB of music on mine.

I like to use AIMP to play music instead of vlc

hell yeah brother. I've got a 50GB SD card just for music myself. Library is currently 1200 strong

For the long time, tapes were seen as cheap but bad alternative, if you want to really listen to music you needed vinyl. Tapes themselves and players that didn't sound like shit were quite expensive, and even those were breaking all the time, meanwhile everyone has a vinyl player that plays nice and reliable. By the time good consumer tape player came about, it was very quickly followed by a cd player that was the best of both worlds.

I wonder if there's a modded Rolls-Royce out there with a gyroscope stabilised record player in it.

I download all my music and play it off my phone

Artists could just release files from their own website in all of the forms available. If they get so god damned little of the money Spotify and other steal from them, they should just release for better terms themselves equivalent to listening to music 24hours a day. Then you can just connect with whatever is on the network run by those artists.

A fediverse streaming audio paid with a subscription where 100 percent of your membership goes to the music you listened to. The artist's should then have to pay the fediverse audio to be a member of the network so they the network can pay the tech overhead. Which If it's kept super simple and intentionally NOT a SOCIAL media app, just a straight up media app.

Then artists could also have more control over what and where they get played. Could be an administration nightmare but a worthy challenge to offer such an amazing thing.

I would try to revive winamp through the fediverse somehow

Any leads on storage that isn't batshit insane in price now? I've got around 25TB, but a lot of it is backups that I can't effectively sort through without some more space to shift things around in.

I swear man, I just need 10 more TB and then I'll go clean! I can stop anytime I want!

Woo hoo!