OT. Queen #1

[Dean Hoffman]

on ITunes.

CCR's Greatest Hits was in the Top 10 for awhile.

[gfretwell]

I am not sure if that is an indication of how old the average I-Tunes user is or just how bad the current music has become.

[rbowman]

Joni got some press last month when she released some remastered albums including Blue. I could relate to that one.

"Acid, booze, and ass Needles, guns, and grass Lots of laughs lots of laughs"

[Marilyn Manson]

I'm going with the age factor. iTunes is old school.

Look up the top albums on Apple Music. The only Queen you'll find is Queen Naija at #72

From cnet.com, July 2019:

"How is Apple Music different than iTunes? iTunes is a free app to manage your music library, music video playback, music purchases and device syncing. Apple Music is an ad-free music streaming subscription service that costs...(2019 rates deleted)"

I'm speculating that more young people are *streaming* music on Apple Music than organizing and purchasing music on iTunes.

[Marilyn Manson]

Joni's always been one of my favorite artists.

I saw her in upstate NY in 83 for her Wild Things Run Fast tour but have been enjoying her talents since the 60's as barely a teenager.

[rbowman]

I'm not an Apple hater but my only exposure was iTunes which I found necessary to load a iPod shuffle I was gifted. It may have only been the Windows version but it was a truly underwhelming experience.

Left to my own devices I buy MP3 players that I can sideload from Windows or Linux.

[invalid unparseable]

I did just that. Have not paid for music since I was a kid. I did take a bunch of my son's CD's and copied them to a Sony Walkman radio, MP3 player. Also plenty of free music online to download.

[Ed Pawlowski]

I just ran across a package of blank TDK cassette tapes, never opened. Goodwill will get them.

[gfretwell]

I-tunes big leap was it created the platform that made music easier to buy than it was to steal. As the Napster guy predicted that was the beginning of the end of "sharing" sites. Music pirates today are more like the kid sitting by his radio with a tape recorder.

[gfretwell]

I am pretty much completely away from little bits of plastic" I have been using MP3s since before the turn of the century and most of the DVDs I have are spinning on oxide. I keep the DVDs just as an archive. They are mostly movies too obscure to stream.

[Marilyn Manson]

When Pandora was one of the more popular streaming services (I/we still use it on occasion*) there was an app for the PC called Pandora's Box.

Instead of opening Pandora on the PC, you would open Pandora's Box, choose your station and Pandora's Box would record whatever came streaming in. Since Pandora plays "stations", not an individual artist, you end up with a wide and varied selection of artist/songs.

The app's main drawback was a glitch that occasionally assigned the wrong metadata to the files. However, you could edit the metadata to fix it. If the album art didn't come down with it, you could search for it and have that applied also.

*My family shares a Prime Music account. If Alexa tells us that "Amazon music is streaming on another device." we will choose Pandora or Spotify or one of the other streaming services we have enabled.

[gfretwell]

My version of this circa 1970s was to put a timer on my 8 track recorder and record an hour and a half of an all night FM station that usually didn't have much advertising or talking at 0200 in the morning. (WWDC, WHUR etc) My Kenwood recorder would run 4 loops and stop automatically. I had a stack of those tapes. If I didn't like one I would recycle it.

It used to surprise people tho when they thought they were just listening to the radio and a weather report about snow would pop up in August.

[Marilyn Manson]

Another use of 8 Tracks in the 70's was to receive certain leafy plants while stationed at isolated duty stations where certain leafy plants were not available for purchase.

There's a lot of room in one of those cartridges once you take all the innards out. Just make sure you leave a strip of tape across the opening so it looks like a working tape when you open your package in front of the mail inspector.

[gfretwell]

That must have been before the dogs.

[gfretwell]

Where are the sites like Napster then? Even the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 groups are dwindling down to nothing. There used to be well over a million lines of headers a month in the busy groups and now it is 5,000 or so on a busy one. Some don't get any traffic at all.

This all new headers is since June 1.

[gfretwell]

Mostly by using a program that "rips" straight from an audio stream like Amazon or You Tube, hence my analogy of the kid sitting by the radio with a tape recorder.