People in the internet-connected car device world have known this has been coming for a long time, so I don’t think this is exactly shocking news to most people, but as of yesterday, Spotify’s Car Thing music-playing device is now a useless chunk of plastic. The device was designed to allow cars without CarPlay or Android Auto or other such systems to easily access and play Spotify music in the car, in a way that’s easier than fumbling with the phone interface. It even included an actual knob! But it’s dead now. And everyone who bought one is now kind of screwed. But there’s hope!
Spotify introduced the device in February of 2022, and discontinued it in July of that same year, due to low demand, supply chain issues, and, I suspect, some executive’s whim, though they remained for sale. Here’s what Spotify told TechCrunch at the time:
“Based on several factors, including product demand and supply chain issues, we have decided to stop further production of Car Thing units. Existing devices will perform as intended. This initiative has unlocked helpful learnings, and we remain focused on the car as an important place for audio.”
Well, the part about the devices performing “as intended” ended yesterday, leaving many customers who actually liked using a device they paid $90 for out in the cold.
(image: Spotify)
Plenty of people are, of course, pissed, and seeing notices like these on their Car Thing screens isn’t helping:
As far as Spotify is concerned, here’s what you can do: throw it out.
From Spotify’s support site:
We recommend resetting your Car Thing to factory settings and safely disposing of your device following local electronic waste guidelines. Contact your state or local waste disposal department to determine how to dispose of or recycle Car Thing in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.
That’s great, thanks, Spotify, bang-up job. Way to go. You made the perfect product! Sell it, then tell people to throw it away! There is a way to apply to get a refund, but you only have until January 14, 2025 to do it. So, if you have one, you have about a month to not be screwed out of $90.
What’s especially maddening is that this thing didn’t have to be this way. Fundamentally, the Car Thing was just a Bluetooth device, and as such could have been something that just connected to the existing and still functional Spotify phone app and offered a new way to control that. The fact that this Car Thing has to access the internet independently seems absurd, in hindsight.
Inside, the Car Thing is a Linux-based computer and happily, people have been hacking them for some time now, so if you have one, there is hope. Here’s a video showing some of what can be done:
The Car Thing isn’t an especially capable computing platform, and it was definitely enough for the job it was intended to do, playing music. Clever people have developed entirely new software that restores all of its previous capabilities and beyond, but even with all this it’s not easy to restore its ability to run in a car, at least not with some supplemental computing help via a Rasberry Pi or something, because Spotify has not opened up any means for the Car Thing to connect to a phone running Spotify, which they could have. The bricking of all these devices was a design choice that Spotify made, and not necessarily an inherent limitation. It’s like this because that’s what Spotify wanted.
There’s a big takeaway here, a lesson that we’d do well to learn: don’t trust hardware that needs to call home to some server to work. At least not if you’d like to be the one who decides how and how long you get to use that hardware. This goes for systems built into car infotainment and other systems, too, and all those car feature-subscription services nobody wants.
We’ve already seen issues from Subarus that keep trying to access now-defunct 3G cellular networks and draining their own batteries in the process, and the future may certainly reveal more and more situations like these, where all manner of functionality is lost because some form of handshaking to a remote computer is no longer available.
Now is the time that we, as car owners, users, and lovers need to speak up and make it clear that we don’t want to buy things that some company can just suddenly decide won’t work anymore. The Spotify Car Thing is just a very public example of how this can happen, and I think we can all agree that it, you know, sucks.
Can’t wait for the car companies to officially eliminate radios so we can all have to pay for both streaming services and cell data plans to listen to music while driving. The future is so much better! Thank you tech-bros!
My Sony Sports Things will still work fine after 30 years as long as I put fresh batteries in them. I really hate how the modern age is just a constant slap in the face from corporate tycoons.
I’d be interested in a tiny Spotify Body Thing. A stand-alone streaming device to be used when I’m running, trekking etc and don’t want to carry the phone (might have to work on that name though).
It would use existing communication architecture so that you don’t always have to be connected to a cell signal.It would have a minimalist design by limiting the screen size and only allowing you to choose specific playlists being streamed at any given moment.Instead of AI, the playlists would be managed and curated by a real person who could talk about the songs after they’re done or before they start.The playlists are geocoded based on the capabilities of the infrastructure and the tastes of the local population.
I think they should partner with someone like Sony to make this happen.
Okay what is the point of giving me formatting capabilities if none of them translate to the actual published comment
They could call it an AM/FM Thing.
> don’t trust hardware that needs to call home to some server to work.
That’s the main reason I painstakingly sync my FLAC files across multiple devices, even though it’s a minor pita. Music and technology are a big part of my life, and I know better than to rely on the latter to support the former reliably.
You can run Doom on a Car Thing https://x.com/justMaku/status/1584442208203087872?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1584442208203087872%7Ctwgr%5E0a27dc507205915d8dd61502ad02ac2707a57016%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.redditmedia.com%2Fmediaembed%2Fyc4u3u%2F%3Fresponsive%3Dtrueis_nightmode%3Dtrue
I mean, it’s pretty rough being told to throw it out, but at least it’s honest about it, unlike phones which just…deceptively keep working even after they’re no longer getting security updates from their manufacturers.
You know, my brother in law just made fun of me because my now ten year old car needed me to use a cord to connect my phone via an aux jack. It works every single fucking time I use it. The cord is eight years old. It’s worked with my last two phones plus whatever my passengers had. I think I bought it in the checkout line at Target. It’s teal. I’ve never once brought it in the house.
why is any of this better? Seriously, why is any of this better?
Preach it brother or sister! I’m borderline Luddite and ask this very question everyday
And it had the best sound quality.
It didn’t even get close until things started supporting AptX. I hate bluetooth so much.
I’m not much of a Luddite, I like new technology, but I’m also the kind of person who likes a simple, reliable, and functional device or process. I recently had to borrow a car to take a trip,and it had Bluetooth, so I paired my phone to the car (to use the gps on my phone and stream music) and it worked fine for the whole six hour drive. Then, the next morning, the car decided that the phone wasn’t a recognized device, and refused to pair, until I went through the whole process again. And it worked for the next three days, all the way home, and has now decided that my phone isn’t a recognized device again. Nobody can tell me why either.
this does not happen with the cord in my own car. Ever.
I do the same. And I agree with you. My $40 phone has a 32 bit DAC and a SD slot that can handle up to 2TB of storage. That’s good for a metric fuckton of music. Get one, rip your collection to FLAC or even WAV for 100% 16-20 bit glory and you’re good to go. If you prefer internet music you can do that too.
As a bonus it also works great as a home stereo. Just add amp.
2GB for lossless?? Isn’t that tiny?
I have something like 70GB of MP3s. Roughly 8-10,000 songs.
Yeah I realized my error and fixed it. I meant 2TB.
What’s the phone model pls?
LG V20.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_V20
NICE. I have a V30 that I use exactly like that!
I prefer the V20 for its swappable battery. 0-100% charge in 5 seconds!
Wow really?
Yes, really. It literally takes 5 seconds to swap a depleted/dead battery with a fully charged/brand new one. I just verified it. Brand new batteries run between $9-15 on eBay or Amazon (I actually prefer the slightly larger non OEM ones from Amazon).
Cheap, swappable batteries are a Godsend if you have a house full of people who love to grab anything with a screen, run it into the ground and drop it without putting it on a charger, or worse leaving that device exposed to an afternoon of hot, battery frying sunshine. So is a MIL-STD 810G-rating which comes in handy when those people drop the phone onto a hard surface. Spare batteries are also great for those times you will not have access to a charger like using the phone on a bicycle for music and navigation; should that ride end in a crash the phone will likely come out better than either you or the bike.
That’s great. I wonder if the V30’s battery is easy to replace.
I dunno but having disassembled my V20 I can say the V20 is pretty DIY friendly. The metal back cover is of course removable by pushing a button.
Going by this video it looks like LG threw DIY friendly out the window with the V30 since you need a heat gun/hot plate and gloves just to pry the back cover off.
I dunno what features or advantages in your use case the V30 has over the V20 but DIY is NOT one of them. It also lacks the IR blaster of the V20 which I actually use daily since the power button of my TV broke off and its own remote died years ago.
Yup, it’s sooo much better. Our 2022 Civic will sometimes pair with my phone right away and other times I get to work after 15min and it still has “no device connected”. I’m a get in and drive person. I don’t sync in the driveway and fuss with my phone for 10 minutes before I go.
Our definition of better is different than capitalisms definition of better. Better to capitalists is what makes more money. Better to consumers is what works best at the best price. Capitalism has been doing bait and switches for decades, our government is just too captured by the oligarchy of capitalists to call that spade a spade.
A GitHub link on the Autopian! Love it when there’s a crossover in my interests. That GitHub organization is said to be Spotify itself so it’s nice they released those things.
I may pick one of these up and repurpose it…
This thing always seamed like it was trying to return to the time when people had Ipods and Zunes connected to their car with an FM transmitter like the good ol’ aught’s. I’m still trying to understand the usefulness beyond having a knob for navigation, and even that seamed to not be a useful way to navigate a music streaming app.
I was tempted to pick one of these up, as it would have been nice in my off-roaders to handle Spotify tasks while my phone handled OnX maps. In the end I decided I wasn’t quite so lazy that I couldn’t just let the phone take care of both, and I’m now glad I did seeing as how Spotify unnecessarily orphaned it. I still like the concept, though.
Not entirely related, but somewhat: Honda is quietly killing satellite radio in most of its cars now. I never really listened to radio, preferring my CD collection and later my mp3s, but SiriusXM — for all its flaws and compression — is still a seamless way to have “music that just works” in the car, regardless of who is driving, where the phone is, whether it’s paired, and regardless of cell signal or data plan. And yes, I mostly blame Spotify’s popularity for indirectly driving this decision.
Spotify is a trash company that goes out of their way to screw over the artists they profit off of.
https://weareumaw.org/justice-at-spotify
This is a great story and a good lesson Jason. Guess what device will never give you up like the Spotify Car thing? The Jatco Xtronic CVT and its smooth, shift-free driving experience will never let you down whether you’re looking for a comfortable and quiet cruise or a fast paced run around town. Best of all, it will never leave you deserted because it’s just so reliable.
I think I just got Rick-rolled by a transmission.
I was three pages into the article before I realized that “Car Thing” was the actual name of the product.
Reply to Internet Commenter
This made me so mad I Spotifyed.
IMHO, any company that sells a device like this and bricks it in an unreasonably short time should be on the hook to refund the purchase price.
Of course, we live in the US, so that ain’t never gonna happen.
He mentioned they were offering refunds, which hopefully don’t require jumping through hoops and paying to ship the things back.
This company might, but so many don’t. It should be the law of the land. I don’t know what “reasonable” is for this sort of thing, but five years from date of purchase feels fair. Maybe a sliding scale based on how much it cost. I’d even be OK with it being somewhat pro-rated. Nothing lasts forever, but if I had bought the last one of these I would be a tad peeved.
And definitely no hoops. Anything like this is going to require a subscription, so they both know who their customers are and have the ability to put the cash right back on the credit card.
I’ve held onto and used computers, and smartphones longer than recommended, but it is a given that they are of finite usefulness. I will never buy a “software defined” to be subject to the same.
I feel much better now about my decision to no longer listen to music, podcasts, etc. Car time is quiet time now, and I like it.
I just listen to my own gigantic music library, or that old-fashioned thing called “radio”. I see zero need to pay to stream music from the Internet. I mostly listen to NPR in the car anyway.
Around my area I mostly just listen to the radio. However our cottage is in country music territory so I’m pretty happy to have spotify then. The subscription is worth it for the amount of surveying I do at work, approximately 140km of walking in a grid on one site this year. Music makes it much nicer. The long cottage drive music is just a bonus.
I have a 128Gb thumb drive full of my own music. I have no need to stream any even where there is no decent radio.
I see your thumb drive and raise you a Plex server on my home PC that I stream to my phone and car via PlexAmp and Android Auto.
(I do keep a selection of favorites on my phone for those rare times when I can’t get a signal).
I only have one car that is new enough to be able to stream anything, the Mercedes, and I can’t be bothered. One of my BMWs doesn’t even have Bluetooth period, thanks to the cheapskate CT Yankee who ordered it new. $35K BMW convertible, European Delivery, but they couldn’t spring for the $300 Bluetooth option? I’m a cheap SOB, but I got it on my BMW wagon when I ordered it. Have the stuff to retrofit it (phone only), but haven’t gotten the “round tuit” in four years. I don’t drive that much in that car. Someday I will get a bug up my butt to tear the car apart and run the wires.
I do have a Plex server at home for movies, but my Marantz reciever talks to the NAS directly and seamlessly for music. And my router is locked down like Fort Knox anyway. The geeks among us will love that setup – buddy of mine owns Checkbox Systems, who build hotel/campground/retail wifi systems based on their own mesh network and routing IP. Custom hardware to their specs too. If you ever stayed at an IHG hotel you have probably logged in via their system (he’s not responsible for the shitty ISPs they always use though). He gave me a whole setup – I have a router that can handle a 1000++ room resort hotel. 10Gb Ethernet, fiber ports and everything. Wifi 6 Mesh network spanning my place and a couple of neighbors. Works fantastically. Getting upgraded to Wifi 7 shortly.
This is the way. I <3 Plex, and Plexamp. My own media, available anywhere I want it to be.
I used to be the thumb drive guy. Still have one in one car. But as life got busier with kids etc and I’ve gone the Spotify route. Do I ever worry about losing access? Not really, I can always go back to the thousands of albums I own. But at this point I’m choosing the more convenient way.
I don’t see how it’s more convenient. If I want to listen to someone else’s music, I just use the good old fashioned radio. Which I don’t have to pay for other than by ignoring the ads.
I feel like you’ve never used Spotify or other music app. You can choose whatever you’d like to listen to or it’ll make playlists based on your listening habits. Sometimes the playlist are great and I discover new bands, sometimes not so on point but I’m ok with that. I’ll fully admit if you are into something really niche maybe you won’t find what you love. My tastes are somewhat eclectic but more than covered by the apps I’ve used. It also means that I’m only carrying one device and can easily switch it up while watching TV. Remove X, add Y and done. Don’t have to update a USB when I want something different. Also my job can, at times, involve long periods wandering fields and ponds and creeks surveying. Pop in some earbuds and enjoy music while doing so and easily answer phone calls/texts too.
The sound quality argument? Maybe, buy hundreds concerts have definitely not done my hearing any favours and I can’t notice a difference. The artist payment? Well, that isn’t ideal but most artists have probably made more from me front ticket and t-shirt sales than they ever would from albums.
Messed with them, can’t be bothered. I have too much of my own music, and radio is free if I want to listen to different things. Not everything needs an app and a subscription. If you love it, good for you!
And I absolutely LOATHE any sort of headphone or earbuds, so that is a non-starter anyway. My job involves long hours on airplanes – I *read* – though I do use Kindle these days rather than physical books as a rule, I am not a complete Luddite…
I listen to my local community radio station while on long drives. The have an internet broadcast, so I connect it to my phone and phone to car. Bingo. KVMR is basically the only radio station I listen to.
Only one of my cars is new enough to be able to do that, and I still can’t be bothered. I do like local radio when I travel for work, and it’s usually university radio given my client base.
The long trip I do this is a 715 mile one, so well worth the trouble.
I drive from Florida to Maine and back a couple times a year. <shrug>
Hear hear! I just reprogrammed the classical station and NPR after last week’s battery change in the truck.
Mostly I use Bluetooth for local media or Apple Music, or even more mostly just for quietude.
“The Car Thing isn’t an especially capable computing platform, and it was definitely enough for the job it was intended to do, playing music.”
I have but one simple question. How much more powerful than The Autopain Mainframe is this Car Thing?
Yes.
A Car Thing is both running The Autopian web server AND Spotify at the same time
Learnings not to trust tech companies.
Companies need to be fined for e-waste like this
I’m so sick of seeing this happen over and over and over. They absolutely should either have to pay to recycle them or be forced to open source it.
I’m more worried about the number of boxes that Amazon leaves on peoples porches every day.. It’s a lot of waste.
Its pretty amazing the number of things we buy basically as a license, not a transfer of title. Its like renting an apartment. Sure you can keep the keys, cuz they put new locks on anyway. Steam has been getting some serious grief over this recently, to the point they updated their language to actual state you are not buying a game, you are buying a license to play the game for as long as they choose to support it.
Pretty much any software sale is a license… Most certainly since digital sales were a thing, but I think even physical media is also technically a license.
Thankfully Valve seems to be in good financial shape; I’ve always wondered what would happen to my game licenses if they went out of business.
I have the same play lists since the 90s.
I don’t have any music subscriptions since I always listen to the same music anyways. The day or phones no longer play mp3s I’m screwed.
Nah, you will just transfer them to whatever the new hot format is. Just like we all ripped our CDs to MP3 (well, at least I did). And being the bad boy rebel that I am, after ripping my 1500+ CDs (I worked in a record/video store for YEARS) I *sold* them. Don’t tell the music mafia on me! And with modern computing power, it will take a LOT less time than it took me to rip all those CDs 15+ years ago.
I ripped all the songs I like from my CD’s circa 2003. All the CD’s are sitting on storage boxes in the corner of my bonus room; probably slowly succumbing to digital rot.
My oldest CD, AC/DC’s Who Made Who was starting to get a little dodgy 20 years ago when I ripped it. I guess the liner notes that told me it was manufactured to the highest quality standards and would last a lifetime when handled properly wasn’t true.
Obviously, you didn’t handle it properly! AKA with the finest kid gloves, in a climate-controlled listening room at the ideal temperature and static air pressure. 😉
But I do have a couple hundred classical music CDs that I never ripped (and so kept) that still play just fine after up to 35+ years. But they have been treated extremely lovingly, unlike the rock and pop CDs that spent YEARS rolling around in cars in many cases. I got my first home CD player in 1987, and my first car CD player in 1990 – those old CDs had seen some things… But only a couple out of 1500 didn’t rip, and one of them was one that a drunk roommate in college rubbed against a cinderblock wall… 3/4 of it still played ok.
The trouble with classical CDs is that 99% of the time there is no metadata for them, so ripping them doesn’t work out well, and many mp3 players didn’t handle gapless tracks well at all back in the day. And I never listened to them in the car or on the go anyway. Very much a “sit down with a glass of Port” sort of thing for me.
I actually did keep the very first CD I ever bought – Elton John’s Live in Australia concert album. Six months before I bought a CD player – a friend had one, so I copied it to a top-quality cassette with Dolby C. I had a few dozen CDs before I bought my first CD player. Those things were f’ing expensive in the ’80s! Both players and media!
Memories – I had a Yamaha receiver with a nice Yamaha tape deck and Boston Acoustics speakers that I bought my senior year of high school and took to college. Bought a Sony CD player with some leftover textbook money (don’t tell my folks) when Sears had a Black Friday sale. I still have that CD player in my garage in Maine, and I bet it still works fine, though I haven’t put a CD in it in a decade. I also still have the Sony clock radio that I bought at the same time for $10 – that still works too! I bought my first CD-writer in about 1997 – 2X SCSI. You didn’t dare breath near it when doing it’s thing, lest you make a $16 coaster. But I still have a couple of mix CDs I made with that – and they still play too!
My first car CD player was a Blaupunkt with a little carrier you had to put the CD in before putting it in the radio. I believe the amp was also a separate component linked to the radio with a DIN cable.
CD skipped on every train crossing, or anything but the smoothest road surface.
I had a Yamaha with that setup as my second CD player after the first one was stolen. Loved that setup, given how expensive CDs were back in the day. But it broke. A LOT. I can’t remember now what the replaced it. Probably a Kenwood. Both were pre-amp-only decks, I had Nakamichi amps. I spent SOOOOO much money on car stereo in my younger years. And home stereo too for that matter.
My first car CD player was a JVC that I bought at JC Penney of all places – ordered from the catalog because they gave a credit card to a starving college student. That thing was $700 or something. Got stolen out of my car in Montreal (’85 Jetta 2dr), insurance bought the Yamaha replacement. Which was a removable unit, unlike the JVC.
Damn. I forgot walking through the mall carrying a car stereo like a metal purse.
I used to lock it in the trunk. 🙂
I don’t miss those days.
My friend put his under the seat. I joked about buying some wire and shove them into the slot when the radio was out to deter further investigation.
LOL – perfect!
My trunk was full of subwoofers, amps and the 0 gauge wiring / fuses to feed them.
Opening that in the mall parking lot was like lighting a neon ‘steal me’ sign.
Sounds like my Sony head unit from that era.
Store discs vertically, not horizontally. Gravity eventually separates the shiny bit that stores the data away from the plastic part if you store them flat.
Yeah it seems those CDs made in the 90s weren’t the best in quality, I already have several CDs where that whole layer of silver stuff started cracking and are now unusable.
Remember when they told us that anything on a CD, including a CD-R, was basically etched in stone and would last forever as long as you didn’t scratch it?
Then later we learned they (and DVD-R’s) degrade over time just by being in contact with oxygen?
Good times.
I’ve had to rip my collection several times. Much smaller than yours, but every time I got more space I went to a higher bitrate until FLAC (and the required storage space) was an option.
My ears aren’t golden enough to care anymore at advancing middle age. I ripped them to high bitrate MP3 back then, and they still sound just fine. My days of spending megadollars on stereo equipment are long over. The factory H/K upgrade systems in my BMWs and Mercedes are fine, and a decidedly mid-range Marantz HT surround receiver with Jamo speakers and a Yamaha sub does the job in the house adequately.
Though given I have always hated both headphones and loud concerts, for 55 my hearing actually still works REALLY well compared to most of my friends! I can still hear the squeal of a CRT monitor, for instance.
I spent my 20’s driving cars loaded with subwooofers. I only know the neighbors are shooting off fireworks when the dogs alert me.
I think a cheap Amazon amp running old Cambridge Soundworks speakers in my office may be the highest fidelity sound system I can access.
ROFL – even in the car, I have never been one to play the music all that loud. Had some pretty nice systems over the years, but never anything whose primary purpose was rattling other people’s cars.
Today, very happy with the Harmon/Kardon upgrade systems in my two BMWs and Mercedes that came from the factory. Crappy Blaupunkt MP3 player in my Spitfire that I want to replace with one of the “classic look” ones. And some JVC thing in my LR Disco. The Spitfire actually has decent Boston Acoustics component speakers and an amp – you can almost hear the stereo at highway speeds. The Disco has crappy factory speakers and sounds like poo. I mostly just listen to NPR in it anyway.
Back in the day coworkers would look at me like I was crazy when I would remark that some monitor was particularly noisy. Young or old, I think most people cannot hear a CRT whine.
Definitely true for the majority of people over the age of about 15 these days.
Do yourself a favor, rip them to WAV and keep as a master. I know FLAC and other lossless formats are supposed to be as good but who cares, 1500 discs is maybe 1TB of WAV storage which is nothing for modern HDDs. AFAIK WAV is as close to a 1:1 copy as it gets. I find MS music payer works well enough for free and autofills 99.9% of the info but you might have something better.
Then get a good ID3 tag editor and add in album cover art and other info from the web. There are a few good freeware options. Amazon is a good source for JEGs and info missing from MS autofill.
You can make MP3s or whatever you want from those masters later. Given how cheap and huge storage is though I just keep the WAVs.
“And being the bad boy rebel that I am, after ripping my 1500+ CDs (I worked in a record/video store for YEARS) I *sold* them. Don’t tell the music mafia on me! ”
Oof! I just realized what you said. Oh well, if you ever get them back go with WAV.
Or, I dunno, visit your public library with their own VAST collection and maybe also the vast collection of other interlinked libraries for you to check out for two weeks and listen to at home. But DO NOT RIP those, no no no! That would be WRONG!
There is no “close” with lossless formats like FLAC or wav. They are literally the same as the original, bit for bit, after going through the decoder.
There’s no reason to rip to wav instead of FLAC for consuming the audio in a player. The added time to encode to FLAC is negligible and the space savings for the exact same data are as high as 60%+. Ripping to wav instead of FLAC is like cranking up the heat while you leave the windows open on purpose.
There isn’t SUPPOSED to be any loss, however those files are shrinking quite a bit with FLAC. In my ignorance of exactly how that magic happens I’m a bit skeptical. When HDD prices are as low as $7/TB and 1-2TB is plenty for all the music I could hope to listen to I figured: why bother with FLAC?
Even this cheap bastard feels an extra couple of bucks is worth splurging to ensure the time spent backing up a large music collection isn’t wasted by using the closest format to the original. My hard drive had plenty of room anyway so that space would otherwise have gone vacant. I can always batch convert those files later if needed.
You do you though. If FLAC or ACC or whatever works for you then absolutely do it. CD quality is already overkill anyways. Very few people have the ears or equipment to hear any difference between WAV and a good MP3, much less FLAC. I know I don’t.
It’s just math. The files are shrinking because their contents are compressible (there’s predictability and redundancy).
There’s nothing magical about lossless compression. We do it all the time! If you’ve ever said or written “20K” to mean “20,000,” or “2Bn” for “2,000,000,000,” you’ve used lossless compression.
WAV, the source CD, and FLAC are literally identical when played back. Every bit is the same. Using wav instead of FLAC “just in case” is superstition. You do you, but it’s not a reasonable position 🙂
The thing is 20k is NOT the same as 20,000. 20k has only two significant figures, not five, therefore it is a lossy compression. 2B has only be single significant figure, not seven so it is also lossy.
Now one can intend 2B to mean EXACTLY 2 billion to infinite precision in the same way “Pi”, ” e” and other numerical symbols are exact Of course nobody knows exactly what those numbers are to infinite precision so we approximate those too so even those are lossy.
Of course this is academic. The way to prove your point is to take multiple WAV files, convert them to FLAC then, back to WAV and subtract that file bit by bit from the original. If its truly lossless the difference column will be all zeros. Or just play the difference and see if it makes any noise.
Again I believe you to be correct and yes I admit to being irrational in the absence of evidence supporting my approach. But whatever I have plenty of room on my HDD. And the Autopian is a haven for the irrational.
My CDs that were ripped are long gone, and my ears can’t tell the difference in the car between a CD and a high-bitrate MP3 anyway. I never listen to pop music anywhere but the car and while taking a shower. My Echo is good enough in the bathroom. I just don’t care anymore. One of the bonuses of advancing middle-age is no longer giving a shit about all sorts of things. 🙂 Almost makes up for the various aches and pains.
The LIBRARY? That is where the stinky homeless people hang out. I am at the stage of life where if I want a book or some music, I just buy it. Then I don’t have the hassle of returning it. And yes, I know you can get Kindle books from the library – I don’t care. <shrug>
I will say that one thing I LOVE about the modern era is that you no longer have to pay $16 to buy a CD to get the one or two songs that you actually like on the album.
I dunno what your libraries are like or when you last visited one but ours are modern, clean and filled with very helpful librarians.
Are there homeless? Sometimes but not often. And when there are they are easy to keep your distance from.
It doesn’t really matter anyway, just peruse the library catalog online, find what you want, put it on hold from anywhere in the library system (or other library systems if they have a sharing agreement) and pick it up at your most convenient branch when ready. When its time to return you just put it into the returns machine at any hour or to the librarian at the check in counter.
If buying music works for you great! If however you want something and can’t find a copy to buy this can be an option.
The libraries near me have a bit of a problem these days with homeless. I am mostly being facetious – but I really just can’t be bothered, I have enough demands on my free time as it is to be running back and forth across town to the library. As I said, I just don’t need to borrow things that I need to physically return, I’ll just buy it if I can’t find what I need for free on the Internet. A rare occasion at this point anyway.
Well you do you. I just add the library to my list of stops on my shopping day.
That makes me sad. So much great new music is being made every day!
If you say so. I occasionally find something I like but overall I find most post late 90s music is not to my taste. That is true for every generation though, most people stick with the music that makes them feel young.
I’m with you on this one. At this point in my life, I might buy 10 new songs a year in a good year. Songs, not albums. And often they are songs from artists I have been listening to for decades – the last MP3 I bought was the first song Billy Joel has released in 20 years. No album, he just released a single. I have everything he’s ever recorded.
And radio stations play it for free!
Commercials though. Ugh, I HATE commercials!
I could not care less. I don’t pay any attention to them.
Nor do I but ignoring commercials requires it’s own kind of effort.
You don’t get to pick the music, though. It’s like going to a restaurant and telling the waiter “surprise me.” Not really my jam. 🙂
If I am not listening to my vast collection of my own music, the whole point is to be surprised. <shrug> I already own all the music I know and love – why would I need to pay somebody to stream those to me?
So much garbage too. (To my ears)
I do add a few new songs to my playlist Once in a while.
Is the Spotify phone app that terrible to use? (I don’t spotify)
If they made the UI for the car thing, seems like they could replicate the controls and layout in their app. And since a phone has bluetooth and seems to be around the same size and shape of the car thing it seems like there’s already a replacement available.
It’s decent enough when it’s in car mode, but the Car Thing does have a few advantages:
I’ve never used a Car Thing before but I always was intrigued by it and thought there could be some potential with the hardware if it wasn’t so limited (for obvious reasons) to Spotify.
I usually listen to podcast while driving, so I don’t switch tracks very often. I do us a magnetic mount that can hold my phone in portrait or landscape and I usually leave it on landscape – which allows me to see full track names if I am scrolling for something.
I also have physical volume knobs still. I sought that feature out specifically in my last 2 cars. I realize they were hard to come by for a while, but they seem to be coming back.
There is this thing that is a BT receiver with a volume knob.
https://www.amazon.com/NVX-Universal-Controller-Motorcycles-XUBT3/dp/B015XLMLQQ/ref=sr_1_11?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.XQ53R-HK6_w_AeG9Qo-5abVahnr2IuZj0EEX6_LQRcXlAbDAPqo7-Z3jr5tMCiTmtk89uAybvGalYSD-K5InY9UB0p_8sAe3m32lLkgdOV7PzrMntxTc_MgeW3L4z9gdPYnTD9MMcpF44WppYHRgsBiiELNpkL7myFn9ffA_nFM9oF1v1hByTmWDicdLQjncSKXy-xVhpEfCm-X_urXVA21GEdJ_prs4CIWGH1ADCm0.ClwpJReNESUEhAaNF6v4_-K0EvGFaHNQRgZAZ_BX3fw&dib_tag=se&keywords=bluetooth%2Breceiver%2Bwith%2Bvolume%2Bcontrol&qid=1733946050&sr=8-11&th=1
That volume knob is pretty sweet. When I dropped in a new head unit into my car I lost the volume knob but the stereo has little buttons at the bottom for volume, skip, etc. and at least I still have my steering wheel controls.
Now I wonder if someone makes a little knob that would act as a sort of cursor thing for my phone when I’m connected to Android Auto so I can use that instead of a touch screen lol.
Someone definitely makes that. I don’t know where, but someone must.
Biggest complaint I have with Spotify is either their laziness, or my lack of knowledge, of making it easy to play specific genres of music from your liked songs.
I think it’s pretty easy to use.
*Smugly inserts cassette into the deck of his ’99 Corolla and jams to Zeppelin II*
*deck eats tape*
My LAST VW did that. It also choked on a CD rendering my in dash stereo a radio only experience.
Hasn’t happened yet, in fact I bought that Zeppelin II cassette back in middle school. But boy is buying used cassettes these days a fuckin’ GAMBLE. That Chicago cassette I bought sounds like they’re playing under water. Total waste of like $3.
As someone who has gone through tapes, CDs, thumb drives and streaming services: can we evolve to a solution that doesn’t have a major issue? Decks chewed up tapes, CDs skipped at the slightest pothole, thumb drives… well, you know what? Those were not that bad. Streaming services skip in areas with low signal and songs or even services themselves vanish.
I never had a problem with CD skipping
Some CD players had larger buffers to avoid skipping, but at the expense of a longer delay when changing tracks (this was also noticeable in CDs which had gap-less tracks). Some of my cars back then tolerated bad roads amazingly well, others skipped at the slightest bump. It was a compromise but it was a very common issue which you’ll realize if you Google around.
I had a lot of cars, and a lot of CD players, both factory and aftermarket, some of which I still have. It took a really big hit to make any of them skip. I can only recall it ever happening a couple times.
No one needs to hear Moby Dick again!
But I do need to hear Bring it on Home again, several more times.
Troglodyte, CDs are where it’s at!
Yes, borrow them from public library, rip onto home PC, transfer into phone, return CDs to library.
I still have a Denon dual deck CD burner to make the copies I keep in my truck.
I originally read that as “…CD burner I keep in my trunk” and was wow, you’re the Jim Rockford of music conversion!
HA! Now that would be something!
How fast. I remember a friend had one that was 1x only. I shamed him by getting a 4x that hooked up to my computer.
It’ll do it in 2x. That’s good enough for me.
It’s like Pirate Bay but less convenient.
Fire up utorrent 2.6, browse rutracker dot org, save the environment.
Assuming they have what you want in a format you want with no add on’s (worms, viruses, spyware, etc) you don’t want.
Very easy.
That’s what I use in my ’06 Sierra. But I drove the Corolla today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW4Gdsnr2Bg
My 2000 Windstar is fancy. It has CD and cassette.
Niiiiiiiiice! I keep looking for the optional CD player in junkyards for my Corolla, but haven’t found it yet. Probably won’t work even if I do find it, but I gotta try!