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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Consider the fact they may be using a 3rd party application, like ErsatzTV or similar, to create a “virtual” tv station that just plays videos in sequence after being added to a channel.

    You can always reach out to the user in question if you’re concerned though. I generally wouldn’t open my plex up to users unless I had regular communication with them anyway, but that’s a personal thing I think…

    Edit: Another thing to note is that, depending on the user’s tech savvyness, they might not be aware that you can see what content they’re watching. If you aren’t close friends, it might turn them off the service to have an admin approach them about the content that you yourself are hosting. Consider this and really weigh whether it’s your own business or not. And obviously, to be clear, you definitely shouldn’t be charging for this service so make sure that you’re not putting yourself in potential legal problems.








  • signing into cloud services and downloading apps is just so much easier to do!

    This is actually true, but it doesn’t speak to why self hosting is “impossible” and more to how the lack of education around computers have reached an inflection point.

    There’s no reason why self hosting should be some bizarre concept; In another reality, we would all have local servers and firewalls that then push our content into the wider internet and perhaps even intranet based notes. Society as a whole would be better if we chose to structure the internet that way instead of handing the keys to the biggest companies on the stock market.

    I’ll give this podcast a listen to though, as it might be interesting. I think the reality is that some more docker frontends might help casual users jump into the realm of self hosting – especially be setting up proxy managers and homepage sites (like homarr) that work intuitively that never requires you to enter ports and IPs (though fearing that is also an education problem, not a problem with the concept itself.)





  • I have a kind of complicated system for organizing my music files – some of which is admittedly way too much maintenance but it might be of interest to some.

    For my general “commercial” music collection, the folder structure is roughly
    Music/%Release Artist | Band%/%Album%[%Year%]/%Track No.% - %Title%.%Format%

    This is simple to maintain. I basically just use MusicBrainz Picard and set up appropriate paths.

    For my soundtrack collection, it gets a bit more complicated. For Anime/Film/Whatever, I have it sorted basically the same way but in a different root folder. So something like:
    Music/Anime/%Release Artist | Band%/%Album%[%Year%]/%Track No.% - %Title%.%Format%

    Which is also easy to maintain since most of these also have commercial releases.

    But games are sorted more strangely. To put it simply, I have a folder structure that puts the console or platform first, followed by the game name and then the loose files. Since some of these files are emulated formats (.vgm, .nsf, .spc), I generally don’t bother renaming them and keep them as is and trust that the music program in question has tagging support. It also means that having them sorted by console is mostly beneficial to quickly find emulated file formats, but YMMV and I have regretted the choice on occasion.

    Obviously game soundtracks are spotty when it comes to releases. Some companies have reliable metadata you can get from MusicBrainz Picard, like SquareEnix, but others have no tagging at all or very incorrect tag values. Because of this, I generally use something like VGMDB, which is usually higher quality but not always. I do have to resort to manually correcting files on occasion.

    If anyone has a nice automated way to sort this stuff out, it would be a real benefit to me as well.


  • Spotify serves mp3s because it uses less bandwidth and most people can’t tell the difference on their 30€ Bluetooth headset.

    I think this highlights a bigger issue when it comes to this discussion.

    The issue isn’t the mp3 format – for the most part, the format of any lossy encoder can sound good with the right settings. The problem is that, unlike flac, all encoded lossy files are essentially untrustworthy audio formats. So when people say mp3 sounds bad, it’s only a half truth in the same way that it’s a half truth to say that people cannot tell a difference. You are putting trust in the person who encoded the audio to make the right choice and the encoder is putting trust in the idea that the person consuming the media can’t tell the difference.

    When it comes to being cheap on bandwidth since most users can’t hear it, that’s a huge cop-out being made for a company that can do better. While Apple is pretty notorious for making terrible decisions for arbitrary reasons, even they respect the user enough to allow you to opt into higher audio format quality. It’s decisions like these that cement Apple as the kings of the creative computer user.