Go FLAC or go home.
I fucking love my 100gb flac collection
Do you know a reliable tracker? I have lidarr set up to find lossless versions, but it’s pretty terrible at it.
Im using Soulseek
Orpheus for torrents, Usenet gets like 90% of the stuff out there though. And don’t forget to sort your favorites bands but buying their albums when they provide them as FLAC.
Nah, I won’t pay for music, unless it’s a signed record, because the bands get pretty much no money from the sale, so it’s more of a fuck you to the labels. But I will travel to go to concerts and buy merch to support them.
I guess I should get around to figuring out how to use usenet, though.
I’m pretty sure they are getting money at their merch tables, but I could be wrong.
This was more true when the labels were running everything. Now you can get a lot of the material more-or-less directly from the artists on various platforms. Instead of artists getting 5% of the $$$, they can get 70%+.
Just saying that not everything you listen to is necessarily by a band signed to a label. A lot of newer talents have gotten wise to the scam the labels have been running (for the same reasons you articulated - who would knowingly sign up for that?) and are putting things out themselves instead.
Ah, that makes sense, but I only listen to the same artists I have been for 20 years (or artists that I’ve discovered that have been active for that long), so not much has changed with the labels for me specifically.
Usenet is way better than torrenting. I had heard about it for years and finally checked it out a month ago. I bought a few lifetime memberships to trackers (but just nzbgeek might be enough) and subscribed to news hosting. The reliability and speeds are so much better. Plus the traffic is encrypted and it’s much less common than torrenting so also safer
Can you recomend me some trackers? I’ve been considering usenet for a few months now but never pulled the trigger
I’m using nzbgeek, nzbplanet, and miatrix
I made a XSPF format list of lossy versions, imported into qobuz and deezer using soundiiz, and downloaded from there using qobuz-dl and deemix, fwiw. Got about 1.2 TB this way
Where does one begin to find flac? I am taking the first steps beyond “finding a movie to play for free”
hdtracks.com and Bandcamp are some sources.
Tidal + Tidal-dl or Soulseek
I use FLAC for albums I love and mp3s for everything else (including copies of the flacs in mp3). It’s a nice balance.
Fucking love my collection of music. I use Spotify as well, but nothing can compete with literally owning a music collection of my own I can listen to without the Internet
This is the way. Also, FLAC for high bit rate audiophile vinyl rips.
I literally got goosebumps reading that. Take my Iron Maiden collection for example:
I have mp3 versions of all albums. Different release versions of FLACs and then a vinyl FLAC collection as well.
It’s nice exploring the difference in sound, but somehow, vinyl always makes me feel the best.
Man I miss what.cd.
I miss Oink’s :(
That too :(
Interview for redacted.
I did and failed. I don’t want to waste that many hours of my life trying again. So they lose out on an amazing seeder and I lose out on good access to music.
I have a whole pipeline of recording my vinyl as 96kHz 24bit wav. Before people start greefing me about storage/overkill, I work in media production. I can’t walk into my closet without tripping over 5 TB of hard drives. Storage is not a problem and I like using the best encoding on my H6.
I cut the recordings up into record “sides,” then render them out as flac and MP3s. MP3s go on my phone, flac on my Plex server. I have 110 or so sides done, and probably 30 or 40 in the pipeline that need to be edited. I just need to carve out some time!
I literally salivated.
hahahaha it’s been really fun! I run my Technics 1200 Mk II -> Numark mixer (nothing special but solid, from my college DJing days) -> Zoom h6 (left and right channels get their own inputs) -> bring into editing software, combine the two channels, chop off the beginning and end as well as silence/dead air between sides, then run it all through Compressor to create “sides” as described above.
Gotta use that lossless format so you can pick up all the sound artefacts caused by an imperfect physical format.
Despite vinyl’s technical inferiority, it was those same limitations that meant vinyl actually sounded better than CD throughout a specific period. Vinyl cannot be too loud or the needle will jump off the track, making the vinyl unplayable. This prevented vinyl from dealing with the loudness wars, and brick wall dynamic range compression. So especially for the early 2000s, the masters used for the vinyl mix were often significantly better.
And, a clean record played on clean and properly set up equipment can sound really pristine, especially if copied to a digital format early in its life. You wouldn’t even be able to tell it’s vinyl.
+1 to all you said. I collect vinyl for a number of reasons and none of them are because it is technically superior (it isn’t) however, many (most?) people have never heard just how good vinyl can actually sound when it’s in good condition and played on a good setup. I personally cannot tell the difference between even a 33 and CD, let alone a 45, and I have a decently high end setup.
My ears like to trick me and tell me I can hear a difference between a 33 and 45 but I’m pretty sure this is a lie.
Not to mention, psychoacoustics don’t really give a damn about fidelity, so if your goal is “I want it to sound good to me” moreso than “I want it to reproduce sounds accurately” then there’s arguments for vinyl, tube amplifiers, vintage speakers, etc.
Hell I have a friend who specifically uses one of the earliest CD players because it had a 14 bit DAC and no oversampling vs 16 bit DAC, and for those few albums he really likes the digital distortion that comes with it because that’s how he first heard it.
I do a pretty robust cleaning/digitization process for my vinyl but you can definitely tell it’s vinyl. There’s just no way you won’t get a little wow/flutter on quieter stuff, and there’s always that distinct background sound/cracks and pop somewhere.
But yes the quality can be incredibly high. That’s just part of the fun!
Compared to CD? If you have to compare it to a lossy compressed format to make it look good in comparison, then maybe it’s not that good overall. You may have noticed it’s no longer the early 2000s and CDs are not ubiquitous, nor even very common at all anymore.
Lossy compressed format? Where? Are you talking about CD? The format famous for using uncompressed PCM audio perfectly specified to cover 100% of a human’s hearing range?
Because if that’s what you mean, you’ve got some studying to go do.
BUY ME BIGGER STORAGE BROTHER
looks at his 42TB NAS
That’s a lot of hip-hop 😂
Are you using an off the shelf NAS or a DIY? I’m looking for around that much space but the consumer/prosumer grade stuff I’ve seen doesn’t really do what I want (full disk encryption, Linux, ability to customize and host a few applications).
I originally figured I’d just cram 5x12TB drives in a case, RAID5, with my Linux flavor of choice… Then I learned how bad RAID5 is with big disks.
I don’t need mirroring or high throughput (home NAS - other device backups and local streaming) but would preferably like a little redundancy… As a treat.
Got any pointers?
I’m using a Synology, and I love it. I have most of my self hosted servers running on it in docker containers, and I can use the Surveillance Station to locally store and view my camera setup.
I’ll probably buy actual server hardware at some point, but I need to do my network build out first.
What do you think of the Asustor flashtor NAS drives which have 6-12 m2 slots…I think you can run any OS on it if their own software doesn’t check all the boxes for you
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/how-i-installed-truenas-on-my-new-asustor-nas
Truenas or unraid
Listen up, all you young whippersnappers and your FLAC collections, we downloaded our lossy but ‘high enough quality’ 128kbps mp3s from those IRC DCC Fserves back in the 90s using our dialup internet and we didnt complain!
Unless of course someone picked up the house phone and caused our internet to disconnect.
Don’t forget Limewire and Kazaa
I’m still shuffling some of those.
It’s all about the 64kbps .wma’s. I could fit so many songs on my 128mb mp3 player back in the day
FLAC is a meme for 90% of use cases out there. The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent. The file size is drastically different, though. Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the “lossless” versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.
Not to say that I don’t prefer to download FLAC when possible, but I also don’t avoid non-lossless albums either.
The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent.
I would disagree with this. It isn’t really a matter of equipment cost. It may be a matter of not having ever heard a direct comparison between versions of the same track, though.
What I’ve noticed is that you really need e.g. wired headphones to be able to hear this difference. The compression artifacts of MP3 are quite distinct, but since Bluetooth tends to compress audio as well, this eliminates a lot of the difference between lossy and lossless sources.
I can hear the difference clearly with cheap (≈$50) wired headphones on my android phone (which is nothing special and a few years old). It is particularly noticeable with high frequency sounds, like hi-hats, which tend to sound muddy with a kind of digital sizzle.
Um, .wav is a lossless format. It’s just raw PCM with no compression. An upscaled FLAC from a lossy source is not lossless, even though it’s stored in a lossless compatible format (FLAC). A properly encoded and compressed MP3 file will sound very close to the lossless source, but when procuring those lossy files from third parties, you rely on whoever compressed them doing it properly. I prefer to store my music repository in a lossless format, and stream/sync in lossy.
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Still fits in a 1 TB sd card… Barely!
A 1TB SD card costs the same as a single vinyl LP right now.
It’s not even a concern.
However, I have a box of CDs that I ripped to 96kbps Vorbis in the early 2000s, and I think this time I’ll go straight to FLAC. Plex will transcode to the flavour-of-the-month codec on the fly when listening with limited bandwidth.
I have my flacs on a 2tb nvme drive in a little usb-c enclosure, kinda like a big USB stick. It’s about half full… Also have a couple hundred records so I’m pretty agnostic on format I guess. Still use foobar2000 too to manage and play lol
Imagine stroring WAVs
I actually tried doing that when I first decided to start archiving my own CDs. I ripped with abcde to flac but kept both copies. The idea was to keep .wav as a sort of “master” original and then copy the flacs to my phone and laptop for listening. That way if something happened I could always go back to my “masters” without having to rip the CD again.
Honestly the wav files aren’t that much bigger than flac and I feel like storage wouldn’t be much of an issue today, but I started this project several years ago when an 8TB hard drive was still $600+ and I quickly ran out of space.
Why would you need “masters” when you use lossless codec anyway?
I guess the idea was that if something happened to flac like new devices stopped supporting it for whatever reason, or if a better lossless format came along, it would be much easier to go back to the wavs and convert them to a different format.
It is easy to convert them back to wav, so…
Converting back and forth, even from lossless to lossless, is a good way to lose or corrupt data. I abandoned the idea years ago anyway, but thanks.
Imagine storing stems and plugins
Hi it’s me!
Jeez why did you have to call me out by name? =(
You mean there’s more of me out there?!
✅ No buffering, music starts instantly
✅ No connection issues
✅ No monthly money drain
✅ No arbitrary access or availability revocation
❌ No immediate access to any song I want to hear, but
✅ I’m patient
I need to get a NAS and a sailing hat
Watch out, it’s a slippery slope… You start with a raspberry pi and a USB drive, you end up with a virtualization server and a zfs pool
And the orgasmic pleasure of sticking it to the man.
At least you get to learn along the way
But can you swim in it?
Same for me. I already have SBC with 64gb USB stick, but I could use more. Oh, and I want sailing hat too.
So you don’t have no immediate access? That’s not how yes/No checkboxes work.
You know, I considered “fixing” that before hitting reply, but I figured the overall sentiment of my comment would make its way through.
I used a check and an x, to represent positive and negative. I could have gone with ➕ / ➖, so that’s on me.
It’s only a friendly comment, why you have to be mad?
Yes friend, we are one in the same. I still have the last gen iPod I use in my car. It has Bluetooth and I still even use the 3.5mm audio jack instead. I’m old and hate most new music coming out anyway. And if I do want to check something out I still preview it on Apple Music. If nothing else it’s an entirely private and secure way to consume music.
I salute your commitment to the audio jack. I no longer have that luxury, but it is what it is, and I love my phone despite that glaring flaw. Wish it had an FM receiver too, but oh well.
If nothing else it’s an entirely private and secure way to consume music.
Amen to that. I’ve got my weird guilty pleasures that I go to occasionally and there’s no reason anyone else needs to know why I listen to a couple of specific dubstep songs as often as I do. If that theoretical information ever got leaked, would it even matter? Probably not, but I’m able to enjoy the music more if I can listen in my own world with no strings attached.
This is one of the biggest things I’ve enjoyed since I ditched spotify and started building up my own library again. It feels way more personal somehow.
Had a first Gen ipod permanently in my car from 2011 to just last year. Only took it out because head unit died and I put the factory one back in. iPod still works
The head unit in my car is so old it still has a dedicated 30 pin iPod cable that you’re meant to run out to your glovebox. I don’t do that, though. It has an SD card slot (full size) and also a USB port. And it still has a physical volume knob, too. I just chunk a flash drive into it.
No algorithmic suggestions and therefore, no curated daily taste playlists, no sorting your library by genre (at least not as granular and specific as Spotify unless you put in as much work as they do at tagging your music), finding new music manually takes at least 10x more effort and you’re limited to the taste you already know you have. If you switch phones you’re SOL unless you want to deal with the insanely slow transfer speeds of androids MTP or whatever apples slow ass transfer protocol is. Not to mention your library is limited by how much space you have. My 10,000+ song playlists on Spotify aren’t gonna easily fit on anyone’s device, and definitely not at the highest quality that Spotify can stream at. Your only hope of getting even a comparable experience is to be tech savvy and patient enough to set up a home streaming server, manually tag all your music, and find an audio app with an interface/features that you like that also supports streaming. Oh and then your home computer needs to be on all the time, and your Internet has to be great, and you must not care about your energy bill that much, and … I’m just gonna stop. Locally stored music is just not anywhere near as good. It’s lame and tedious and nearly pointless. At most, I’d say keep a couple albums you like with high quality FLACs but that’s it. You’re waisting your time not getting Spotify premium or Apple Plus or whatever the heck
Oh and this is coming from 20+ years of pirating media. Limewire used to be the best, but now it’s firmly Spotify etc.
Your only hope of getting even a comparable experience is to be tech savvy and patient enough to set up a home streaming server, manually tag all your music, and find an audio app with an interface/features that you like that also supports streaming. Oh and then your home computer needs to be on all the time, and your Internet has to be great, and you must not care about your energy bill that much, and … I’m just gonna stop.
It’s a bit spam-like, but I’m going to write something about this separately despite having replied about a different item previously.
I’m technical so it has to be taken with a grain of salt but umm:
-
Home streaming software is not really that difficult to setup and run.
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Search beats tagging for me, which is embedded as part of point #1.
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There are an abundance of options for streaming music, it’s (almost of course) easier and with more available choice than running your own Plex server which millions of people do. Hell, if you like plex you can just use its music app.
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Of course you have to have a computer on in order to stream to yourself. I have a NUC (to counterpoint your “large energy bill” point) I use for the purpose of Plex and music streaming. But at least the music you like will stay there even as artists fight with various streaming services or try to start their own to get market share via exclusivity. It’s all still there, because in a very real way you actually have the music.
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Your Internet does not have to be great to stream music. Some of us older fucks remember RealAudio. We literally streamed audio via dial-up modem. Aside from that, many streaming software packages including the one I use have an ability to locally cache what you’re listening to. I can listen to anything I’ve recently listened to on an airplane without preparing because it has an offline mode.
To each their own, but Spotify isn’t for me for a large number of reasons.
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No algorithmic suggestions and therefore, no curated daily taste playlists, no sorting your library by genre (at least not as granular and specific as Spotify unless you put in as much work as they do at tagging your music), finding new music manually takes at least 10x more effort and you’re limited to the taste you already know you have
I haven’t used Spotify much, but I found Google Music and Pandora to be very shallow with regards to discovery. There’s not really much to them other than “people who liked X tend to like Y” or “here’s something that sounds similar to an artist you like”. It’s discovery sure, but it’s discovery on autopilot. It’ll keep you treading water in the same shallow area of the ocean forever unless you make a concerted effort outside of its algorithms to listen to something new.
I usually don’t want something “similar to…X” when finding new music. I usually want things that are completely different. I subscribed to Google Music for around a year and found maybe two new artists I liked to listen to. I switched back to a manual discovery process around five years ago and this year alone I’ve found probably a dozen.
I think this is a really important point. Music streaming services are incentivised to concentrate attention and create filter bubbles in much the same way as other tech. I’ve been discovering some new music through internet radio stations and it’s reinvigorated my sense of adventure in music. There is so much good stuff out there which is ignored by streaming service algorithms. Nothing beats discovering a new song/artist/album out in the wild and falling in love with it.
All valid points, and I’m glad Spotify works for you. For me though, the tedium isn’t nearly as bad as it seems to be for you. I’m fine with my methods since they’ve never truly failed me Even with my relatively disorganized collection, I can find what I’m looking for pretty quickly even without metadata (Lots of my oldest stuff is also from Limewire, and even Kazaa. Let’s just not mention the bitrate of some of it lol).
I’m fine with gradually expanding my tastes too, so I don’t need Spotify for finding new things. To be fair though, I have found some truly great stuff through the site that I feel I would have never heard, so it’s not without its merits. Though if you’re ever bored and you want to do some manual discovery, Every Noise at Once is a bizarrely cool place and might lead to some interesting finds. But YMMV. And if I don’t feel like picking anything I’ll just throw on whatever internet radio station suits my fancy.
I get you on the storage space as well. Luckily for me, a lot of what I listen to (don’t make fun please) is chiptunes, and I found a kickass app for my phone that reads the same files that the real consoles read so I can enjoy them in truly perfect quality, plus I have actual weeks of music in this format for less than 300 megs.
I admit my tastes are highly eclectic - to say the least - but I’m perfectly content with that. It’s great that you, along with the majority of other people, have an option that best suits your needs. May we both be able to access our music solutions as long as possible.
Every noise at once looks awesome - thanks for the suggestion!
No immediate access to any song I want to hear
I have. Arrrr.
I mean… That’s not immediate, but it’s close depending on the music and it’s availability
No immediate access to any song I want to hear, but
WDYM? If you want to listen before full download, there are some FUSE download managers on linux.
I’m very new to Linux so I’ll have to look up what that’s all about. Got Mint on dual-boot, but I keep slipping back into Win10 because it’s easier sticking with what you know, you know?
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It takes me no longer to gain immediate access then it does for a stream user to search and play the stream, even with rare or weird songs.
I used to be hot shit back in the day when I could run a BitTorrent client anywhere on my Nokia N900. Nowadays anyone can do it.
Am I too FLAC to get these joke?
The guy on the left has mp3, the guy on the right has aif and the guy in the middle has flac
The owner of the mansion they’re having the party in: wav
What features have been removed from Spotify?
Nothing if you’re a premium user. Being able to pick songs on Free I think.
Being able to pick songs
Christ
Plenty of things have been removed from Spotify or just bastardized over the years.
The app is so much less useful overall, so many controls are just gone. It’s exhibit A for the dumbing down of modern apps. It went from being mature software designed to give users tools to control their experiences to a ranch designed solely to corral users into singular usage patterns.
and scrub through the song and rewind
I believe they’ve just placed a bunch of stuff behind their premium subscription, like shuffle/repeat, lyrics, etc.
And being able to look at what’s on a playlist.
What, really?!
Nm I was wrong. I wanted to talk shit and now here I am.
I respect the integrity.
Interesting. Not a Spotify user, but that’s pretty gross. Looks like the way things are going and I’m becoming more okay with that. There are more and more commodities I’m becoming more and more comfortable not paying for.
I really thought it would go in the other direction for me: Making more money leading to being ok spending more. But it turns out I just dislike being nickel and dimed.
Why would free users expect more stuff for free lol. If that’s Spotify’s biggest complaint then you know they’re doing pretty good.
They took free features away, so yeah, it’s reasonable to assume they’d be upset.
Let’s also remember it’s ad supported. The idea was you got the app as it was with or without ads, but now the app itself is pay walled.
If that’s Spotify’s biggest complaint then you know they’re doing pretty good.
bro really had to Google criticisms of Spotify because he couldn’t think of any other then wanting more free shit lol
I was wondering the same. I haven’t noticed anything.
FLAC master race check in.
FLAC on a NAS for self-hosted streaming.
I don’t have good solution for that other than what comes with synology. I guess how badly my collection is catalogued plays a bit of a role.
Physical copy on my phone SD card in 2023 lol
I don’t really notice a difference it just takes up storage
You’d probably notice it with better audio gear.
Absolutely.
I had gone awhile without buying any albums on cd. Icky Thump by the White Stripes came out, I downloaded it and had been jamming it in the car every day.
I took a friend out shopping and seen a copy and thought, “You know what? I want the album art.”
I took my burned cd out of the player and put the actual release on there.
“Boodoodwiddle dah boom boom boom boom boom boom boom, bah dah bow!!!”
I couldn’t believe how powerful it sounded.
I only fucked with flac after that.
You need to do spectral analysis too to see if it’s not upscale from 320bit
Exactly. Speakers make the difference. My car audio has a better range then my home setup. I haven’t gotten a subwoofer for my home. But the same songs from my phone sound a million times better in my car than on my home audio setup. Great speakers with a cheap head unit will sound better than the most expensive unit using cheap crappy speakers.
Yeah, bass suffers a lot.
It’s the same with movies. The difference between Netflix and a Blu-ray with Dolby TrueHD or DTS-MA is night and day on a half decent home theatre setup. On TV speakers you’d likely hear no difference at all.
I’m not going to pretend I can hear the difference, but I have plenty of storage so I don’t care. I like having the best version available
I have my music collection sitting as FLACs on my Multimedia PC, connected to my stereo System. I also have a service running that mirrors my music collection by converting it to m4a files and automaticly sends it over to my phone once it connects to my home wifi. I have set up the conversion (qaac64) so the difference between a flac and the m4a file is unnoticable over my bluetooth buds (playing the m4a from my phone).
While I cant hear the difference on my phone, I definiley can hear a difference on my stereo / hifi headphones
Depending on the Bluetooth code flac is indeed not needed.
Something like mp3 happens before it goes over the air unless you have higher codes like ldac
Or SBC-XQ
The bigger issue is that if you decide to convert to whatever new lossy format might become popular in the future, it will be worse to convert from lossy to lossy than from FLAC to lossy.
I use FLAC to archive my CDs and convert to mp3 to listen to them on my phone, in my car, etc.
Part of whether you can tell a difference depends on your setup. If you have average gear, it would only make a minor difference. Also depends how much you care about how things sound. Most people don’t give much of a shit if things are muddy or clear.
To all the friends I never met:
I am running a homeserver with all my music, videos, books, articles, source, etc. here is how you do it↓
- get a old desktop computer
- install gnu/linux on it
- connect it to your router through ethernet
- install nextcloud
- install samba, create a smb partition on your new server
- mount the drive into your regular computer, phone, laptop, tv. smart-stereo.
- enjoy all your music from anywhere without cluttering your devices with music, movies or books, or articles, or , or, or
- I usually just use vlc to access any media on my smb share :D just works
- get the nextcloud-client for phone and your other devices and access your smb share that way if you like and upload fotos, video or music there. :D
Thank me later (also if you use ALL linux devices you can skip the smb part and just use netdriv
Whips the llamas ass
Not the new worthless app, the original.
Duh. Ver 11? 17? Can’t remember
Version 1.0
It whipped a lama like it was nobody’s ass
Playing NiN on that while trying for Gourangas in GTA.
One word. Geiss
Milkdrop.
Came here to say this!
I’m surprised more folks on here don’t like FLAC… it fits better 😉
Yall may hate on em, but Spotify has not only made my life easier in that I don’t have to first pirate then sort all my music, but has also got me through some difficult times by recommending music that I would have never found otherwise. I’ve found groups that I love that have maybe 2000 monthly listens. Went to concerts in places I’ve never been for bands I never would have found. It’s more than just listening to your own music. The Monday and Friday discover playlists have been more beneficial to me than most anything else on this planet.
Fair
2016 was a total gamechanger for me musicly. Spotify opend so many genres for me. I listen to so much music it would be an absolute pain in the ass to collect and manage all that music.
It really whips the llama’s ass
The Enshittification has forced us to revisit the old way
.flac or bust
MULLVAD! Wireguard configuration! Quantum resistant encryption! Multi-hop!
ProtonVPN!
Qbittorrent!
Sorry…there I go again with my Tourette’s syndrome, spouting off the names of random software.
You should never pirate things! How are billionaires supposed to afford their colossal mansions on huge plots of land in the most expensive areas of the world if we pirate things?!
Billionaires had to step on and fuck over so many people to get where they are now! If we pirate things, they won’t be able to afford their platinum toilets covered in diamonds! Or their $50,000 watches. or their $5000 designer suits that they wear once and throw away every day.
