Because the index generator is broken and constantly using up CPU and memory to index things you'll never look for? I mean, it shouldn't be that way, but unfortunately is.
I personally disable these kinds of search indexes in favor of find and ag/ripgrep etc. They are very fast on a modern system with SSD.
Not available to regular folks I guess, but use prewritten aliases to simplify.
That might be true in theory, but in practice a find oneliner is still the fastest way to find things. It shouldn't be the case, but a fulltext search is faster than using the OS index, because the former is stable and improved for decades by low level developers, while the later is continuously recreated by people who like Javascript in the UI libraries of the OS.
With a fiber connection, 5-20 terabytes/month is nothing. I could probably ramp it up, but I'm only looking for 1080p content. The only thing that keeps me sub-petabyte is that my budget doesn't allow for a NAS with enough bays (and 20tb disks going up to $500ish here lately surely hasn't helped).
Really, just start downloading every new release and you wouldn't even have to dip into the back catalog much.
None of the alternatives seem
To have anything close to the radio/recommendation power of Spotify. I don’t know how they ever could - they don’t have the massive data Spotify has in listening history combined with playlists and their descriptions… on top of building world class ML audio analysis models.
I’d love have my own local mp3s get this super power. I just don’t see it happening. Plex has their own attempt but it’s no where close.
Seems redundant to get recommendations from your own mp3s. And "radio" would just be playlists on shuffle.
You can decouple discovery from offline music experience. Outside certain genres that I'm not deep into, there's almost nothing I get rec'd on Spotify that I didn't already know of from other sources.
I agree, I don’t need recommendations from my own library. I know when I am in the mood for a particular album, and if not, it’s much more pleasant to glance through my Artists list than to trust some jerk at Spotify to tell me what I want. Especially since they are now actively trying to replace the music on their mood playlists with royalty-free stock Muzak.
For discovery, there are plenty of (especially linear) streaming music sources that are dirt cheap or free, anyway.
To be honest, it may be my music taste, but the recommendations I get are extremely boring and are just rehashes of my liked songs..
But it may be that I hit a bug quite some times ago where each offline downloaded song got added to the liked songs playlist and even though I manually removed quite a few of those, it may have corrupted my user profile.
I cannot understand “rolling coal” at all. I’d love to know more about the psychology of this and what makes it so attractive that you actually spend money and time to do so.
It's uncomplicated. I have coal rolling enthusiasts in my extended family. They're flag waving 'patriots' who have legitimately drank all the Kool-aid and believe that everyone to their left hates the country and is trying to destroy it in any way possible. And since the left-leaning folks often support green energy and efforts to reduce damage from the impending climate disaster, that hatred manifests as doing whatever they think is the polar opposite of what their left-leaning friends and family would like. It is precisely the same motivation that underlies embracing the 'deplorables' moniker (I think none of them actually read the whole remark) by intentionally acting like an asshole.
It's not issues based at all, they really are playing hard core identity politics and they consider anyone who disagrees with them to be morally contemptible and inhuman.
To be completely fair, I am not certain what it means for a track to be "virtually unplayed".
First off, it was striking to me how little of the "top 10 000" they published back on Christmas I recognize. I'm not sure what I expected, but 10 000 sounds like a big number, so it seemed likely to me, that if I get a random song from my playlist I could find it there. It turned out I hardly can find an artist I recognize. Ok, I can recall a song from Lady Gaga and even Billie Eilish, I've heard of Bruno Mars (cannot recall any song), but I have no idea what is "Bad Bunny", "Doechii", "Drake". I mean, I think I do have a pretty good idea what these things are (abstractly), and I probably wouldn't want to listen that. And while I knew that all this stuff is very popular, I didn't quite realize how little place in the top-10000 it leaves for the music I (and everyone I know) actually listen to.
I didn't download the metadata they released (it would be hard to process it on my laptop anyway), but now I wonder how much of my 3 TB music collection is in top 100 000, or heck, even top 1M Spotify, or on Spotify at all.
I also am sometimes surprised how little scrobbles some tracks get. I didn't bother to find out what this means, how many people still scrobble to Last.fm or ListenBrainz, but it is just surprising when I see that a track that I didn't consider to be obscure was scrobbled like 50 times this year.
So I'm saying that music worlds seems to be terribly fragmented, even more than I imagined. So the very premise of AA backing-up 97% of Spotify (by the number of plays) may be much lesser achievement at "preserving culture" than it may sound. And of course we are about 8 years too late to backup everything, since by now half of it must be generative NN bullshit. And I'm not even sure it's in those leftover 3% (bots listen to bot-generated music too, right)?
You might not listen, but surely you have heard of Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and of course Christmas Staples of Mariah Carey and Wham?
First off, this is not the top we are talking about, since there is one that AA provided[0]. I am not sure what it matters which names exactly I've heard of, but if you are that curious: I don't know what is Ed Sheeran and Wham (but cannot vouch I've never heard their music in a supermarket), but I definitely remember "Coldplay" being mentioned in a joke onstage by a NIN member[1], but I didn't bother to check out what they are. I can imagine the faces of Taylor Swift & Justin Bieber, but cannot name any song, and I'm sure I've heard Mariah Carey somewhere, since that name is around longer than Rihanna. I have a song or two of Ariana Grande in my playlist though.
Are you sure? See, my point is a conjecture (based on a reasonable assumption that I cannot be that special), that there must be really a lot of us "outliers" out there (so I'm not even sure it's reasonable to call us that).
Let's reiterate. I am well aware that more people listen to that Bad Rabbit, Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber than they listen to <random name from my playilist>, it's not really a surprise. There even is a special name for people like that, it's "celebrity". In fact, that's probably how most people who are into music (including myself, I might say) would categorize them, as "celebrities", not as "musicians" (though, mind you, of course they are musicians, as everyone who ever sang a song is, it's just that when I hear the word "musician" I don't necessarily think of Taylor Swift). Hence these people indulge themselves for not knowing who these guys are, explaining it that "they are not into celebrities".
And it's no surprise that a lot of people listen to celebrities. I mean, if Trump would release a song right now, it would become #1 on Spotify in no time (for a very short time, but still). Well, maybe not #1, but close.
But I also suppose there are a lot of people who are into music. Maybe not so many, as there are people who are into celebrities, but it's still a lot. And after seeing that top-10 000 I suddenly find it very plausible, that a lot of tracks these people call "massive hits" may turn out to be "virtually unplayed". And hence not in those "97% of Spotify (by # of plays)" that AA archived. I am not even claiming it, I'm just saying that this doesn't seem to be impossible.
For instance, any DnB fan would say that "everyone knows Noisia and Black Sun Empire". It would be absolutely laughable attempt at "preserving human culture" not to include them. Surely all of their tracks must be at least in top-5M, right? Well, after seeing top 10K I'm not so sure anymore.
Maybe you've never heard of them, but surely you've heard of Prodigy. Not a single track from Prodigy on top-10K. Or Chemical Brothers. Or Burial, or Placebo, or Nighwish, or King Crimson. These are very famous names in respective circles. There are 2 tracks from Massive Attack — both featured in super-famous movies and trending on TikTok right now. For God's sake, there are only 8 tracks from Madonna in top 10K. Versus 26 from Imagine Dragons and 124 from "Bad Bunny", whatever it is. How do you like Madonna for an obscure artist?
So, my point is that there may be a lot of people listening almost exclusively to "virtually unplayed" music. Entire discographies of (niche) cult-artists may turn out to be buried in these 66% of "virtually unplayed" tracks.
I guess I should just get the metadata and check, but I'm pretty sure that would be outside of capabilities of the hardware I have on hand, so I'm not sure how to go about that.
1) 10,000 tracks really is not a lot. It sounds like a lot, but isn't. My own - relatively small - collection is nearly double that.
2) 10,000 tracks... out of 256,000,000 that AA archived.
I'd be very interested to see some more analysis done on this, particularly as it relates to, say, Last.fm statistics - but I suspect the missing music is not as significant as you think.
In any case, even if every one of those "niche" artists you list are missing from this collection, I don't think it's fair to say it's a "laughable attempt" - it's certainly better than nothing, even if it's not perfect.
The funny thing is, since the advent of streaming I no longer listen to the radio. I listen to new music, but little pop music, and I have never heard a single track from Swift, Bieber, Grande or Sheeran. Coldplay is the only act I like on that list, and the streaming services are pretty good at only playing what I like.
If they were pre-streaming artists I probably would have heard a lot of their catalog because radio played it over and over. Unfortunately you just can’t get away from the Christmas music.
It’s a special mode called secure access. You cannot actually access any existing data from it; but taking camera photos is a primary action that people use their phones for. Why wouldn’t you want to accelerate that?
I suppose. I rarely take photos with my phone. It's really one of the least used features of the device for me. When I activate the camera from the lock screen it's always unintentional and it's an annoyance. It would be nice to at least have the option to disable that.
Edit: I discovered that in iOS 26 you can disable the "swipe" activation of the camera on the lock screen. I've done that and it should remove one of my major annoyances with the phone.
The postmark isn't the stamp (piece of paper). It's the ink seal that's stamped over the stamp with the date on it. It doesn't matter how you pay for the piece of mail; it now potentially get postmarked at a later date than previously.
Request a Manual Postmark: Customers may present a mail piece at a retail counter and request a "manual (local) postmark". This postmark is applied at the time of acceptance, so the date aligns with the date the USPS took possession.
I should have said manual postmark but it’s what I implied. They’re stamping or postmarking it with a date manually.
reply