Steal This Comic(xkcd.com)
xkcd.com
Steal This Comic
https://xkcd.com/488/
37 comments
For me it's becoming less about owning something and more about just finding it. Streaming services have fragmented and they each have some flagship show or series locked to their platform. At this point we're back to premium cable channels all over again. If I want to watch an old episode of something like South Park I don't know which services would have it, but I know of a torrenting site that will.
South Park is a bad example. They're available for free without a subscription - all of them.
Not in Canada. Here CTV (owned by Bell) has the license rights, and you need a bell TV subscription to watch.
Almost all of them. Some have been removed, like the Super Best Friends episode.
What was in the Super Best Friends episode?
The prophet mohammed. there's another 2 parter about him that's also unavailable iirc too.
I set up Audible accounts, because my favourite podcasts had ads for it. Their pricing model is basically "get as much money out of you as possible". Monthly subscription payment, and when you stop, you'll lose all your audiobooks. Before I stopped supporting this usury I downloaded all the books via some scripts I found on Internets. The books are still DRM protected and I will have to use some other scripts to decrypt them. Fuck Amazon.
I had an Audible plan where I got credits each month and was able to exchange them for books. The books I got back then are still available for me even though I stopped paying.
I had that plan too for a while. When I wanted to cancel, they said all unspent credits would vanish, which felt pretty evil. I'd bet the other commenter is talking about the stuff available under "unlimited" or whatever it's called.
I honestly don't understand. I stopped my Audible subscription years ago and I have access to my library of audiobooks purchased with credits.
For audiobooks, you can play them and use an external audio recorder.
If you are into VMs, you can probably get a near perfect recording.
If you are into VMs, you can probably get a near perfect recording.
I often buy an ebook to support the author, but then pirate the book in an epub format, which ends up being more user-friendly since I can read it on multiple different computers and in the ebook software that works best for me.
Is this really still an issue? I have a feeling that 'collecting music' (with the intent to listen to it) is probably something that only Boomers, Gen-Xers (myself), and older millenials still do.
(The (strange) exception being vinyl, and I suspect that a fair amount of the albums that get purchased don't actually get played. The records are really more 'collectables' than an actual means to listen to music for many people...audio funko pops, if you will...)
I've got a hard drive full of FLAC rips of my CD collection, which I listen to when I'm at the computer working. (I think I have about 600 discs.) I have plex serving the FLAC files, so I can listen to my music collection on my devices, but other than at the computer while working, I never do.
In the car and away from the computer listening is almost entirely music streaming services, with titles downloaded to my phone when I know I'm going to be somewhere with spotty internet.
My wife is 100% Spotify. My daughter (12) uses streaming services or youtube (!) to listen to music.
(The (strange) exception being vinyl, and I suspect that a fair amount of the albums that get purchased don't actually get played. The records are really more 'collectables' than an actual means to listen to music for many people...audio funko pops, if you will...)
I've got a hard drive full of FLAC rips of my CD collection, which I listen to when I'm at the computer working. (I think I have about 600 discs.) I have plex serving the FLAC files, so I can listen to my music collection on my devices, but other than at the computer while working, I never do.
In the car and away from the computer listening is almost entirely music streaming services, with titles downloaded to my phone when I know I'm going to be somewhere with spotty internet.
My wife is 100% Spotify. My daughter (12) uses streaming services or youtube (!) to listen to music.
Streaming music services like Spotify are a little different. The issue is really with services like Amazon Prime and Apple Music where you're paying for each song but don't really 'own' it. With the older paid music services when I bought a song I got a regular .mp3 that I could use anywhere I wanted and owned for life. With these new services we're not buying a song, we're just renting it for the same price.
Songs quietly disappear from Spotify and YouTube all the time. I guess it's "solved" by never owning the songs in the first place, and accepting they're ephemeral.
This. If you have a long playlist on Spotify, check out how many of your favorite songs are gray because reasons. I don't understand why they can't sell rights globally to every streamer and be done with it.
Hrm. We have Apple Music and Spotify. As I mentioned, my wife and kiddo use Spotify and have never complained about music gone missing, but my experience with Spotify is probably a few years out of date.
I use Apple Music and only have about five playlists which are sizable. I haven't seen any music go 'grey' in any of them (I just checked). Some of that might be that my music tastes arent' particularly obscure, some of it might be Apple Music's licensing relationships with the record labels.
CDs are currently the best bargain in music at the moment. I can hit a thrift store and find about 10 discs that I'm interested in. Of those, about 5 are usually in mint condition, which I buy for $1-2 a piece. If there's a disc that I'm really* interested in, I can usually pick it up on eBay or Discogs for $3-5, shipped. It's almost always me looking through the discs which tend to be about 10% CCM, 15% country, 15% classical, and about 60% rock. There's always at least one other guy sifting through the Lenny Dee, Herb Albert, and Lawrence Welk records that are all that remains of a thrift store vinyl section these days (though I think Herb Albert is becoming harder and harder to find... :P ).
* We get Spotify for free with our phone contract, but I prefer the interface / integration of Apple Music on my phone.
I use Apple Music and only have about five playlists which are sizable. I haven't seen any music go 'grey' in any of them (I just checked). Some of that might be that my music tastes arent' particularly obscure, some of it might be Apple Music's licensing relationships with the record labels.
CDs are currently the best bargain in music at the moment. I can hit a thrift store and find about 10 discs that I'm interested in. Of those, about 5 are usually in mint condition, which I buy for $1-2 a piece. If there's a disc that I'm really* interested in, I can usually pick it up on eBay or Discogs for $3-5, shipped. It's almost always me looking through the discs which tend to be about 10% CCM, 15% country, 15% classical, and about 60% rock. There's always at least one other guy sifting through the Lenny Dee, Herb Albert, and Lawrence Welk records that are all that remains of a thrift store vinyl section these days (though I think Herb Albert is becoming harder and harder to find... :P ).
* We get Spotify for free with our phone contract, but I prefer the interface / integration of Apple Music on my phone.
I've had songs disappear/reappear and I don't notice until it comes up on a discover/radio and I realize it isn't marked as liked anymore.
I imagine it's due to licensing fuckery, but you'd think they'd keep track of the song in your favourites and reinstate it later.. infuriating. I got part way through writing a script to periodically check what has disappeared earlier this year, maybe I should go dust it off
I imagine it's due to licensing fuckery, but you'd think they'd keep track of the song in your favourites and reinstate it later.. infuriating. I got part way through writing a script to periodically check what has disappeared earlier this year, maybe I should go dust it off
> As I mentioned, my wife and kiddo use Spotify and have never complained about music gone missing, but my experience with Spotify is probably a few years out of date.
Probably depends on the region. There are plenty of japanese songs suddenly gone from my spotify playlist, probably because the labels decided to pull out from spotify. I never see that happen on western songs on my playlist.
Probably depends on the region. There are plenty of japanese songs suddenly gone from my spotify playlist, probably because the labels decided to pull out from spotify. I never see that happen on western songs on my playlist.
Well Donda just disappeared from a lot of people's libraries:
https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2021/10/05/donda-not-on-apple-mus...
I know I had to manually replace tracks in my playlists because of this.
https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2021/10/05/donda-not-on-apple-mus...
I know I had to manually replace tracks in my playlists because of this.
Spotify by default does not show unavailable songs. Unless you've enabled the gray-out option and you make your own playlists, it's easy to live blissfully unaware.
I regularly listened to Whitesnake's The Purple Album on Spotify, until one day it was mysteriously gone.
When it comes to media especially, I don't really like the idea of depending on a company that serves me at their pleasure.
Needs 2008 in the title.
Not sure when this xkcd was released, but music is now drm-free on iTunes. You can just copy it around and it'll still play.
This was from October of 2008.
It's an XKCD with a URL ending in only 3 digits, so it must be very old. Not sure why it's on the front page.
Mirror: https://imgur.com/OPVQstH
Why would you want a mirror, and especially why would you want a mirror on an ephemeral image hosting site? The XKCD site has been online since '06 and is already archived on archive.is and web.archive.org, imgur has been online for less than that time and certainly can't boast the same amount of uptime.
The title of the comic also kind of encourages it.
Because:
a) sites go down and disappear
b) sites get censored / taken down by random acts of god
Yes but surely imgur is more prone to that, given its more lucrative surface area? And either way, wouldn't archive.is or web.archive.org be a better choice, given that both have big infrastructural systems that are very literally designed from the ground up to avoid data loss?
There was an alternative frontend for imgur in show hn the other day too...
like teddit and nitter but for imgur
like teddit and nitter but for imgur
Imgin?
https://imgin.voidnet.tech/
If using firefox, try Redirector extension to redirect all imgur links to imgmin.
https://imgin.voidnet.tech/
If using firefox, try Redirector extension to redirect all imgur links to imgmin.
Maybe they were trying to prevent a HN hug of death? XKCD handles those surprisingly well.