this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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I'm an old millennial that downloads and keep what I like. It took so long to download anything on dial-up that the habit was to keep everything for later.
And then because I go camping and cycling in places without network coverage, I took the habit of copying a few hundred of MP3s and a few dozen episodes of cartoons on my phone. That way I have some entertainment even when I'm in a forest without network coverage.
I still can't understand people streaming music on their phones, music that they probably are going to listen and download again and again and again instead of only once. Why not keep it instead of constantly using bandwidth for the same thing over and over?
Same with watching stuff. Your favorite paid streaming service may eventually decide to remove a series you like, or miss a few seasons. That's if it's not on another streaming service. Like, I know I'll watch and rewatch again episodes of the Simpsons, so I download them. It only consumes bandwidth once and can watch it on repeat whenever I want, even without internet.
You can still pay for stuff, but don't use the DRM ridden streams that can disappear or can't be accessed without internet... pay for it if you wish but then, pirate and download a version you can keep.
Or I'm just old and living through "bandwidth scarcity" and really owning stuff left its mark on me.
A big reason is phone manufacturers purposefully restrict the amount of storage on devices and killed expandable storage so that you will be forced use the cloud for everything, and if you want more space on your phone, you need to pay way more money than it actually costs for the difference in hardware cost. We certainly have the technology to have more storage room for media on our devices, but you know... Enshittification.
You can plug a thumb drive in most phones nowadays.
It can be a bit of a challenge with Android as it doesn't support NTFS out of the box. So your experience may vary depending on the storage device and the phone.
exFAT works, which is supported by windows as well. Should be sufficient for normal movies.
Android really drew the short straw as far as file system support is concerned. No Ext4 (or anything else for that matter) , no windows filesystems... just plain fat (or exfat). Pityful.
Indeed, that's one annoying thing I miss about my new phone, as it doesn't have a micro SD card slot. Another thing about new phones and this "everything cloud" point of view is that it's becoming increasingly difficult (for me) to plug a USB drive/stick as a temporary ad-hoc storage device. So in addition to not allowing lots of space on the device itself, and removing micro SD card slots, it's also becoming difficult to just plug a USB stick in an OTG port.
However, MP3s are not that big and anyone used to streaming shouldn't bat an eye on compression. The loss on files compressed at 192 kbps is acceptable and you can have thousands of files for a few dozen of GBs. Also, when I started to "keep my files", it was mainly in SD. Those files are perfect for devices with small screens and they are still small enough to be "portable". A whole season of South Park is like 2.5 GB and my video player won't tell my it isn't available in my country. For 10 GB I can have 4 whole seasons on my phone and because the screen is pretty small, quality will still be more than acceptable. So, there's still wiggle room even if phones will not allow TBs worth of storage.
huh? how it is becoming difficult to use USB OTG? shouldn't that be easier now with USB-C?
Because Android doesn't support most file systems used by modern OSs. If you want to use NTFS, used by Windows, you have to buy an app on the Play store, or reformat your drive using FAT. Ext4, the defult in Linux for a while, is also not supported. The only option seems to be FAT.
It's also not standardized so it varies depending on the phone's image and manufacturer. Sometimes it just doesn't work. And if you're not a developer or an advanced Android user, you won't know what's wrong. I have 4 working Android phones with different versions of the OS, and they all behave differently when plugging in a thumb drive.
The most recent one, the Realme, is giving me the most trouble. So far I haven't been able to read a single thumb drive with it. They are detected but the default file manager doesn't show them, and the file manager that I use (Solid), asks for permissions, that I grant, but says I don't have the rights to open the drive anyway.
Thumb drives on Android are a mess. It's not the connector, it's the OS.
EDIT: Apparently some phones don't even have OTG turned on by default.
YOUTH'S ANSWER: Spotify offline download
I love it :)
Always got a stash of backups if network goes down on the road. Love mp3s still tho.
Also we stream so much because we're used to it. I download replays now tho to save energy consumption in general.
BUT more streams means more money for the artist!
So if/when Spotify ceases to exist, you lose everything. Even then, they can just decide to remove whatever music you liked "because" and you now lost access to it. In a few decades when people will want to listen to the old songs they used to like on "the Spotify", they won't find them anywhere.
It's already happening for some movies.
EDIT: A friend just told me he did in fact cache some popular local albums on Spotify, and they just removed them. So those albums were accessible on Spotify at some point, but are not anymore.
Well I did say I still love MP3s...
Obviously good points.
But we know now subscriptions =/= to ownership.
Also nothing stops us from potentially ripping the downloaded songs into MP3s and this gives you all the access to it. Or just go rip them off youtube.
I was just providing an easy solution that still gives the artists money. Philosophically, just using mp3's doesn't inherently give the artist any funds when I can just torrent/rip them.
I agree with your sentiment. I grew up mostly with 56k as the shiny new mainstream internet tech. I got DSL for the first time when I was like.. 13? I dislike the "stream everything" paradigm, too.
But, I do know a thing or two about it, so I want to correct a misconception you have that does make it all seem a little bit more reasonable than might appear for you at first glance:
Most of these streaming systems have built-in, automatic client-side caching mechanisms. This means that when Spotify downloads a song to your phone to play to you, it keeps a copy around in a safe place for a good while, so it doesn't have to re-download it every time. In a sense, it automates our natural data hoarding instinct and does so transparently, with keep-around durations calculated to provide the most ideal "local-replay to storage-consumed" ratio for their average users' network capabilities. The computers just take care of it automatically now so people don't have to think about it. If you only play it once, it'll toss it out for you. If you listen to it a lot, it's coming from your phone. "Streaming" is just high-speed managed file downloading.
100% right about the risk of them pulling content though. They're still a bad proposition. The DRM and "rent not own" they do screws with the whole value proposition.