@robpike yes, like newspapers, magazines, and books.

It doesn't really bother me, and I use more of these things than anyone. I use Apple Music, Spotify, Overcast, SoundCloud, and BBC Sounds.

@robpike /me stares in mplayer (excepting, unfortunately, books)

@robpike not if you install itunes back on to your modern version of macos. :) https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive

@robpike Well... the experience I want to have with a book is quite different than the one I want to have with a playlist of songs or an individual song. And how I want to access/find these different audio media is totally different. So I don't find this surprising.

@robpike Spotify is trying to change this. Its app now features music, podcasts, and audio books all in one place. Perhaps others will follow.

One could maintain a (private) podcast feed with one’s own audiobooks. Then one can download & listen to them in one’s favorite podcast player. But one must know how to do all that…

@robpike Intellectual property surely has fueled innovation everywhere!

@robpike it’s the tools that require different metadata. Perhaps its time to use different tools

@robpike in my world I use mpv for all of those. shift + q to quit and save position, useful for stuff you want to resume like audio books and podcasts (and movies/tv shows etc).

@robpike Last year I started writing my own audio book player in Flutter, hoping eventually to add podcasts. I wanted to make a free audio player to rule them all, outside of corporate interests. I stalled on it when I realized the LibriVox data is fairly unusable. I did use it to read a few books, including David Copperfield.

@robpike You're saying you don't like listening to audiobooks on random play with phone messages and sung market summaries?

@robpike
I don't mind, because those audio files have different context, and context matters.

@robpike @preslavrachev
It’s understandable- different tasks require different tools even though they might use the same input.
You don’t use an axe to carve intricate forms on a piece of wood.
And you don’t use a pocket knife to cut a tree.
Even if both of those cases would be achievable, they won’t be efficient or pleasant.

@robpike gives me great pleasure to find ways to make them playable by any generic media player :3

@robpike If you walk into a store to buy headphones, there's zoom and discord logos on the packaging to indicate they work with those services.

@robpike I don't! I use the same app for all of these!

Though that does incur a boycott...

@robpike

@robpike Luckily, BBC podcasts (the majority of my podcast listening) still have RSS feeds serving up MP3s, so not that different from songs...

@robpike not after I'm done ripping them, they don't

@robpike this would be a stronger statement coming from someone who didn’t hate type systems in general

@robpike what if that's a good thing?

@robpike
no, take spotify album name, curl, pipe to a script that runs yt-dlp and play the resulting files with mpv. easy, and no different than it used to be (tape, CD)

@robpike VLC

@robpike @samwho Bring back iTunes!