Pioneer DJ, I mean AlphaTheta, probably don't even know MusicBrainz exists. They're too busy selling subscriptions for RekordBox. And they do nothing to help you with the metadata on your files, besides filtering in browser mode.
I can relate to the problem of revising genre or energy ratings over time. I've gone with custom genre tags for ages, ie "dub/house/techno" or "funk/disco/edits" with a sprinkling of extra qualifiers in the comment field and do bulk updates from MP3Tag/Foobar2k. The extras only really help when preparing "crates" for export to USB for outside use, or when just playing off the entire collection at home. I'm fast, but still not much time to read the comment fields when browsing on the players, much less input any words with the scroll wheel.
I keep every purchase around in FLAC, and the part I might realistically play out stays in AIFF, for minimum fiddling of tags (ie stars map a bit differently between Traktor and Rekordbox) - because of course Rekordbox will warn you you're exporting files you can't play anywhere, but won't do anything to transcode them.
Lossless whenever possible because I just want to give the sound quality as much of a chance as I can when recording sets, especially if they might get posted online and getting lossy-transcoded multiple times. I've tried the mp3 of mp3 thing, and you do hear it at home (out at a gig, most of the time, probably not).
I don't suffer from track bulimia, so the numbers work out - and disk space has gotten a lot cheaper in the last 20 years.
I let this thread go for a while, but just saw your reply and wanted to say thanks for your insight! I am a hobbyist DJ for whom "playing out" just means "on a friend's equipment from time to time" so I probably don't need to fuss as much as I do, but your experience has kinda reaffirmed for me that keeping stuff MP3 is going to be the least hassle.
It really used to annoy me that bringing along just a USB left me with a useless "filenames only" view on old CDJs, and then even when they did read the file they only cached the metadata of a fraction of the tags, which is how I ended up same as you - custom genres with modifiers in the comment. It's not the ideal data structure for organizing your collection at home, but it seems to work the best for bringing music to go.
Most of the CDs we burned at home in the 1998-2005 era were still good in recent years, some DVDs in there too. Luck, I guess. No delamination or rot. Really, my main problems were figuring out file types without extentions (burned on classic Mac OS) and... appropriate programs to open them (old Painter limited edition from 1998 needs... the same thing, pretty much).
OTOH, some 12 years ago I worked IT at a newspaper and we were moving offices. The archivist got an intern in a room in our section of the building and together they spent a month or two scanning, then committing whatever physical media to burned CDs (maybe DVDs) before chucking the former to the bin.
Maybe a year after the move, a ticket was opened and I went to check the disks. None of them worked, CRC failures all over. I don't think they even considered testing them, or burning duplicates, or maybe they used a really bad drive which would produce media unreadable by anything else - although I'm only aware that this is a thing with floppies for example.
> The best way to experience this is at one of the top festivals. The second best way is at a club.
I would respectfully disagree and swap these, unless the festival is something like Freerotation. Festivals tend to bring out the more consumer friendly, hands-in-the-air side, and more often than not, force everyone to condense their sets, losing a lot of the "storytelling", risk-taking and deeper cuts.
What remains of techno has largely rotted in the last 5+ years due to the high-visibility, high octane arms race "business techno" festival energy, for example.
Someone in a past thread here mentioned how they enjoyed the help of LLMs to generate all their PR marketing nonsense blurbs, because they looked just as good as the real thing.
It might have been 2-3 years ago but I still joke about this with coworkers when the conversations shift to "AI".
- "good job on the acquisition and maintaining some kind of product" - how many of these are users?
- "this is now dead and completely useless to me, I am switching to something FLOSS this instant" - I'm betting v2-decayed-for-a-couple-years still beats GIMP/Inkscape from the future in at least UX for example, and it certainly does now)
- some "it's all a scheme for AI training" which would be more of what I'd expect, although for the time being, appears to be FUD when it comes to local files (surely Lord Vader will change the terms further as well)
For me it took a bit of self-discipline watching the video announcement first, before checking any comments anywhere.
I'm glad I got my v2 licences a few years ago, they've allowed me to dabble in graphics again without losing my mind to other even more affortable products. The strings that come attached with this and the potential lack of options for some workflows later down the line bother me. Just hoping v2 doesn't get too much more unstable with time.
Never seen wire wrapped boards besides photos of this and maybe some other early micro. So of course I had to do a little search and one of the first results has Bil Herd from Commodore (Plus/4, C128...) explaining it.
Thanks for sharing that! Never got to see any pro wrapping.
By the time this stuff started, I'd started forgetting all the hobbyist hardware electronics I'd learned (thinking it would last) and had moved to software ... at right about the time that manu's stopped documenting their internals ... but while disassemblers still existed.
In retrospect, it seems almost nuts that appliances from the past came with not only a block diagram, but a schematic. Especially now that everything is not only too complex to be documented "for your own good", and even potential repair techs, and now with DMCA protected software locks.
I still sometimes use the old Scott amplifier my parents got 50 years ago, with manual - and it has everything you need for a repair (besides a list of modern day replacement for some of these, of course). Same with the ol' Amiga 500 in a box over at their house. A lot of tinkering you could scheme on your own without going online (my quartz oscillator overclocking replacement never materialized, but hey).
I think of all the education that I missed
But then my homework was never quite like this
[Chorus]
Got it bad, got it bad, got it bad
I'm hot for teacher
Got it bad, sooo bad
I'm hot for teacher
Wow!
[Scorching guitar solo]