I never found a browsing interface as good as Winamp's. Reset the dial-up for a new IP, run the command, and you were back in within a minute.īeing a dick on IRC was how I learned to program. and some time later I'd inevitably be k-lined, because of course the kind of kid who did this was the kind of kid who got k-lined.īeing k-lined wasn't an issue though. It then read the body of the email and 'clicked' every link it found in order to verify the email, and logged me into the IRC server with the auto-generated credentials. The SMTP server just literally reponded with 354 to the DATA command and a 250 to everything else, which was more than enough for my needs. The reasoning, of course, was that there was an IRC server that I frequented that required a web sign-up, so I wrote mIRC script that screen-scraped the sign-up page, solved the 'captcha' (an unobfuscated type-in-this-number field solved by using an open source OCR library) and then used a random local-part and a host-part of a dotted quad - think - that was a hosted my box at home that was running mIRC. I wrote a reeaally primitive SMTP server in mIRC's scripting language. Is there anything that can adequately replicate this type of radio style listening while using one's own library that doesn't require them to spend hours and hours both proactively seeking out new music and meticulously updating their library's metadata using something like Musicbrainz (or whatever the modern equivalent now is)? In addition these services are smart enough to understand that vibe and mix new music in that fits that vibe which I therefore might also enjoy.

Sometimes I just want a specific musical vibe without having to design a playlist or choose a specific singular artist. They provide a middle ground between just random music selection and entirely intentional selection. It is that they remove the need to do the work in both music selection and discovery. So much more exciting and engaging than fucking Spotify radio.īut what you describe takes work and Spotify radio and similar features from their competitors don't.Īs someone who also built up a big library during the golden ages of music piracy, the primary benefit of the Spotify-like services is not their libraries. >Foobar2000 was such a golden age of music discovery.

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