Climate Town, is this you??

Hey, thanks for the suggestion! The website does work for me (although the web-app doesn’t, yeah). As for the project: Decentralized sharing, on-chain DRM, p2p social features and payments? The project seems ambitious to say the least. Although many of its features stand in stark contrast with what Disney, Apple and co. currently exploit, so I doubt they would ever have the motivation to join in.

I’m going to follow its development for sure, thanks again for shining a light on it.

I have no clue what Warhammer is or how to solve any of this, but I consider myself a jolly guy. Probably for the entirety of last month I’ve never laughed as much as I did while reading your post.

So hey, I wouldn’t wish harm on anyone, but if a horrible chain of misadventures like this ever happens again please be sure to share it with us. So we can comfort you, of course.

I appreciate the effort, thank you very much! I’ll look into it as soon as I’m home, hopefully a VPN makes it accessible👍

Honestly, after seeing that there’s truly no GOG equivalent for movies, neither now nor probably ever, this is the solution I like the most.

If I want something fast, I get the file through “other means”. If I like it and want to support the production behind it, I add it to a list and at the end of the year I do what you’ve said.

This way I neither accumulate DVDs nor throw them in the trash, I support the production, I make my neighbors happy and get a high quality file on top. Sometimes it’s the simplest things, thanks for the reminder and the idea :) Hopefully in the future this will all be possible digitally.

Somehow wasn’t expecting this in the context of games but of course makes perfect sense. Denuvo =/= DRM, the latter being much more broad. Thanks for the knowledge nugget!

“Wait, so you’re telling me you can watch a movie you bought without using the official app?”

This might not be very popular, but I find their games section to be lacking as well. I’ve recently tried GOG for the first time expecting a “money for an .exe file” kind of approach for every game that had its Denuvo removed on Steam. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Dragon Quest XI without DRM!

Oh boy, how naive…

Thanks a lot for your suggestions, admittedly those are all fairly niche and don’t really have up to date content but they do indeed offer a digital video file for money (apart from iTunes, I’ve tested it and can’t seem to get a DRM free video file). Who knew that GOG had a movies section!

As for my personal takeaway from your suggestions and those from others, I guess the best approach is to continue to split the “supporting” part from the “getting a file” part.

You’re right but the same argument goes for the music industry, yet they still allow direct downloads. I have phrased it incorrectly, I certainly don’t expect a solution for everything from you kind people, I’m simply taken aback by the fact that it truly wasn’t my bad googling skills that prevented me from finding such a service, it’s that for visual media there simply isn’t one.

To your other point, there are many people involved in the creation of music as well, altough not as many as those involved in movies and such. After I’ve made my purchase, may that be a DVD for a movie or a song on Qobuz, I do assume that my money passes through many more intermediaries and studios and execs that all want their cut before it finally gets distributed to the people that it took to create the content. That’s another huge can of worms. I was simply looking for a service that offered a digital file for money, just like with DVDs but without the plastic.

Splitting the “file getting” from the “supporting artists” part is my current approach for movies and such, but I fear that Prime Video isn’t a very good service for the “supporting” part since their cut is so big. But as you’ve already correctfully said, if I have to split my approach to movies, then I’ll be on the lookout for a service that offers digital purchases and that I support, which entails that it doesn’t take half of my money before it even reaches the movie studios that will want their cut too.

Yeah…thanks for the clarification, when I read the download part I expected to get a file, not just an offline viewing experience. I’ll be more careful now whenever I read that a service offers downloads, I came in from the perspective of someone buying music and thought I would get a file.

Splitting the “file getting” from the “supporting artists” part is generally an approach that I’m fine with, but I fear that Prime Video isn’t a very good service for the “supporting” part since their cut is so big.

Oh I nearly forgot but specifically Prime Video is indeed a service that allows direct movie downloads, thanks for the suggestions!

Altough…now that I’ve looked at it more closely and if I understood it correctly:

1. one can only use their proprietary app to initiate a download
2. one can only watch the downloaded content on their proprietary app, and
3. the downloaded movie expires after 30 days.

I’ll try it out as soon as I can, but if true then this is just a horrible experience.

That sounds like a really solid approach!

As for Amazon Prime Video, they aren’t really a company/service I trust with supporting the artists behind it, also seen by the fact that they’re increasing their cut each year (Amazon’s average cut is now at 50%, and somehow I have a hunch that they won’t stop there). And I was already being generous by asking for a 50% split, compared to platforms like Steam (30%) or the App Store (30-15%) it’s insulting.

Basically, for me Qobuz’s attractiveness doesn’t lie in offering direct downloads, as we all know there are other ways. Personally it’s attractiveness lies in not having to support artist by buying tickets to their show, buying their merch, buying CDs and leaving them sealed anyways, donating or funding their sideprojects, but instead in supporting them by directly buying their product, in that case it being their music. All the other stuff is just waste I don’t want.

Often times on this sub there’s always an alternative being proposed, so I’m a bit shocked that this time most of the answers are simply “no”.

I have nothing against buying what I enjoy. But I also want to use my own streaming service (be it Plex or Jellyfin), I want to watch it offline, I want to not live in fear that it gets taken away, and most importantly I want to know that atleast 50% of my money rightfully goes to the artists of said content.

As I’ve said in another comment, it’s shocking that even the notoriously copyright-obsessed music industry allows retailers to sell high quality digital copies, while the film-industry just plainly doesn’t.

Interesting concept. If I understand it correctly it didn’t truly let you own the stuff that you bought. It instead gave you a proof-of-purchase allowing you to stream your purchased content on different streaming platforms (like Netflix, etc) as long as you have that one proof-of-purchase. However, if the platforms remove your purchased content from their catalogues at any time, it would be gone. So you’re right, almost but not quite like DVD.

I wonder why the notoriously copyright-obsessed music industry allows retailers to sell digital copies (and high-quality ones), while the film-industry doesn’t.

Spotify currently does not work, apparently they got blocked and are currently arranging a new proxy.

I tested it with Qobuz. I copy-pasted the link directly from Qobuz, and it somehow managed to pull a full 24 bit, 48KHz, flac file from source with just the Qobuz link. I still don’t understand how. It works with full albums too.

Damn, you’ve definitely put in the work. Thank you for providing such a detailed feedback, meaning that thanks to you this is now the most up to date resource on how to move from Note Station to Joplin for future peeps that have your same problem!

I think you can rest assured that you’ve made the best choice in moving to a more flexible format now, regardless of any future “Joplin vs. Obsidian vs. whatever” discussions that might come up. Because if you’re annoyed with Note Station now, I can absolutely guarantee that moving decades worth of .nsx notes for all your family, potentially manually, would have been hell on earth in the future.

One last experiment, now that you can: Let’s say you wanna move from Joplin to Obsidian tomorrow. These are the #1 and #2 results when searching for “Import Joplin to Obsidian”. Just take a look. It’s almost comically easy compared to now, so I’d say bright times are ahead :)

Ahh yes, the well known dilemma of “data portability”, also know as “If you can’t leave with your stuff, you might as well stay with us”. That’s something I’d definitively recommend you look out for in the future, here, I’ll make the first step for you [for Joplin]:

• Joplin stores all your notes on your device and allows you to export them in several nonproprietary formats, including markdown and HTML, which are human readable and directly importable by generally all open-source note apps. Joplin being open-source helps too, as it means that anyone can directly add new ways of exporting notes into different formats should you ever want to switch. Joplin is not perfect since it still changes your files during usage, but one could argue that it’s well within reason since it adds several features on top that the raw markdown format doesn’t have.

As for your problem at hand, imma be honest chief, it’s not going to be perfect. You have two options, but both of those options will require that you manually adjust some notes, that’s just a consequence of today’s world in which different note apps are built completely different and there not being a universally agreed on format that can easily contain all the contents of a single note in one file. Synology using their weird format doesn’t make it easier either so you’re going to have to put in the work to break out of that file format first. This is true regardless if you ultimately decide to switch to Obsidian, SilverBullet, MoeMemos, Nextcloud Notes, you name it. With Joplin at least, you’ll be able to automate the import of 98,9% of all your notes, but even that still means that you’ll have to manually adjust some notes. Here are your options:

1. Automate the process:

   • There are several scripts that automatically take the Sinology .NSX export you just created, then they translate all it’s content into .md files that you can then easily import in one-click into Joplin. Here are the ones I’ve found:
     • https://github.com/Maboroshy/Note-Station-to-markdown/
       • “It creates md files and puts all attachments into a sub folder.”
     • https://github.com/xinbindai/Note-Station-to-Joplin
       • A customized version of the above script “to export notes/images in markdown + Front Matter (Directory) that can be [more] easily imported into Joplin.”
     • https://github.com/andreas-vester/notestation-to-joplin
       • This script might be worth it if the above scripts don’t work. Some people had issues with this script, but managed to mostly fix them. See here.

2. Copy-paste each note:

   • This sounds tedious at first, but once you get in the flow, it isn’t that bad. It isn’t doable if you have 10’000+ notes, but in my case, I got it in a few hours. Remember that even if it takes you one hour a day for a week to move them all, since you’re switching to a nonproprietary format you only have to do this once and then you’re set for life. This person on the Synology forum had your same problem and ended up choosing this option.

Lastly, my personal experience: I moved from Google Keep to Joplin and I know nothing about scripts or code, so I copy-pasted most of my notes manually into Joplin, downloaded the attachments and added them manually, then reformatted the notes manually. It was a pain in the ass. But nowhere near as painful as importing 1000, 20’000, hell possibly 100’000 notes that will probably accumulate in the years to come. Importing them in a different note app would be straight up inhuman or at the very least impossible without a script, so I’d personally recommend you and your family make the switch to a more flexible file format right now, while you still can.

Good luck!