Feel free to DM.

I wasn’t expecting tommydan from YouTube to be mentioned here :p. Best of all he does, what companies themselves couldn’t do, maintain the original aspect ratio. I remember that Shemaroo restored certain old Hindi films but the original aspect ratio for them was 4:3 whilst the restored ran into 16:9.

In fact, I have been seeing the odd old Hindi film from an unexpected source. The Russian site Ok. I am still not sure if it is a social media site or not since the English UI is not there for me but for all Intents and purposes, it is used to upload videos only. Some guy ended up uploading whole filmography of Rajesh Khanna on the site (much of it mirrored later to Archive.org). Whilst the irony remains that there is probably not a single legal hub to see the lesser known films.

Heck, I was hunting an out of print (like literally unavailable to stream or purchase anywhere short of anyone having the original CD/DVD) 1996 film and the only way was to pirate it (from a single source).

In some cases, piracy becomes an act of media preservation ( cues back to when BBC wiped some Doctor Who episodes in the late sixties and only way few were gotten back was because some folks had gotten audio transcribed or something at home).

From Kinks to Camel to obscure Krautrock stuff like Dissidenten, Out of Focus, Embryo. Ironically I have < 50 Hindi songs in my collection because the era I like the most [50s - 60s], good quality stuff is hard to come by. Like the files even on Soulseek or torrents are so incredibly compressed that it is a pity. The vocals sound so tinny that one wonders that how did the original masters sounded like.

I didn’t knew foobar2000 was available for mobile as well. I only knew it because it was so popular as a lightweight modular player for Windows. I used to be on Strawberry, a Clementine fork on Linux before moving to Deadbeef, which is like Foobar2000 but misses few features.

It is law of diminishing marginal utility. There would be more sonic distinguishness between a 64 kbps and a 128 kbps file, than say when making the same upgrade to 256 kbps. It becomes less and less obvious as one approaches 44.1 kHz/16 bit flac (beyond which it is useless to hoard unless one is mastering the albums themselves).

I have a DAC paired with Sennheiser IE 600 which is not audiophile level, but ought to be decent enough.

Either case, my point was not about audio quality and whether or not a person can distinguish a flac from say, 320 kbps mp3. Countless threads are made on that and viewpoints presented. My argument was that YouTube Music does not present first, to stream music in high quality and second, even if the quality was indistinguishable, there is no way to manage a library since most of the desktop third party clients remain without login.

Once can stream audio from YouTube via terminal on Linux but problem is all of that is limited to 128 kbps AAC. There is no way to stream proper 256 kbps AAC that YouTube Music Premium provides. One can download such streams via yt-dlp (it needs to be given authorization cookies) but there is currently no way to stream high quality audio from YouTube without using the webpage.

Could you tell me an alternative that allows for third party clients? On Spotify, I can configure a terminal client even on Linux and stream music with very low overhead [contrast with YTMusic with required a permanent browser tab opened]. Yes, local media streaming can do that but there is only so much space at one time on my HDD.

New Reddit is a mockery of design and waste of space. Add ito it the fact that RES isn’t properly compatible with new Reddit and keyboard navigation is not possible.

I don’t understand why Mozilla is so smitten with this extension. They already removed it from AMO, why are policing it now. A tiny minority of folks use Firefox(as a percentage of market share) worldwide and only some part of it use this extension. Why go after it so hard?

They are policing it today, tomorrow they may say uBlock Origin violates our policies as well. Sure, technically one might be able to install via changing about:config toggle but that’s a bridge too far for most users.

It might seem I am making a huge mental jump for equating a paywall bypass extension to an adblocker extension, but in the eyes of corporations, both kind of users are equally loathed by them.

If you have a YTM subscription, it does not make sense to play in Outer tune. Any YTM Streaming client streams in 128 kbps whilst YTM Premium streams at 256 kbps when set at High.

One can download songs at 256 kbps though if they have YTM Premium via yt-dlp using setcookiesoption. This is useful if someone has large custom playlists where searching via Soulseek is a chore.

Kissinger is easily the worst example to give the Peace Prize to. I think Anthony Bourdain wrote about Laos( correct me if I am wrong about the country) that you will wish to beat Kissinger with your bare hands after you have visited the place and see what he had done.

Satire died the day Kissinger was awarded the Peace Prize. Someone said famously as well. Even if Trump gets it, I will still argue that Kissinger remains the gold standard for being bad.

I remember using Cent OS (dual booting it alongside Debian) multiple years back. I think it had more or less feature parity with RHEL then and meant for personal use case unlike RHEL.

Too bad it was discontinued. I think the closest fork of it is Rocky Linux.

Nobel Prize committee made quite some blunders over the years but they really swapped war crimes and peace tables that year.

Whilst YT-dlp supports many sites, it’s primary function is still downloading from YouTube and that doesn’t have flac. Even YouTube Music Premium only streams at 256 kbps Aac when set at high, I think.

Using one of those deezer or qobuz bots might be better incase someone really wishes for flac. Or if one wants to invest time, then Soulseek is always there.

Reminds me of the quote Political Satire became obsolete when Kissinger was awarded the Peace Prize. But over the years, there have seriously been multiple controversial candidates who got the prize.

Listenbrainz is good. I scrobble to both there and Last.fm, there was librefm as well but it is in maintenance mode now practically with no new sign ups.

Not a perma ban but still.

Back when I used to be on Reddit much, I got auto banned from r/latestagecapitalism for having too much karma on certain subreddit they disliked. They weren’t necessarily political in nature (I think I only frequented couple of political subs then and they were non US in nature) but apparently the concept of not breaking any rules on your sub but still being banned just because I participate in some place they dislike was dubious.

Not related, but I think I was very active on reddit from 2016-2021. I had gone through couple of user IDs then (stupidly forgotten the 2FA mechanism for both and never backed the recovery code :p) and had a decent curated feed. I still sporadically open it but hardly participate / post. The only thing worth keeping me there is old Reddit and RES which makes keyboard navigation a breeze.

If one donates to Soulseek( on their official website a certain amount), they get privileges. If you have privileges, then your downloads will be queued ahead of other users (basically you side step a long queue for downloading).

I use Nicotine, and when I open the client, it shows for a couple of seconds at the bottom/tray No active Soulseek privileges before vanishing. That’s the only clue.

In practise, my downloads usually go through normally. The 5 days I had privileges I honestly didn’t notice much difference. Some users have an automated script that crawls one’s folder whenever you download from them, so as long as one has decent amount of shares, it’s alright. (I only have shared 40 odd gigs but it’s decent enough).

The chat is useless most of the times. The users troll each other and the unmoderated nature means racism is quite common as well. That being said, there are the odd decent folks as well. I had a decent conversation with a guy once there and he even donated 5 days of Soulseek privileges to me; sadly these type of conversations are forgotten in the cesspool that is the chatroom there.

When I was listening to obscure krautrock bands which were nowhere to be found on Spotify or YT Music, Soulseek came to rescue. Also, funnily, it is easier to get flac from there than 320kbps mp3 of various albums. The former is more ubiquitous there.