I’ve still got a few vintage Napster MP3s from the 56k days.
Damn, I envy you. I lost all my digital music from those days to disk rot and a hard drive failure. Wish someone told me back then that CD-R was not a good backup medium. Or that I had checked on the disks before I needed them. Live and learn.
I use Jellyfin to stream both video as well as audio. Media is stored on my NAS via a samba share.
Much like yourself, I’m more frequently streaming music. The default apps aren’t great for music (and horrid for audio books) but there are music specific apps for most iOS, Android, and most PC OSs. Can’t remember what app I use on Linux (don’t use it much) but I use FinAmp on iOS a lot.
Navidrome is probably a better self hosted music service , but I didn’t see the point when Jellyfin plus FinAmp and met my streaming audio needs.
As for where I got my music collection, I’m an old fart whose music collection predates digital music. Early stuff was ripped from whatever format it was on to digital a while ago. Nowadays I tend to buy CDs and rip them to flac or buy digital from Band Camp or Amazon.
I haven’t seen the need since iTunes and Amazon Music came around, but if you wanted to go sailing you can find popular releases and discographies of popular artists on public torrent sites easily enough. There are also several programs available that can take a Spotify playlist and automatically download the music from YouTube.
While you didn’t ask about audio books, it might help someone else. While I can access my audiobook collection from Jellyfin, it is so bad at audiobooks that that I don’t bother. For audiobooks I use a service called AudioBookshelf. Great for podcasts as well. The audiobooks themselves I generally buy from Audible and then use Libation to strip the DRM.
Last time I needed to do this was 2006ish. Like I said it’s been a while. Worth checking into though. Might need the cd burner installed (or emulated) for the option to be available.
I also seem to recall that thee were a couple of projects attempting to strip the DRM off of Apple’s proprietary music format. Not sure how those turned out.
And no, as far as I know, it is not possible to go straight from Apple Music to mp3, or whatever format you prefer. It has to be downloaded to iTunes first.
Not sure if it is still possible, but the work flow for this used to be to use iTunes to burn the tracks or album to a CD and then rip the newly created CD to a format of your choice.
If you don’t have a CD burner, I seem to remember it was possible to emulate a cd burner on Windows and create an iso instead. I don’t remember how I did that though. I was running XP back then and that was a long time ago.
Edit: adding link to iTunes software
Pirate Bay? I don’t know. I haven’t run that sea in close to 20 years. Went open source instead. Might check the Mega Thread for more up to date info.
I’ve never played guitar hero so I don’t know what you mean by that.
If you’ve seen the Simply Guitar or Yousicion ads (I’m not linking them, too cringe!), you’ve got the general idea.
UG Pro’s midi player didn’t exist when I first started playing with the guitar, so something I’ll do with tab or sheet music, when I need to hear something to understand what I’m reading, is to enter the tab or standard notation into MuseScore and use it to create a midi track I can listen to. You can speed it up or slow it down as necessary.
It’s also possible to take a midi file, open it using MuseScore, and it will convert the midi data into standard notation. From there you can have it translated into tab. Tab created this way isn’t great, and you will have to modify the fret choices it makes to make the song playable, but it will get you in the ball park. The rest is just learning your instrument/tuning, what notes are where, that sort of thing.
Most popular songs should have a midi file available, especially popular music pre-2010ish. Downloading mp3s on a 56k modem sucked! Midi’s were a much faster download.
Another thing you can do is take the audio track your interested in learning from and load it into a DAW. Use an EQ filter to isolate the instrument, and add a boost after the EQ so you can hear the instrument clearly. Depending on the DAW, you may also be able to slow down the track and pitch shift it back up into the correct frequencies. This is a bit more difficult but will let you learn directly from the musician you’re interested in. I seem to recall an application that could do this in a more automated fashion, but I don’t remember what it was called.
Without knowing what you’re looking for? Might try archive.org. They’ve got a large collection of archived disk images. Might find what your looking for there. Otherwise you might try a public torrent search engine.
If you had time I would say to try contacting CNN directly. Most news outlets don’t mind sharing old reports. Can take a while though.
Another option would be to contact the reporter who did the report as they might save such things for whatever reason or might be willing to put you in touch with the outlet’s archive department, but again might take a while.
But since time is an issue, YouTube may be your best bet.
I agree, it could definitely be better, but it is cross platform, and the UI is “good enough” if your needs are as simple as needing a containment environment for software you don’t trust.
Is there a GUI interface for qemu now? I haven’t looked recently as I use Proxmox for my VMs. But that seems a bit overkill for this use case.
I’m not familiar with the software in question but generally your options are (in order of my personal preference):
If you’re intent on option 3, Virtual Box is a decent (though not great) free software for hosting VMs. Windows can be obtained from microsoft.com and doesn’t actually require registration or a license key (At least Win 10 didn’t, not sure about 11). Once the OS has been installed and the software has been downloaded you can easily disable the network interface from Virtual Box’s interface. From the VMs perspective it will be as if it suddenly doesn’t have a network interface anymore. You can then safely install and run whatever. Things cannot phone home if there isn’t a “phone” available.
The others in this comment thread have covered the potential threat vector fairly thoroughly. It’s not something I’m particularly worried about at the moment, but it is something that I try to keep awareness of for the future.
I’m inclined to say screw Reddit. Lemmy may be less private overall but at least we have more control over things in the Fedi.
Yes actually. I know it’s usually said as a meme, but I actually do have a drive that is nothing but Linux ISOs. Generally it’s a far faster download that way. Really wish more things would give me that option.
I use Trakt for tv and movies and ListenBrainz for music. Both have plugins to allow them to integrate with Jellyfin.
Way back when, I think I was using WinAmp (on XP) and then k3b (when I moved to Linux) to rip and burn cds, but I don’t recall hearing anything about k3b in a couple of years. As for something more recent, I’m afraid I’ve been running Windows lately so I don’t know what available in Linux land.
If you’ve got wine installed you might give Exact Audio Copy a try. It’s what I’ve been using since I started ripping cds again. I don’t know if it work in wine however. I didn’t have any luck ripping cds with WinAmp when I tried recently, though surprisingly, it does still run in Windows 11.
But I also don’t understand why HDMI has fucking DRM built into it.
If I remember correctly, the DRM was a result of pushback from the MPAA back when Blue-Ray and HD-DVD were coming out. They didn’t want a digital signal that could be easily recorded like S-Video or composite.
Despite, knowing where I am currently, may I suggest Audible? Once you’ve stripped the DRM you can then put it into whatever format you want. There’s a Windows application called OpenAudible, I that’s what it’s called, that I use to strip the DRM and then transcode it into MP4.
It’s not free, I know, but they seem to have almost any audiobook you might want.
Analog for the win! 😁
Well, I mostly buy music nowadays. but I’m also not as broke as I was growing up and the tooling to convert media to digital is a lot better as well. Between Ebay, Amazon, and BandCamp you can find pretty much anything on either physical or digital formats.
If you were looking to sail the seas, there are Spotify downloaders that download music from Spotify playlists/albums, sourced from YouTube, and of course, alot of music is available via torrents including some rather obscure stuff. Last time I looked on Pirate Bay (about six months ago), there was still a healthy selection of music with active seeders.
For the really old and/or obscure, try the Internet Archive. It sometimes amazes me what they have in their archives. Not all that I’ve found should be there.