going streamless

something really exciting that i did today: i picked up a used nas server from some guy, put my two old hdds in there and it's already up and running! because one of my general resolutions that i already implemented last year was to stop using streaming services for music.

the initial catalyst was honestly finding my old, barely alive ipod in a drawer and comparing the quality of a song to the same one on spotify. it blew my mind how this decades old device with buttons so worn down by use that the lock function doesn't work anymore and a battery that can't hold charge still sounded so much better than a modern app (i even played it through my laptop on cable headphones).

baby boy

shortly before that, the youtube algorithm had served me a video by australian nugget man dankpods. (it was the raycon video, obviously) it activated some kind of curiosity in me about audio. i did a little research and found my first nice headphones, a pair of beyerdynamic dt770s used for 30€ (this is a flex). i wear them at work, because it's good to have very visible don't-talk-to-me kind of headphones on in the office.

then, when i had to bite the bullet and get a new phone without a headphone jack*, i became the weirdo who uses a dongle to connect a pair of cabled in-ears.  on top of that i had decided to say goodbye to spotify and switch to apple music. there was a noticeable improvement in quality, but i have to say, the app is ass. not as terrible as the podcast app, but still sort of ass. i used it for the last two years anyway, and i enjoyed feeling superior to almost everyone, because my streaming choice  meant marginally higher support for artists after all.

but i also kept thinking about my ipod.

you see, i was using that thing up until around 2017, even when everyone and their mothers had switched from pirating songs off of youtube to streaming. I kind of missed having all my little songs and knowing what I had, I missed the physical buttons and the single function object that doesn't distract me. From the hifi videos I watched I knew that there were modern "mp3"-players, or daps (digital audio players) with huge storage and powerful guts. the idea really appealed to me, but at that point i had been spoiled by algorithmic convenience and couldn't justify to myself buying one of those expensive devices (there are daps for hundreds and thousands of euros).

that clearly changed. i think some trends are almost a bit subliminal in the way that a lot of people get similar ideas at the same time without talking to each other, because suddenly getting off of streaming was on my mind and everywhere i looked. it's hard to say which came first, my interest or the apps serving it to me. there are many reasons to stop supporting spotify especially, the low artist compensation, the ai generated music, the ice recruitment ads (????)...but supporting apple isn't great either, neither is google or tidal to be honest. so it's back to the physical media for me.

i got a pretty good deal on a dap, and so far i love the shanling m1 pro and recommend it. the ux is a bit clunky, but nothing terrible. i also like using it as an external sound card on my work computer, the dt770s sound great through it. my music i source from bandcamp mostly, which is also great for discovering artists in case you're worried about losing that without streaming. i also scanned old cds and put them on my player. my collection so far isn't gigantic, but i know what's in it and i feel so much more attached to the music i listen to. it's brought me back to the fun of just listening to a whole album from front to back, actually noticing the song titles and artists.

new baby boy

 so that's that...i don't really know how to end this, but i just wanted to spread the word about quitting streaming, it's really cool. the current gEoPoLiTiCaL lAnDscCaPe forced me to become more conscious about what megacorporations might have a little too much power and what we could do to extract ourselves from their suffocating grip. it's part of a bigger shift for me, so i will try to get more people on the wagon.