I personally find those over ear hearing protection uncomfortable and sweaty, especially trying to wear them for a full shift but I have tried that method in the past.

I can’t say I have any experience with ear buds as they have never fit my ears well so even before bone conduction I would gravitate more towards headphones that hooked onto my ears or more often than not just closed back headphones. That being said I know that you would be sacrificing bass primarily in terms of audio quality when comparing the two.

The bone conduction does give you a weird sensation of bass in the way they vibrate against the side of your head but it is no substitute for actual bass, so your main sacrifice in the comparison will always be audio quality. That being said all the points I said outweigh the loss in quality for me.

I can wear these for a whole day and they are never uncomfortable like I would get with any other headphones. On top of that they excel at audiobooks which is what probably 70% of my listening is. The tech was originally developed for military comms so as to keep the ears open to surrounding noises and as such they were designed to be used for speech initially.

The sensation is a bit different to regular headphones too. Regular headphones are using your ear drum like you would usually where as bone conduction is vibrating through your bones directly to the three little bones in your ear that you use to hear, bypassing the ear drum entirely. Because of this it sounds like the audio is coming more from the center of your head rather than from outside of it as it would with regulars. In combination with in ear ear defence I can block out outside noise so well that you don’t need the bone conduction up loud it just feels like the audio is comfortably coming from inside my head in a weird way.

On top of all of that it is no where near as fatiguing to listen to things for extended periods of time like if you use regular ones, regardless of how loud you have them.

Ultimately it is a different experience and particularly for audiobooks they absolutely excel. I was skeptical at first and it took me nearly 2 years of reading about then and questioning if they would even work before I bit the bullet. Since I first got them though they barely ever left my head and I use then for nearly everything, and I’m a guy who use to carry around closed back headphones with an external amplifier and everything but these just win in so many other respects for day to day use.

That is fair enough. I use mine in all weathers and have been so drenched many times I may as well have jumped in the sea and never had issues with water ingress.

I haven’t really looked at what others have said about them so only have my own experiences. My first pair did eventually stop charging but that was when they were still using micro USB for their charging ports, I have never had an issue with charging since they started using the magnetic charging connection.

I am now on my 6th pair in the last 12 years but the reason I change them is due to battery life. I use them 10 - 12 hours 6 days a week and then usually 3 or 4 on the 7th day. That amount of constant charging is bound to degrade the battery so I’m never annoyed and think that is worth the money for me. They usually still have plenty of life left in them when I switch but I like being able to have 12 hours of use on a charge ans not have to worry about charging them during the day.

Bone conduction headphones, specifically Aftershokz.

Running, cycling, walking whatever activity I’m doing outside I can listen to music or audiobooks and still be aware of my surroundings.

Taking an acid trip? Now I can hear the birds and have a nice background soundtrack to the day whilst I trip in the woods!

Working with heavy machinery, I can wear ear protection and also listen to what ever I want to pass the time. No more blasting headphones in an attempt to drown out the machine noise and fucking my ears up.

Fucking love these things!

Maybe I’m just being blind then. I can deal with slow I just didn’t find what I wanted and the search in the help section didnt help.

I’ll give it another chance and have a look. I just barely know what I’m doing with custom domains yet as this is my first forray and so may have been looking at what I needed and didnt realise :)

The website is horrific and not being able to find what I want on there is what is putting me off switching to them right now

AirVPN does, I have used them for 6 years or so ans been pretty happy.

Agreed. I too much prefer LSD but I know generally speaking more people seem to prefer shrooms over LSD. At least in my experience.

LSD

Haha yeh I get you, it is definitely used more in the US as here the general populace tend to know what the bigger genres such as dnb, house etc are so dont need a catch all concept.

Ah Dom Whiting, yeh I know that guy. I remember seeing his videos years ago when he only had a few people following around. He was in my city this year and I joined in the ride for a bit. Absolute chaos but mad vibes! Definitely need more of that in the world these days!

We don’t call it EDM here, that is a dirty “word” ;) but yeh, there are still some great nights depending on where you are. I went to an old skool hardcore night recently that was fucking sick and most big towns and cities you can find decent drum and bass nights. Plenty of Jungalist nights in that same vein too.

If you are in Brighton, Bristol or London you can find decent proper dubstep nights (not that American brostep crap) and I’m sure there are others out there.

I’m certain all kinds of flavours of house and techno etc are out there too just less my wheelhouse.

The best part about all of these nights though, at least in my area of interest, they are all taking place in small, dark and dingy clubs with absolutely sick sound systems. The way it should be! You haven’t lived until you are chewing your face off at 5 am standing next to the bass bins feeling the music course through you whilst having a life altering epiphany xD

It obviously isn’t exactly what you’ve described but you should check out Erenshor

For the more mainstream music I have I went through and used Picard and manually reviewed everything and altered accordingly before saving the changes. This was only around 10km tracks so wasn’t too bad, just slowly chipped away at it over time. Now it is in a good place anything new I add I can just do the same and it doesn’t take too long.

I tried a few automated ways but they are all unreliable. I don’t believe this is really anything you can automate and still get accurate results, tou have to put in the time.

My DJ library which is mostly stuff that would never be recognised by any software is about 25k songs and growing. I went through and systematically loaded all the tracks in batches into mp3tag and manually reviewed and edited every track to be tagged correctly and within the naming convention I had chosen whilst at the same time giving me the opportunity to cull anything I didn’t want.

It was extremely time consuming but ultimately the only way I was going to achieve what I wanted.

After that they would all be run through mixed in key. So now anything new I get goes through the same process of mp3tag to mixed in key to the library and now I’m in a good place.

Note for anyone else doing this, always do mp3tag first, if you run mixed in key first then even just opening the tracks in mp3tag it will often overwrite your key tagging (if you are using comments tag to contain keys) so you’ll have to run mixed in key again. Even if you dont edit any of the tags on that track.

Ultimately I think you have to put in the time to get what you want, any automated solution is going to give you lots of incorrect results and end up tagging your stuff into a worse position than you were in to start with.