People who buy their music: What music has caused the most trouble?

[vvinrg]

By this, I mean mostly technical difficulties, although if you've got any stories about songs causing other issues somehow, those are fine too. Post your solutions too, in case they help someone!

I'll start:

Long track/album names are consistently a pain. While "Thanks to You Song That I Don't Understand How People Like It I'm Forced to Listen to This S​*​*​t Everyday Cause My F​*​*​*​ing Sister Plays This Every Time Without Getting Bored of Listening to It Thanks Ghost for This Piece of S​*​*​t You Introduced Into My Life", by Ghost and Pals, caused plenty of problems in the past for me(including crashing the PS Vita file transfer software!), the most consistent issue I've run into has been with Will Wood's "14. Big Fat Bitchie’s Blueberry Pie, Christmas Tree, and Recreational Jell-o Emporium a.k.a. “Mr. Boy is on the Roof Again” (Feat. Pasta by Sneakers McSqueakers) [From the Motion Picture ”B.F.B.’s B-Sides: Bagel Batches, Marshmallows, and Barsh-mallows]". I have yet to successfully listen to the song since starting use of my Airsonic server, and, everytime it ends up being shuffled into play, the player just halts until I manually skip the song. As much as I love absurdly long titles, for said absurdity, it's annoying how frequently they just break things.

A slightly less notable issue I ran into, was with Cavetown's "10 Feet Tall". Upon importing the track into Airsonic, I found it had been retagged as "Feet Tall". It turns out, Airsonic detected that it was track 10, and detected that it began with the number 10, and decided to strip it. This is not the only track to lead to this, but it was the first time I noticed it. I ended up solving the issue by prefixing the actual name of the track with a Unicode Zero Width Non-Joiner. This is a completely invisible character that is not part of the whitespace characters, and so does not get stripped by most programs. Airsonic doesn't see the number at the start, and last.fm is smart enough to strip the character from scrobbles, so everything works!

[Kolo]

A slightly less notable issue I ran into, was with Cavetown's "10 Feet Tall". Upon importing the track into Airsonic, I found it had been retagged as "Feet Tall". It turns out, Airsonic detected that it was track 10, and detected that it began with the number 10, and decided to strip it. This is not the only track to lead to this, but it was the first time I noticed it. I ended up solving the issue by prefixing the actual name of the track with a Unicode Zero Width Non-Joiner. This is a completely invisible character that is not part of the whitespace characters, and so does not get stripped by most programs. Airsonic doesn't see the number at the start, and last.fm is smart enough to strip the character from scrobbles, so everything works!

This is actually hilarious. It was trying so hard to be helpful....

Sadly for the thread (but thankfully) I haven't had any issues when buying music except not being able to find a certain song for sale, bizarrely enough. It's one that the band has sold on CDs and whatnot so it's not like they're opposed to selling it, I think they literally just forgot to put it on their Bandcamp as they have an enormous discography and this song was released... checks notes.... as the B-side of a vinyl. Hmm actually that concerns me about the other recent B-side vinyl song they're doing that Also began life as a live-only song I may need to do some hunting down of this.

The software I use to play music randomly replaced all the album art with pictures of the artists. I don't know where it got those pictures, why it did that (well I have a vague idea, but) or how to reset it. I'm not super annoyed but it is pretty funny. I keep meaning to properly troubleshoot but I've been busy enough and it's minor enough that I forget until I randomly see their faces staring at me.

[devils]

Admittedly I acquire my music files by less-than-legal means (I always make sure to support the artists in other ways though), but when I do buy music it's usually through Bandcamp, which works pretty swell. However! I will say that buying + downloading bundles is a straight-up pain. You have to download all releases individually, which I kind of get...? But, I'd much rather download them all at once while I do something else. Might just be me though.

So far, the only bundle I bought was the Halley Labs bundle, which is over 80 releases. It took a while.

[Memory]

The only problem I have is not having enough storage space for all these vinyls.

[myleszey]

Admittedly I acquire my music files by less-than-legal means (I always make sure to support the artists in other ways though), but when I do buy music it's usually through Bandcamp, which works pretty swell. However! I will say that buying + downloading bundles is a straight-up pain. You have to download all releases individually, which I kind of get...? But, I'd much rather download them all at once while I do something else. Might just be me though.

So far, the only bundle I bought was the Halley Labs bundle, which is over 80 releases. It took a while.

Bandcamp is real convenient when it comes to those bundles. I do have some gripes with it (that are pretty rare and I doubt there would be reason to address), such as not being able to remove music from your library if you have some regrets later on and wold prefer that other people don't see it on your profile.

A label I really like, SBFR, only releases music in limited runs physically through Bandcamp, but also provides digital downloads. Why not make the release digital forever and provide a brief run of CDs?

[loren]

such as not being able to remove music from your library if you have some regrets later on and wold prefer that other people don't see it on your profile.

you can hide purchases from your profile! on the desktop site, hover over a release and a "hide album" button will appear under it next to "download". on the mobile site, click the three dots under the album art and you should see "Hide release from public collection". i just looked around for a way to do it within the android app and wasn't able to find one, so you may be out of luck if that's your preferred method of using bandcamp.

[myleszey]

you can hide purchases from your profile!

I see now! Thank you! This has been bugging me for a bit. I keep recommending people use bandcamp rather than other online streaming services and this is just another neat thing in their favor.

[Thorn]

I would say the hardest thing for me is just finding the music in the first place. I have an android device so I'm not set up with apple music in any way, and I've stopped using spotify, so downloading or streaming songs is pretty unwieldy outside of just searching for bands or tracks by name on youtube and hoping I can find a video with good audio quality. I do want to be able to listen to my music without the ads and outside of youtube though, but a lot of musicians I like are small enough or old enough to not even have all of their albums listed on legal sites, and finding a physical CD or tape copy is just as challenging. Once I finally get my hands on a website or physical copy, getting the audio files is a cinch for me, but finding the actual songs first is a multi-day effort when you're into more indie artists and you aren't hooked into a subscription service.

[villiersterrace]

I collect all formats except for 8 tracks so I have encountered a lot of technical difficulties. Burning and ripping CDs with my computer is like flipping a coin to see if it will work properly the first time. Sometimes it doesn't work at all for some reason. Some cords work with my mp3 player and some don't. I have no idea which ones until I use them. Scratched records are the worst, especially when it's a really good song playing. I've bought records that were sealed and newly pressed before and somehow they were still scratched.

[myleszey]

I replied to this thread earlier but just remembered; many of my favorite Japanese labels sell their music exclusively at conventions!! This makes it terribly difficult to find and often there are very few vendors if any that resell their music, and if they do it's unlikely that they offer international purchases without the use of an intermediary.

[virtue]

Two of the biggest pain-in-the-rear experiences I've had trying to acquire music are Falling Backwards by Defsharp and People Still Live Here by Kane Parsons. They both have the exact same problem, being that there is literally no means to acquire a copy of the album, paid or otherwise. With People Still Live Here, unlike with Falling Backwards, it appears that there was actually never a way to get it in the first place! Falling Backwards was originally sold on the artist's bandcamp but was later taken down for (officially) unclear reasons. Either way, neither album has most or even any of the songs that make them up available as individual tracks. They only exist as full continuous mix releases of the entire album. The only way I was able to acquire a copy, despite wanting to purchase them, was find the official continuous mix of both of them, download it with a youtube/soundcloud downloader as an audio file, then open that in audacity, manually chop up the full album stream into its component songs, and then apply metadata.

Definitely not the most insufferable thing I could have to put up with when trying to get my hands on an album, but it is nonetheless deeply frustrating to simply have no way to purchase an album anymore, no matter how hard you try. Falling Backwards was also never sold physically, so I could not even buy it secondhand. People Still Live Here on the other hand... While it of course also was not sold physically, it looks like at least a single person somehow has a copy??? I looked on last.fm and apparently one account has in fact streamed the album before, which means someone must have either found a copy, metadata and all, or there is someone as frustrated as I was willing to bother chopping it up and manually applying metadata. I must find them, but no luck yet.

(If anyone on this forum knows where I could purchase or download People Still Live Here please let me know for the love of Jeff)

[PurpleHello98]

I haven't had a tonne of technical difficulties caused by the music, although I have had the occasional iTunes difficulty with organizing music from one album that iTunes doesn't want to be in one album, and one time I deleted my entire iTunes library except for one Britney Spears album. (Thankfully, it was ages ago, so it didn't take me a tonne of time to reimport my music, but I really should've been backing it up---I've learned my lesson!) However, I have had difficulty finding songs for sale, especially the obscure k-pop I often listen to. For one song, I had to scour the iTunes Store to no avail, and then I went to Amazon (yes, I know, but I had a gift card) and found it for 99 cents, but only as a part of some DJ compilation album from 2012 or something. It was well worth it though!

[tarraxahum]

I don't buy all my music, but damn this one time I was trying to buy a song that was only available on iTunes and I didn't have a single iOS device in my entire household (no idea if anything changed, but back then you definitely weren't able to access iTunes without being an iOS owner). I ended up asking a friend for help and then she apparently had a bunch of glitches and other weirdness in the process to the point where I was feeling guilty for even pulling her into that mess. We stayed up till like 2 am fighting for dear life.

I got the song in the end though. But that was probably the hardest I had to ever struggle to get some music I wanted :D

[starbreaker]

A lot of old equipment that displays track information only supports US ASCII, not UTF-8, so none of it knows how to handle band names like Motörhead, Queensrÿche, Mötley Crüe, or the Blue Öyster Cult. Spın̈al Tap is right out.