Even when using FLAC, MD's 1.25Mbps speed would barely be enough. My dream of re-creating the early 2000s music listening aesthetics is ruined by another imperfection.
@newt
Wat is wrong with buffering? Without it you're fucked in a lot of cases: network delays, physical media spun down on detecting vibrations to prevent damage, physical media having to be re-read due to errors, etc…
And 1.25 seems to be just right to be reading FLACs on average — studio recordings are often heavily compressed/filtered and use even lower bandwidth.
@newt@stereophonic.space
@newt
You obviously have no experience using low processing power machines, which use USB (an utter garbage of interface 😏) for audio, networking AND storage.
Dropouts are gay and lame and whatever, buffering is amazing!
@newt
Sure, everyone knows that you need modern desktop-class hardware to play audio 😂
@newt
Of course it is better! Might even allow you to implement audio decompression in JS — computing power well spent 😜
@newt
No need to! Buffering can defeat the deficiencies even of such a sorry ass of interface as USB. But of course that wouldn't even be necessary were superior DMA-capable hardware used.
But we have this discussion before. You lost that time and I'm not going to indulge your weird fetishistic DMA fantasies again.
@newt
Man, do you realize that I'm just teasing you? I don't want to have a serious discussion about it again. I think you got my point — that theoretically DMA might still be advantageous, and I got yours — in most real world usage scenarios it no longer matters. And I've never stated otherwise: use whatever you're comfortable with — always. My rotten museum-class hardware gets the shit done for me, does it so well that I don't see the point in getting anything new and shiny 🤷
I was talking about cheating lol. What I meant by "helicopter helicopter" is a popular rage hack usually referred to as "spinbot". It distorts your hitbox making it harder to hit.
https://youtu.be/fD4T13WEpXo
But it all goes to shit when you do something really time-sensitive, like playing an instrument. I can't use my synth with BT audio at all, the delay is just really THAT noticeable.
@newt @mischievoustomato
Now that is a valid point indeed, I don't use wireless headphones at all, but I suspect it to be pretty much unusable.
I just don't see why you attempt to apply the same principle to audio *consumption*, I didn't even get it at first — what you were talking about and why buffering might be bad.
@newt @mischievoustomato
Making music and video games are relatively niche use cases compared to what most people use wireless audio peripherals for. In both of these cases wired would probably always be better. No need to apply some kind of universal solution for everything: you know me — I *despise* USB audio, but if it's a tiny machine hooked up to my amp that I can listen my digital collection on and that I can control remotely — why would I care?
@newt @mischievoustomato
As much as it is embarrassing to admit, but until recently it was even using PulseAudio to work around the bug that at certain sample formats and sampling rates its audio interface was producing silence. Luckily I've found a workaround that allows me using bare ALSA last week. Point is, I wasn't even so much worried about about Pulse in this case — I just came up with an idea of fix and it worked, other than that — let corner cases be corner cases.
>Luckily I've found a workaround that allows me using bare ALSA last week.
You're delusional.
@newt @mischievoustomato
Why is that? 🤔
@newt
I'm not attempting to sell you ALSA and again, I don't think there is need for one-size-fits-all solutions. I just don't need anything pulseaudio/pipewire provides — no transmission over the network, no advanced routing, nothing of it. I just want my output as dumb as it can possibly get.
@mischievoustomato
@newt
In this particular case avoiding pulse at least allowed me to get rid of separate pulseaudio process that had to be running all the time — less RAM on an already resource-constrained machine, and a couple percent less CPU usage as no unnecessary routing is done. It had its merits.
As I didn't have to spend a week on it, like I said — I just came up with an idea, while messing with alsa on another machine, and it worked, why the hell not?
@mischievoustomato
@newt @mischievoustomato
That probably is true! I'm kinda happy that tinkering with this stuff makes me happy and brings me calm now — it wasn't always like that 😂
@amerika
I've only had proper turntable for a pretty short period of time and I've given all the vinyl records I had to my friends so it's probably too late to start collecting them again.
I do love CDs though! But since shipping and handling started costing more than the CDs themselves (and now it became at all impossible), I stopped buying them.
@mischievoustomato @newt
@amerika
Yesterday I was flabbergasted by the difference when I put a CD on after not listening to them for a few days: the stage feels wider and I can clearly hear different sounds in different stereo channels. But it probably had more to do with it being an early King Crimson record, not with audio source per se — but nothing wrong with that either, it was an HDCD remaster — I liked the format, too bad it died too fast 😩
@mischievoustomato @newt
King Crimson did a lot of work with production, as I recall. Some of their stuff sounded almost as good as the Led Zeppelin material. Warm and spacious.
Of course, I get all excited for the Fripp/Eno stuff, which is sort of another level of production artistry, and pre-digital too.
It's very painful these days. I have been favoring bulk orders where shipping goes down to a couple bucks a CD.
Of course, my only sources are for metal... but you can often find pretty good deals on Discogs, just use a disposable credit card since their credit processing is a sieve.
@amerika
I don't enjoy metal as much these days, but when it's something bordering on prog or something slower like sludge, I still appreciate it.
When my NAD CD player broke down I got a used Rotel one from a guy who was also selling some of his CD collection, including nearly complete Neurosis discography, I only had A Sun that Never Sets by them at the time and didn't like it much — for some reason it seemed rather simplistic to me.
@mischievoustomato @newt
@amerika
Later, when I was living in the country near the forest during the COVID thing, their music started growing on me immensely.
Today I regret not buying it very much — and I didn't even have to do a thing, he didn't know what to expect so when he brought the CD player, he took a few records with him to test it and I could just "You know, I'll take those too", but alas 😢
@mischievoustomato @newt
I have many regrets about things I did not buy back in the day.
I was sort of hoping the internet would erase that by having everything online and easily accessible, but my monkey species wrecked that one fast.
It's too bad since despite most music being bad, there's a lot of great stuff out there.
I enjoyed Neurosis and other sludge like EyeHateGod, but in the end, it did not stick with me.
The earlier hardcore albums are kind of neat. "The Word As Law" stuck in my head.
https://www.discogs.com/artist/154935-Neurosis
I ended up missing our DC++ server.
We generally served up low-bitrate MP3s so people could try before they bought.
With metal, the point is to connect people to albums.
