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Recently, I've started compiling all the songs on Spotify I listened to that became unplayable into a playlist; that number has reached well over 100. Now, I'm aware that this is a much less common experience with most people, as my taste comprises of music that often uses copyrighted samples, but for me this is a problem I've been dealing with for awhile now and I've grown tired of being complacent. Yes, while other streaming services are far less picky about samples, I've still suffered from the same greyed out tracks from the lot of them. So, no more using 6 different music libraries, It's time I've made my own!
You might be wondering where and how exactly one would get their music from. Well, mostly just by ripping it from YouTube lmao. buuuut, if your looking for high-quality downloads, I'd suggest Bandcamp. There, you can buy tracks and albums individually kinda like iTunes back in the day but there are some differences. Firstly, the downloads you can get are super high quality! You can choose from multiple formats, such as MP3, (sounds decent and barely takes up storage) FLAC, (a tad bigger but sounds much better than MP3) and WAV (nearly uncompressed but VERY big. Honestly not that neccesary just use FLAC lol). While it might be hard to tell the difference with headphones, I've found that FLAC sounds WAAAAAYYYY better on decent car speakers--that shit is night and day. But the best thing is, most small artists are giving away HQ downloads of their tracks FOR FREE. And if you feel generous and decide to toss a dollar their way, the app will even let you stream in FLAC quality! I'd say the only thing about Bandcamp is that it's for much smaller artists so you ain't gonna find The Weeknd there or anything. Although, Bandcamp is a great way to support small artists as long as Epic Games doesn't fuck the service up somehow! (yes they own Bandcamp idk why either).
I've been downloading music onto my phone already, but what I've starting doing now is syncing my downloaded music across all my devices: My PC, laptop, and my phone. At first, I thought this was gonna be absolute hell to set up, but I've found a free program called Syncthing that gets the job done great. Although, Apple SUCKS so of course it doesn't let you use Syncthing without some annoying workarounds. I've found that Mobious Sync Works decently, even though it only syncs with the app open, you gotta pay for it if you wanna sync more than like 2 files, and development for it stopped a couple years back. Aside from all that, it works wonders! There are alternatives but idfk lmao. If you wanna know more about Synchthing, here's a good vid on it.
Having music stored on your devices without the need for an internet connection or a subscription is great, but do you know what's even better than both? NOT BEING RELEGATED TO PROPRITARY SOFTWARE!!! Because holy FUCK I HATE Spotify's app!! Trying to manage any playlist with more than 20 songs feels like an absolute NIGHTMARE. Seriously, why tf do you have to go into a seperate menu to move songs around and that menu doesn't have a search or even show any song covers!? I don't even wanna TALK about how you can ONLY MAKE FOLDERS ON DESKTOP!!! HUH??? Dumb dumb dumb and stupid and dumb! Meanwhile if you just have all your music in some folders, there's SO much more customizeability with how you can play your music. You can download music players like MusicBee, MediaMonkey, or AIMP. There's also some more retro options, my favorite being WACUP, a player continuing the awesome look of WINAMP and it's many community-made skins! Or, you can just use your system's default player. Since it's all stored on-device, it's super easy to swap though a bunch of them and find your favorite!
Honestly, I can see how having a digital library wouldn't be for everyone. It's a bit of a hastle to set up and even more so to manage, but if you've become as equally feed up with these services as me, then there's no better time to start a digital library than right now! Seriously though, the more you use other apps the harder it'll be to convert everything over. I have so much fucking work to do.
Thanks to this video for inspiration!