If you ever see a cute anime girl asking you for a short break when coming to our forum

I used to do that but now save tons of money (and time and space) by purchasing digital versions on Bandcamp. The only downside I see is that it’s kinda hard to know what quality the band or label uploaded in the first place – pretty sure I have some FLACs that are just brutally upscaled lossy MP3s as a result.

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I also use bandcamp, but to be honest, I don’t hear the difference between, say, Ogg Opus at 96 Kb/s (for stereo) and the original in the typical settings where I listen to music. So anything above that is fine for my purposes.

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Every time I see this thread reach the top again, I think to myself that I would not mind a cute person telling me things in real life. (Un)fortunately, I have not experience that yet. :sweat_smile:

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I do, but I simply put MP3s ripped from my CDs on the phone. Sure, I can’t take my whole collection with me all the time but have to limit my self to a curated subset (which I change from time to time). I don’t see that as a disadvantage.

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So do I, but I use FLAC rather than MP3. They might be bigger, but slapping a 128GB card into the micro SD slot gets rid of the problem.

(I use the Asunder ripper)

I guess a 128 GB card would hold about 300–400 hours of FLAC encoded music (CD-quality stereo), so it is not a constraint, but you could store about 5x that with a modern format like Opus without hearing the difference, even under ideal conditions, let alone headphones/earphones.

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Headphones are a secondary source for me.

I have one of these and one of these for my primary listening.

Both will play FLAC files, so why settle for a lossy format?

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They tell me things. Often amounting to the fact that their “cuteness” is none of my business :rofl:

PS… OGG, or even MP3, allows me store a huge amount of music on my phone. I do. And very very rarely listen to it!

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These are beautiful devices. Do they sound as good as the price suggests?

I have a Nubert NuGo! One that I’m frankly disappointed of. It just doesn’t sound very good. I’ve heard an Apple HomePod that costs something similar, and sounded WAY better.

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I used to have a Linn system, with matched speakers in our last house. Unfortunately, our house in Scotland is an amount smaller, hence the Naim kit.

I thought the Linn kit was better, but the Naim kit does extremely well, considering its size. I also get a much wider set of sources (the Linn wasn’t network connected). What I didn’t say was that I have ripped all my CDs to FLAC, and that these are on a SSD connected to a Raspberry Pi using mindlna as a media server.

I hadn’t heard of the Nubert NuGo. It is about 1/3 of the weight of the Mu-so QB!

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Using Kodi on an old Raspberry. Formerly with HiFiBerry but I think the DAC in my amp is half-dead (weird white noise after a couple of minutes, regardless of the source) so now I use Pi→HDMI→TV→RCA→Amp…

But :laughing: it’s becoming hard to distinguish this thread from Sound solution for a home 2025?.

By the way, if you’re using Linux (or WSL2?) and buy MP3s or FLACs and, like me, are tired of messed up metadata and titles in all caps and stuff, you might be interested in my “bandcampetc” project. :laughing:

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I’ll have a look, but it isn’t a problem that I run into, in that my main interest is classical and pre-classical music, and the CDs tend to have good quality metadata.

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I just picked FLAC because it’s widely compatible and is a perfect lossless copy. Those are my archives.

I’ve partitions of my library I’ve transcoded into AAC for an old iPod I have laying about if I really want to take things with me. Those old HDD based iPods are great. They still make batteries for them, you can replace the HDD with flash nowadays on the cheap and they sync with Rhythmbox easily. The DACs in the later models are quite good too. Also a real headphone jack.

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I just googled this, I had no idea they made such tiny hard drives, that’s crazy. I thought their minimum size was the 2.5" format :smiley:

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longer version AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity

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As I mentioned:

… And I also like to try to make some topics more “accessible”, so I tried to summarize this stuff about aggressive AI crawling in one of my “comics”, in relatively layman terms. I don’t usually translate them, but I made an exception this time and quickly cooked up a version to post here (sorry if there are typos):

(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, blahblah.)

(Yeah, I’m not a Gimp expert nor a drawing artist, even nearly ten years after my website was created.)

The original, French version is not online yet, so feel free to point out any inconsistency or terribly wrong piece of information. :bowing_woman:
Done.

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Edit: the figures quoted below are probably wrong. I’ll keep the post here as context for the other comments.

Forty percent of US GDP this year is based on AI-related spend, while 60% of venture capital goes into AI. Hopefully, it won’t end up as a bubble which bursts like in 2001
(The Pulse #149: New trend: programming by kicking off parallel AI agents - paywall, but this portion was extracted into his free newsletter)

See the video thumbnail. Also look at all the circular investing.
Oh and openAI investors are preparing to check out. IPO planned for next year.

This is hard to believe, is there data to back it up? 40% of GDP is a lot. Are they talking about investment?

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