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eramdam
@eramdam

On keeping a music library

re: Nat's post. It's a good post, I just don't want to spam her notifications with a long-ass post lol

You know what rules? Putting together a music collection. Seeing your tastes expand and change and diversify over time without needing some "Wrapped"-style marketing event to tell you what you listened to.

As a self-proclaimed music hoarder, I can confirm, it rules. I say "music hoarder" because I've had the library for so long and I have that manic tendency of "hey, why not grab a full album even if I only listened to a single?" which inflates the collection real quick. I make horribly big purchases on Bandcamp Friday, meaning that sometimes I add ~10 releases at a time, most of which I've only "judged on vibes"1. It's chaotic, messy BUT:

I basically don't need any "discover weekly" or what not. Like really though. I just play my whole library on shuffle by albums2 and I just let the flow take me. Sometimes I might skip an album because I'm not In The Mood or whatever but otherwise it rules. Every so often I'll be like "oh shit I forgot about this album, it rules!" or "oh shit, I had THAT in my library??" and it's great. Can definitely recommend if you can do it.

Now the part For The Sickos, my music "workflow"3:

  • some numbers first: ~25K tracks, across ~1K artists and ~2.2K albums, totalling into ~233GB. This is all MP3 320kbp/s. I genuinely don't need FLAC for a day-to-day listening, I can't tell the difference with my Bluetooth headphones (that I use 99% of the time) anyway so the storage cost isn't worth it.
  • players of choice: Music.app on Mac and Doppler on iPhone, more on Doppler later.
  • everything is local to my computer(s). I only have a desktop and a laptop so it's manageable but I rely on Apple Music's Sync Library to easily stream stuff I may not have locally from my laptop or my phone.
  • Most of the music gets downloaded to my iPhone with Sync Library but I only really depend on that in "no signal" scenarios. When I do have internet access, I use Doppler's (upcoming, sorry Ed) Plex integration to play a mirrored (on my NAS) copy of my library on the go. Doppler is a great music player for iPhone, I can recommend it.
  • For "really, no signal" scenarios like Being On A Plane, I'm rocking a modded iPod 5th gen. It genuinely rules. It has a modern battery and flash storage so I can have all my music AND it practically lasts forever so I can just listen to music for all my flight(s) without worrying about decimating my phone's battery.
  • Almost everything I listen to gets scrobbled. This is pure "I started doing it in 2009 and never stopped" behavior but I think it's fun having a history and some stats. Last.fm also has a bunch of recommendation systems but I rarely use them lmao. Last.fm is good.
  • Most of my music historically has been pirated stuff, I started collecting that back when I was a teenager and I didn't really have other options. My Mom taught me how to use eMule and Kazaa back in the day, so you could say that shit runs in the family.
  • These days when I find stuff that's from Big Artists4 I rarely have qualms about pirating. Everything else I try to find Bandcamp or other official digital copies for, but that's sometimes literally impossible for some releases!! Which is insane!! I shouldn't have to rip Spotify or Deezer to get fucking files for a newly released album in 2024.
  • For albums I really really like, I'll buy a physical copy, usually vinyls because while CDs are cute... I don't find them as appealing as vinyl records as objects, you know? I obviously use Discogs to catalogue all that stuff because otherwise it gets super tricky to know whether or not I have a given release when I am in a record store lol
  • For "ingest", I rely on beets to properly tag and organize all my files. I used to spend hours as a teen researching and applying The Right Tags on my files, which was made necessary because I would get random albums from sources where "here's a bunch of mp3s with just a track name" was the norm. Nowadays I let beets take the wheel, it uses MusicBrainz as a source by default but I have it set up to also use Discogs and Bandcamp as sources, it's perfect. I also tell Music.app to NOT re-organize my media files on import, so everything is nicely laid out in a Album Artist/Album/01 - Song.mp3 structure.
  • Oh also one good thing Beets does and that EVERY OTHER PLATFORM SHOULD DO IMO is use the artist tag as intended when dealing with featurings. Meaning Song (feat. ArtistB) by ArtistA becomes Song by ArtistA (feat. ArtistB) and the album artist tag has ArtistA. It's insane that this is so hard to find as a feature in other music players, anyway.
  • I mentioned earlier that I usually grab MP3 files but I also keep some "archives" of stuff in FLAC. To that end, I'll use bandcamp-collection-downloader to download a copy of my Bandcamp collection in FLAC on my NAS. This is pure "what if something is taken down" paranoia but it already saved my ass so it's worth it. In the same vein, I'll keep a FLAC copy of "rare" releases: digital downloads from physical copies, or just stuff that's impossible to find elsewhere for a reason or another.
  • that's basically it? If I remember something else I'll add it to this post. This is how I live lmao.

  1. meaning I skim a few tracks to see if I jive with it. Never failed so far.

  2. Shuffling songs is deranged and you can't convinced me otherwise.

  3. yes I realize calling it a "workflow" is insane, shush

  4. Like, if an artist's audience is counted in 10s of millions, I think me pirating MP3s won't make a dent in their numbers, they'll be fine lmao.