[HN Gopher] The Musidex: A physical music library for the stream...
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The Musidex: A physical music library for the streaming era
Author : zdw
Score : 78 points
Date : 2026-02-19 16:42 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (hannahilea.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hannahilea.com)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| See https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115939341268444811 for music
| cards that i decorate with and share with people.
| goblin89 wrote:
| Streaming is no replacement for a physical music library.
|
| It's not only that a lot of good music is not on streaming: music
| also get removed. I have a smart playlist that gets automatically
| populated with songs in my library that are not available
| (evidently pulled from Apple Music), and it is growing with tunes
| that I like and that are sometimes impossible to find elsewhere.
| If I had the foresight to get actual copies, I could still listen
| to them.
| dewey wrote:
| You can stream from your own not-physical library though. Which
| is a great replacement for a physical music library.
| goblin89 wrote:
| True.
| mapt wrote:
| My "Random Singles" Youtube playlist created in 2006 is
| approaching 1500 tracks. ~200 of them are hidden, because the
| video is no longer available.
|
| It's not that I can't find other copies (although in some cases
| I literally can't), it's that the information has been deleted
| from my records. My exocortex has had a scalpel remove
| something, and no amount of backtracking and process of
| elimination is going to restore it at this large-N corpus size.
|
| I was able to back up what was still up a few years ago, so
| there's a hard drive in my closet with some of it. But if I
| tried that at this point, Youtube is pretty determined to fight
| me with IP blocks.
| jrflowers wrote:
| I like that this combines the annoyance of when a streaming
| service randomly stops streaming a song/album/artist with the
| irritation of then having to update or remove a physical object
| Xerox9213 wrote:
| I have been enjoying building a CD and vinyl collection recently.
| IMO there is no better listening experience than putting a disc
| on a reasonably high end sound system, and sitting down with the
| liner notes and reading about what you are hearing. No screens,
| just music. It's really quite something these days.
|
| My 2 year old son is also enjoying this process. There is
| something magical about him asking to "see" the music, and
| getting excited about the album art. Some of his music requests
| are based on the album art -- usually ones that actually depict
| the musicians.
| boredemployee wrote:
| I have almost a spiritual experience when I go to vinyl record
| shop around the globe, it is a rare moment where I feel present
| and don't feel the time passing by. I also like to connect with
| people looking around for records and to know their background.
| Apps can't replace any of that.
| edu wrote:
| I'm in the same place and share the same experience with you.
|
| Album art gets my 2.5 y.o. engaged with the music and uses what
| he remembers to ask for certain albums.
|
| Also, he loves to look at the booklets and ask about it.
|
| In the future, I want to get a DVD/Blue-Ray player to get the
| same experience for movies.
| bensyverson wrote:
| Highly recommended. We got a 4K Blu-ray player recently, and
| I've been accumulating Blu-rays and 4Ks. You can often find
| kids movies for $2-5 used. Given that the same movies are as
| much as $20 to "purchase" on digital, and given how many
| times kids want to rewatch movies, it's a clear win.
| smoghat wrote:
| Somebody had a similar idea over here, just with NFC cards. How
| weird I ran into it ten minutes after seeing your post.
|
| https://community.roonlabs.com/t/control-roon-with-nfc-cards...
| bronlund wrote:
| Brilliant!
| ksr wrote:
| I think there are many options between music streaming and
| reverting to 70s technology for music discovery.
|
| As an avid listener, I've been assiduously building a digital
| music library since the year 2000. I started buying physical CDs,
| mostly used and in bulk, only to find that they are an impossibly
| huge burden when moving countries, which I did twice in the
| intervening years. I slowly moved to digital by ripping
| everything I could lay my hands on to FLAC, doing my best to scan
| all the booklets into PDF along the way. I believe I'm mostly
| done with my local public library's CD stock - at least for the
| music that interests me. I dig deep in so-called world music and
| large collections like magazine compilations. I usually collect
| whole series and I have a soft spot for cover versions of
| important composers.
|
| To host all this (around 10TB today), I am running a Synology
| server and I'm backing up the whole thing to Backblaze. Synology
| has helpful apps for all platforms that allow connecting and
| listening to the music. I am using an old tablet as music player,
| connected to portable speakers around the house. It works great!
|
| It's been my pleasure to share music discoveries with my friends
| and family. What's missing is a very good way to navigate this
| massive library in the many dimensions of the music universe.
| wonger_ wrote:
| How would you like to navigate it? I'm curious about that
| design challenge.
|
| Perhaps a "radio" playlist that randomly selects from a genre?
| Maybe a shuffle weighted towards infrequently played songs?
| Maybe some graph UI to browse related music and artists?
| mrob wrote:
| The tactile feeling of the physical media is important.
|
| I buy a lot of used CDs. It's a great time to buy because prices
| are still very low. It's not uncommon to find charity shops
| (a.k.a. thrift stores) in the UK selling used CDs for PS0.25. At
| this price I don't put much effort into selecting discs, and if I
| don't like one I just donate it to another charity shop (ideally
| in another town to keep the discs circulating). I discover a lot
| of good music this way I wouldn't otherwise hear.
|
| Accordingly, I shop mostly by intuition. One surprising thing I
| discovered is that I can do better than chance at identifying
| good CDs by touch. This is because jewel cases from the 80s are
| generally thicker and heavier than modern jewel cases. In the
| 80s, recording technology was expensive enough that people didn't
| usually have access to it unless they'd demonstrated some musical
| talent. In the 80s, the loudness war hadn't started and CDs were
| mastered on the assumption that they would be played on a good
| home stereo. A random CD from the 80s has a higher chance of
| being good than a random CD from any other decade.
|
| Every used CD I've bought has played without audible defect. A
| few have circumferential scratches long enough to defeat the
| error correction but the error detection still works to
| interpolate the missing data. In a previous HN comment I wrote
| that I had a few with disc rot; I was mistaken and what I thought
| was disc rot was actually "pin holes". These are holes in the
| metal layer that people say are a manufacturing defect caused by
| contamination between the injection molding and metalization
| stages, and don't get worse with time. Since then, I bought one
| with genuine disc rot, which looks like corrosion starting from
| the edge of the disc. This one will probably continue to decay,
| but for now it also plays perfectly because the rot hasn't
| reached the data.
|
| I also have two "sticky Nimbus" discs: a known manufacturing
| defect where Nimbus UK in the 80s used some material for label
| printing that becomes sticky over time. The first one I attempted
| to clean with a damp cloth and damaged it, the second I
| recognized as the same thing and didn't touch. I've heard that
| you can clean them with ice-cold water, but I'll just tolerate
| the dust and fingerprints on it. Aggressive cleaning will remove
| the label entirely. It doesn't affect playback.
|
| All this experience is missing from index cards with QR codes.
| You could get the same kind of experience from vinyl, but that
| would cost a lot more and the sound quality won't be as good.
| ktpsns wrote:
| Slightly off-topic: https://tonies.com/en-gb/ is a very popular
| _physical_ music box for children coming from Germany. I guess
| (not sure) it pioneered figures with NFC chips which then let the
| wifi-connected speaker stream the music from their platform.
| Prices are crazy (like EUR30 for a 45min audio play) but wealthy
| middle class parents happily play it to avoid their children to
| control their streams from our sad addictive mobile screen world.
|
| As an 1980s child I would love to see more (also cheaper)
| solutions coming up to make music physical again.
| bensyverson wrote:
| Also an 80s child, and can I ask: would you ever consider a CD
| player? We gave our daughter a CD player when she was 3, and it
| did the trick.
| earnesti wrote:
| This would be awesome with the QR code pointing to a torrent for
| example from Anna's archive with the albums filepath. The problem
| with streaming services is that you need an account, and
| additionally they might remove the music at some point.
| Terretta wrote:
| Why are the backs upside down from POV browsing the Musidex?
|
| Final animated GIF drives this home.
|
| You only see one side at a time, never the other way round. The
| back art and QR code should be pasted and taped "upside down" so
| right side up when top card's face (bottom card's hidden back).
|
| For the list of improvements to next one...
| rob74 wrote:
| Cool project! What I miss most about switching from CDs to
| digital music/streaming is the CD art/booklets. Yeah, I know,
| that itself was a far cry from the art on vinyl record sleeves
| (mostly because of size constraints), but still, if I built one
| of these, I would probably make the cover images bigger - or even
| provide a sleeve in which to insert a CD booklet (however I guess
| that would be difficult with a Rolodex?).
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