continuing thoughts re: Spotify

Missing in Spotify (and in direct MP3 purchases) is what we used to call the “liner notes” (etymology? did they line the cardboard LP jackets? or what?), a usually-valuable source of information about an album’s contents. Someday somebody will gather up those texts and/or image files, much as people are now digitizing and releasing old tech mags. I notice that quite a few of the European sources for (perhaps-legal-perhaps-not) .rar files of albums do routinely include scans of accompanying notes. I guess I’m assuming that the mainstream consumers of mostly-pop MP3s are perceived to be not interested in album art or narrative detail. Over the years I’ve learned a lot from liner notes, and I miss them.

I’m continuing to find remarkable depth in Spotify, and wondering if there’s a way to send the audio stream from my desktop to the kitchen Roku (which plays my iTunes library happily enough). In the Windows world, Jamcast seems to be the solution, but I don’t see a Mac analog. Of course I could just plug the iPhone (with its Available Offline content from Spotify) directly into the little Bose unit that the Roku Soundbridge is hooked to…

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