Maintaining a Music Library, Ten Years On

I've had the same iTunes (now Music.app) library since 2004, with only one botched library migration with an iTunes update in like 2013. It has 40,000 MP3s or so. I still keep it on my boot drive too.

It's a treasure. I understand why most people don't do this, but I will probably forever.

A really significant amount of it isn't otherwise available on streaming services. While I'm an Apple Music subscriber, I still acquire my own mp3s for most of the new music I listen to.

iCloud Music Library is an immense value here as well. Rarely it will sync the wrong version of something in my library, but usually it's on the money. The fact that it doesn't cost anything extra on top of an Apple Music subscription is a huge boon, and it doesn't count against my iCloud data either.

I see this sentiment a lot, and I appreciate it. However personally the fewer things I own the better. The thought of having these things that I bought and have to remember I bought and then keep track of them brings me more anxiety than joy. I'm 64 and I grew up when music was scarce and options were limited. The only thing I want to own now is a playlist that points to songs I like. I'll then move to whatever service I like best and has most of the songs I like. Streaming services should cost much more than they do today so that artists can get compensated.

I continue to pay for iTunes Match out of fear and lack of understanding of what would happen if I stopped. I've had the same iTunes library since 2007 and losing the local content I've uploaded over those years is simply not something I am willing to risk for $24/yr.

Tangential point: The song Terryfold has been removed from Spotify.

It's still available on Youtube if I want to listen to it, but the point is that it's not in the same place, if you're a Spotify user, as all the other music you listen to.

Yes, there's a whole thing with Justin Roiland that's controversial (putting it lightly, maybe he should be in jail, but that's not for me to decide), and that song has obvious elements that relate to the controversy, but, dammit, I like the song for the song.

The point this article is making, and the reason for the author's decision ten years ago, is still relevant and I can't ever see it being irrelevant.

Thanks for the Triode recommendation. I've been looking for a clean and lightweight internet radio player. Will be checking it out.

Hijacking this thread with this question: What's the modern equivalent of the classic WinAmp that runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux? I want to just point the app at a folder of music and have it do its thing.

Somebody needs to introduce this man to Bandcamp. Pretty much all my music buying is through there now, I don't miss the "sometimes iTunes/Music adds two copies of your purchases to the library" bug at all. I do miss Old Itunes though, Music has so many little problems like the fact that hitting command-L to go to the currently playing track's info is broken from a lot of views, and none of my visualizer plugins work any more. RIP Aeon.

Call me boring, but for almost 20 years, my music library has been simply a NFS share on a generic PC host running Debian. I've never seen a need to complicate it further with iTunes-this and Jelly-that and Plex and radarr and sonarr and all the blah, blah, blah modern new software that keeps coming out to solve problems I don't seem to ever have.

Personally I use classic Windows Media Player and sync the folder between my house and my car. (Yes, my car has a Windows PC in it.)

I rip CDs I own, if you buy on Amazon you often get "autorip" when you purchase. Amazon's MP3 store is fine, I used to buy on Microsoft's back when it existed.

I'm with JKCaloun on having owned music for as long as I can remember. From the late 90s until the early 2010s I routinely bought CDs and ended up with a library of... 1200 or 1600 or so? A bunch of years back I made a concerted effort to rip all of them to a lossless format and then play that because, frankly, it's simpler.

Since then I've bought music digitally (Bleep, Bandcamp, etc), saved off copies of live sets (thanks, yt-dlp), or when needed bought CDs and ripped them.

It's just so nice having the library. Yes, tagging was a big pain. And yes, I need to have a backup strategy for it. But, I've ended up with a pretty substantial and well-curated library of stuff that requires no streaming services. I currently use Plexamp (via Plex) to listen to it because the system works well, but also because it's a directory of files I can eventually move to something else.

There's just so many hassles with streaming systems that, outside of discovering new music (which you can do other ways) I don't find them worth it. From dead spots while traveling to stuff that's been pulled to weird versions (or not being able to find weird versions) it's just nice to have My Collection when I want it.

I'm also really liking this Triode app [1] from the article. Sometimes I just want to listen to different things but without using some station-specific app... Here we go.

Old writeup on my CD ripping workflow, excuse the broken images: https://nuxx.net/blog/2016/01/17/full-cd-collection-ripping-...

[1] https://triode.app/

Nice to read, nice to see this message going out more.

I'm old enough (61) that owning music is what I've known most of my life. I have to say I've never not owned my own music. I went from vinyl to CDs—and then ripped the CDs digitally. The ripped tracks I have kept on hard drives, in the cloud. (I am continually adding music as I discover it so that it grows.)

Even though I eschew CDs these days for new music, I buy the digital tracks of the highest quality from Band Camp and add them to my storage locations.

For really top-notch albums, I still buy vinyl as a way of supporting the artist, I guess. I do infrequently put on vinyl (although I still think it is better than CD—it took The Muffs to convince me of that).

I maintain my own library too where I spent a while ripping my CD collection back in the early 2000s (and then again maybe 6 years ago when storage was cheaper to a lossless format). The CDs are all boxed up safely for archival storage, and most of my recent music has been purchased from wherever I can get DRM-free stuff. I fiddled with various self hosted servers but I’ve mostly stuck with iTunes Match since it lets me access it all from my phone, and then I just back up the library from my Mac to my NAS. I just don’t have the time or patience to play sysadmin at home anymore. I use Apple Music streaming for stuff I don’t care about potentially vanishing, but for the stuff that I really love and would be sad to lose, I buy it and put it in the archive. It does happen occasionally that stuff I don’t own that I found on Apple Music disappears, which can be annoying.

I think for most people this is overkill, but for music nerds like me where the collecting and curation is a big part of the enjoyment, maintaining your own library makes sense.

Heh I still have the first mp3 I downloaded in 1998.

Any time I see an article about music streaming, I pour one out for Rdio.

It had all the benefits of streaming and the properties that one would expect from library ownership. When I compare the 'features' offered by all the streaming services (I've encountered thus far), things have regressed drastically.

A few of the benefits I recall (from memory) that Rdio had:

- when setting a radio station and when you 'downvoted' an artist or a song, it only effected that particular station. So, if you wanted a 70's metal radio station, downvoting Metallica wouldn't affect your general 'metal' radio station or your 80s Metal Radio station.

- You could search by numerous parameters, including Label. So if you were looking for classical albums by Deutsche Grammophon, you could actually find those albums or songs.

These are just a couple of things I can recall from memory. I think it's also important to point out (this is based on memory and vibes), that the Rdio algorithm actually respected the user's wishes and didn't try to force things you might not want. Said algorithm was bought by Pandora (IIRC) and based on my experience with Pandora (and past experience with Rdio)...Pandora seems to have thrown it in the trash.

Compare all of these awesome UX experiences vs YouTube Music...where you can't even filter out AI trash from New Releases.

Suffice to say, Rdio was the crest of the wave for music streaming / discovery and everything since has been a regression. But you do get a bit more control if you go down the path of owning your library.

I’ve recently begun the same journey, except I skipped sync and went straight to Jellyfin (open source Plex) with the files stored on a home NAS. With Tailscale it means I can stream from anywhere. I’ve even been working on a native Linux client written in Rust and Gtk [1] which has been an absolute blast. I expect to have it on Flathub by the end of the month.

The whole process has made me more excited about music again. Part of that is listening to entire albums, another part is the feeling you get from directly supporting an artist when you purchase from Bandcamp.

[1] https://github.com/Fingel/gelly

I have a music folder 45000+ tracks and counting dating from as far back as 2003. I sync this 450 GB folder to two computers using syncthing and then use rsync to synchronize a subset of these albums (folders by format) to SD Cards inside iPod's. I use Strawberry player for listening (a fork of Clementine) and a combination of beets and MusicBrainz for tagging. Then, I scrobble my listens on ListenBrainz. When I'm in the car or on mobile, I use YouTube Music and it scrobbles to ListenBrainz as well.

I probably should use navidrome or a similar technology to serve the files. I already do this for audiobooks and podcasts and use Tailscale to access it when I'm not on my local network.

I've pursued a similar strategy via CDs found in resale shops. I've gotten a good collection going, but there's a very specific selection of CDs popular enough for people to buy but not so good that they kept it.

I made this switch years ago and love it. I also strongly recommend Marvis Pro, a fantastic app for navigating your Apple Music collection on iOS.

> but even better is the feeling that you're free from the capricious whims of any corporate policy change

Not even just policy changes per se. Spotify stopped supporting certain hardware. They changed their API so other DJ apps I used no longer had access to the library. It’s just annoying when you’re trying to establish workflows and things change for no good reason.