Will the pandemic change our attitude to streaming?

Roon Software Discussion
21

Well, we’ve known since the early 80’s, at least, that thin client computing makes a lot of sense from a corporate point of view. Put the big expensive noisy compute hardware in one place which can be properly climate controlled, backed up, etc., and use cheap almost empty clients at the periphery to provide access to them. But the logistics and the infrastructure have changed mightily over the last 40 years till it’s finally possible to make that happen.

Interestingly enough, this is the exact opposite of the Internet model, which has a hollow network connected to highly functional endpoints. Two different designs to optimize two different goals. Cost versus ruggedness.

22

The stats vary by region, but in North America, a majority of Covid-19 deaths are in some version of long-term care. These people have already had their collections “disbursed” by their kids.

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23

I am sure you know the concept of rebound effects. Yes, energy efficiency has increased by a lot, but overall consumption has increased even more. So the overall environmental footprint of cloud computing is enormous and growing.

Out of curiosity, I am not a computer expert, how often do data centers have to replace the discs in average? That is also a point to consider. Production and shipping from China.

To your main point: I am very happy about the ability to work from home when it is applicable. And the usability of programs has increased a lot lately. However, I wouldn’t welcome a professional world where companies don’t even provide a work place, and where working from home would be a must. I mean, having a proper work place at home is expensive. You have to have an extra room, pay more rent etc. in that sense it would be smart for companies to outsource these costs and have the employees deal with it.
For myself I can say that I hugely prefer a workplace where I meet people and can interact face to face. That is also why I hope this Corona stuff is over sooner that later :wink:

24

Ha — Google once said that in their data centers, the average time between disk failures is 7 minutes.

But note, they have millions of disk drives In each data center. And they replicate data not just between drives in each computer (RAID style) but between multiple computers, in multiple racks, in multiple data centers. So when a disk fails, there is no running around screaming, nobody notices, the system automatically continues working and provisions an additional drive to maintain the redundancy, and once a week a guy walks around with a wheelbarrow and pulls the duds.

This is one of the differences with cloud computing. That’s how you achieve five nines availability (99.999%, or half an hour down time per year including scheduled maintenance) which is often a contractual requirement with financial penalties attached.

25

I wasn’t, sadly, walking into the local record store before the stay-at-home orders and I don’t believe I’ll find myself in a record store after. So, from a music consumption perspective my routine has not changed. I was already streaming. I will continue to stream. I will continue to buy the occasional album online.

I do find it kind of funny the “climate” arguments over using data centers. Power is a significant cost to running a data center. This is why the big players have invested into their own, mostly clean, power generation plants. The ability to scale in / scale out as demand fluctuates is significantly more efficient than the raw CPU and memory I keep energized in my home while I’m sleeping. Not to mention… I have class A/B amps which I don’t turn off either. I am the problem not the data centers.

I think where streaming music must evolve, change, and disrupt is in the shared experiences. We’re still listening by ourselves. How can a service like Roon bring more than me together with myself? How can I include my friends? How can I share, send, tag, whatever something I’ve found and now want to share? How can I invite others into my listening environment? The most interesting, and successful, service to do this is Fortnite. Diplo did a concert in Fortnite a couple weeks ago and 10.7 million people showed up. How do we bring this sort of shared experience to the Hi-Fi world? The Community DJ extension is exciting to me because it try’s to answer this question. It brings together people in a shared listening experience. I hope to see more of this.

But, yes, there is a distinct line within Roon between “local” and “streaming”. That line should continue to blur and possible just go away. My music collection includes everything I’m subscribed to. It’s not just the CDs collecting dust on the shelf. And, while I do feel some nostalgia for those physical discs, I find it more frustrating to use an interface that is there for the sake of nostalgia than any real underlying benefit to treat local FLAC and cloud FLAC differently.

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26

Yeah, what he said!

27

And don’t think they haven’t noticed that, too.

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28

Me, too, when I can’t find it on Qobuz. Most recently
RoonShareImage-637249123319137330
Wonder why that isn’t on Qobuz? :rofl:

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29

This reminds me of the good old mainframe days, when it was an IBM standard that every product had a white paper and every white paper had a section called RAS - Reliability, Availability, Serviceability. Even trivial components had an analysis of failure modes and probabilities, service method and time required, the possible impacts on systemwide operations, etc. They took that stuff seriously.

30

It’s amazing how many start-ups I talk to who have really good software sitting in the cloud but cannot speak intelligently about their reliability / resiliency model. Deer in headlights when you start asking the questions. They just keep repeating “AWS”. What’s your disaster recovery model for your databases? “AWS is 100% reliable” <-- That’s not an answer! They literally are passing a note from their cloud provider to me when I ask but they have no idea what the note means and they have never even thought to test it. Hey… big surprise friends… things go down. Things get corrupted. It has happened. It will happen. What’s your plan?

31

In my case I have used cassettes, vinyl, CDs, SACD, DVD-A,MP3, Streaming, and Downloads. My age allows me to sit in the middle between the traditional physical media, and intangible ones (streaming, stored media, etc). What I can say is that so far, the most convenient way for me to listen to music is to have stored my media, and streaming. I haven’t bought any album for years, either from iTunes or from HD Tracks, now all the new albums I stream it directly the day it is launched. I have paid subscriptions to Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal. I can say listening the moment the new album is released is so amazing! I won’t enter the analog vs digital quality, let’s just asume that analog is better for sake of this comment, however, the fact of immediately having the content, and with current Hi Fi digital equipment, I am extremely satisfied to come home, be at work, be on the go, and have access to all my music, it is so seamless that I think this will be the way to the future.

Now, with this virus situation, more than ever I will keep streaming or digital buying content, as it will come clean, and immediately.

I above all, am very happy to be able to listen to music all day from home, as when I am on the go for me is almost impossible to do.

32

Not the same type of use case or data center, but extremely good data: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

33

One problem for cloud providers when a drive fails, how can they ensure no customer data leaks? If the drive is so broken they can’t operate it, how can they wipe it?

They have a big, burly, bearded guy named Björn with a sledgehammer…

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34

Padraic in Ireland etc…:grimacing:

35

I drill them. Have a big box full out in the garage I need to get to. Only a few are failed. We remove them from retired PCs before giving them away or recycling them. (For business reasons.)

36

They have multiple copies on multiple disks, on multiple racks, on multiple places (geographic redundancy).

Usually a private cloud will have a high availability system which one is master, the other slave and when one breaks, the other takes control. Some will have a Disaster Recovery plan in which they will have 3 systems just in case, and so on and so forth.

I was fortunate enough to have a project with a bank for Cloud services, and they have this information stored on high tech facilites, in a ground where no earthquakes are big, thick walls, redundant cooling, energy systems, arm guards in order to avoid breach, super systems monitoring digital attacks, and a large etcetera. They are guarding financial data, one of the most critical mission information one could ever think of, and so far, data is safe.

Our humble music libraries (even the biggest collector with 1 million albums) is pretty much safe that nothing will happen to their data. And before anyone says that hackers have stolen millions of stuff, let me remind you that those cases are because the security put on those Data Centers were not up to the task.

If a disk is broken, they open the rack, hot-swap the disk (no turning off of any equipment), change it, then the disk replicates and then the disk is operable, no data loss.

In my personal case, I will keep relying on Data Centers for my info, including my music, plus I will keep having my streaming services (if data is lost, its their responsibility not mine haha), and storing my local media in my computer, and in two or three different storage hard disk, just in case.

37

When I worked for McAfee, we had old drives with thousands of computer viruses on them. We actually took them to a foundry and physically witnessed them being destroyed.

38

To get back to the OP a bit, it isn’t about whether each of us likes streaming, and it isn’t about whether cloud will be an important trend. Will our mindset shift, and what does that mean?

One discussion that triggered the question in my mind was this mundane issue: you find an album on Tudal or Qobuz, and the LIKE button doesn’t work. Of course, you have to add it to your library first. WTF? Why do I have to go through that step? Of course, the LIKE setting is stored in Roon’s own database so it can quickly focus on it, you can’t set a LIKE flag in the database for an album that’s not in the database.

Ok, but when I click LIKE, that means I want to do that, Roon should do what is necessary, add the album to the database. Yes, it’s reasonable that an album that I like should be added to the library. No, got nothing to do with liking it, I may HATE the album, want to be able to do that too, add it to the library if you want, but flag it as HATE or LIKE, that’s what I want.

Exposing the requirement that the album be added to the library is wrong in two ways. First, it exposes an implementation detail to the user, breaking the abstraction. It’s like the save function, which is just about the cost difference between RAM and disk. I shut down Word, and it says “do you want to save your document first?” Of course I want to damn well save it, I worked on it for an hour, what are you, an idiot? “Uh, yes.”

But more deeply, it exposes the distinction between my stuff and the universe of music. Not my owned, local music, Roon hides that distinction, one of its most important breakthroughs, together with hiding the distinction between file formats, sampling rates, PCM vs DSD. But this exposes the mine distinction.

This is old fashioned. I think I swim in an ocean of music, millions of albums, I talked about the long tail in the discussion of The Fabulous Value of Recommended For You. Yes, things I have “added to my library” is a meaningful practical distinction, it’s easier to browse among a few thousand albums I have selected than among 100 million. But it’s only a convenience, it isn’t fundamental.

I can already play an album directly from the cloud. Why should we insist on the distinction?

But I know there are people who dislike the idea of cluttering up their library with stuff from the cloud.

This is what this thread is about. A mundane operational complication, that at heart illuminates a philosophical distinction that maybe can and should go away.

39

No. That’s what the “set” is about.

But what you’re really talking about is a minor feature request for Roon. To auto-import albums from “remote” clouds when you press the “Like” button. Roon already supports multiple “cloud” sources: your local “cloud”, Tidal, Qobuz. It’s the Roon mindset, that regards the local cloud as somehow “special”, that has to change.

40

That minor feature request triggered my writing this post, but it is about something deeper.
First, it’s not about local files vs. cloud, add to library doesn’t make it local. It blesses the album as mine.
Second, it’s about softening the distinction.
Practically: Roon has a lot of capabilities, edit metadata, add to playlist, add to tag, share, view credits, go to composition, radio, seeding Vālence — do you know offhand which work for albums that are not in the library? When I look at it, the choices are not unreasonable if you understand Roon’s architecture, but that’s the point, why should I have to understand Roon’s architecture? And what about my mother-in-law? Consider this: I look at an album that I have not added, I select on of the artists who is not in my library, click on composer, I see some compositions from this album, but she had written other compositions that are on another album that is not in my album either, will it show up in the composition list? Can you guess. I guessed wrong. But I don’t want that question to even exist.
Philosophically: it’s about my ocean mindset. I want to think about the ocean. Favoriting is a good thing. The library is about a second level of favoriting, that’s good too. But there should be no difference in capabilities.

So in my mind, it starts with a philosophy and leads to a variety of design decisions, and in turn to engineering decisions.

But as I said, there are people who disagree with the philosophy. Perhaps also with the feature decisions, but we can’t resolve the feature decisions with resolving the philosophical decisions.

And we should note that this conversation could not even be conceived of with Roon 1.0, before the addition of streaming. And really not before the addition of Vālence.