I Built My Own Audio Player

The enshitification was completed when they convinced us to no longer want to own our own copies of music but to perpetually rent access to their content.

The latest Iteration I discovered 2 days ago, a audio service(via Amazon), where you have limited time for listening. So I get to listen to that new audiobook, but see my 10 h contingent decrease every second I listen. Creates a new vibe for me.

Libraries had the same count down, but it just wasn't in your face. If you returned a book after the agreed time, they charged you late fees. These guys just cut off access to it. They should have a late fee equivalent where you can extend the time without having to pay the full rental rate again.

Maybe I was not clear, but the counter only ran while it was playing.

That is something completely different to me, as it limits replaying.

Having access for 14 days lile a boo kwould be something very different and more OK with me. But limiting the act of playing that audio itself has a new quality for me.

Ughh, I hate the sound of that. Hard pass, I'll find whatever it is and download the darn thing or create an audiobook from it if need be

Yes, but recording the audio is annoying, but currently what I will do ...

(DRM of course)

Edit: but apparently I was wrong and the "countdown" was just the time left of the audiobook. But the mobile UI was stuttering, so that wasn't clear. But thinking about it, I am surprised it ain't implemented yet for real.

People have spent many decades without actually caring to own their music content. Back then they used these things called "radios" to enjoy music content without owning the collection. Streaming services today are just another evolution of listening to the radio.

Not everyone had some massive record collection and hundreds of cassette tapes.

I never have liked commercial radio. There's too little music, and too many commercials. Then of course there's the whole payola issues, and the lack of variety in the tracks played on the radio. In major markets or college towns, there might be a few stations that just play good music based on what the program director or specific jockeys want to play. Luckily, I had one near me, and it offered me a catalog of music I just wasn't going to get otherwise. So for me, the only way to hear what I considered "good" music was to collect it. I spent lunch money and other random bits of cash I'd receive as a teen solely on music.

Today, those "cool" stations have primarily been slurped up into iHateRadio / Comcast conglomerates, so commercial radio is useless. The internet is the only saving grace for kids today, but even streaming platforms don't do it for me. Sadly, youtube is about the best thing for its ubiquitous availability. Bandcamp/Soundcloud are cool, but still not the same discoverability as YT.

Even with my collection, it's still not instantly accessible as I'd like due to the manual labor of digitizing. I've tried on multiple occasions, but it's only a fraction of the collection. It's just too easy to find it with yt-dl

I mean sure, there's always been a lot of people who didn't care for the radio and absolutely found it valuable to buy physical media copies or later digital versions they truly owned. But there's pretty much always been a large chunk of people who didn't care to own a lot of content. They didn't have to be "convinced" to no longer want to own their own copies of music, they never cared to from the start. They just didn't really have any other options other than maybe buy a small handful of physical media or listen to the radio. Now they have a ton more options. It's not enshittification to build new services to target customers which previously only had worse options. Before, these users practically only had AM/FM radio to service what they were looking for. Now there's lots of apps out there with ad supported or cheap tiers (the price of a few CDs a year to get access to thousands and lots of constant new content) offering them on-demand music and autoplaylists and what not.

These platforms aren't necessarily drawing people who really wanted a big privately curated music collection to own forever, they're drawing the people who just want to listen to music and not have to spend much or anything at all for it. Which happens to be a ton of people.

I think you could actually just play the audiobook and screen capture video the whole time and you'd have a decent clear video with audio you could just rip the audio from. Only problem is you would have to have it running the whole amount of time without any hiccup in that process but I got a great, rare piece of audio I couldnt find anywhere that way