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Ask HN: Does anybody manage their own music collection anymore?

8 points by zcal ↗ HN
I'm not talking about favoriting and playlist curation on streaming services. I'm asking whether anybody still acquires and maintains music files and/or physical media.

Personally, I've recently tried ditching Spotify and revitalizing my MP3 and FLAC collection because of the oft-cited problem that a lot of the music I want to listen to simply isn't available there. Much of that music I expect never to be added, for various reasons. I've also experienced several cases of favorited songs and albums later being removed.

If you curate your own music collection, why and how do you do it? What methods of acquisition, storage, organization, and playback do you use?

11 comments

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WallyFunk
I like to play a game called 'Is this on Spotify?' where I download pirated works of obscure music in the hopes it's not on Spotify and I have something rare. So far this game is a losing battle as Spotify's catalogue is so massive, and they have those rare tracks I thought would beat their system. So I stick with Spotify.
n4bz0r
I've always been storing the albums I like locally. The reasons are:

- I don't use mobile internet on my phone, so having the music files at hand is quite natural. Wouldn't be able to listen to the music on the go otherwise

- Recommendation algorithms of streaming services like Spotify weren't good enough for me, so I couldn't simply start the player and do my thang without skipping the tracks I don't like

- Streaming services often don't have many obscure tracks

Ended up realizing that, for me, using streaming services as a daily-driver is mostly like fighting windmills. But I still use them as a discovery tool.

Now, the issue with local files was, I had to manually syncronize any modifications among devices. So I installed Syncthing [0] to sync my audio folder between myphone, PC and NAS. Syncthing can do online syncs via their relay servers, but I set the clients to only listen on local addresses, and disabled all the over-the-internet stuff. I'm quite happy with this setup.

[0]: https://syncthing.net/

zcal
Syncthing is great! I also use it to sync my music files to my phone, among other things.
CrypticShift
I use a simple custom DB [0]. my DB is my library: Lists of artists and albums, enriched (and updated) with data from APIs (last.fm, RYM, spotify) for filtering, organizing....

I have learned not to invest anymore time in organizing files (structure...) and files metadata (correction....). I just leave it as it is. it is not "pretty". But my UI is my DB so who cares. I just do a simple folder search [1] or take out that vinyl, when I need to.

I store all my digital playlists in the same text files: M3U, Spotify URIs, YouTube URLs, it does not matter. I guess you could call it an agnostic system.

It works for desktop. Mobile is trickier.

[0] https://www.getgrist.com/

[1] https://vvvapp.sourceforge.net/

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Phrenzy
I do.

I've had a music collection for decades, and never seen the point of getting rid of it. A little while ago I refreshed my music delivery system. I landed on using Roon with a Tidal connection.

I have the ability to listen to all my music with Roon's fantastic curating. Tidal allow me to listen to albums and artists I don't have. I haven't bought any new music lately, but I am working on a beets configuration that works for me & I'll purchase some of the music I've discovered.

winternett
I've collected music and copied my own music onto my phones and PCs for years and never stopped. Everything the major app & OS makers have done in recent years appears to be intended to discourage music collection now that bandwidth has me converted into a measurable utility.

Even audio apps play games with how they function now in order to encourage paid upgrades to where simple "randomize", "skip", and playlist creaton no longer work as expected... I miss winamp on android more than words can say... Google's music player even stealthily deleted my purchased mp3s off my device at points, I am lucky to keep non-cloud (unplugged) SD backups of my music library ritually up to date. I will never give up keeping my own collection as long as I can... The Algorithms serve advertised music, not really the music you want to hear, and it's only gonna get worse over time.

Nothing beats my music collection, it spans across multiple genres that no algo could ever emulate, and that no single site would ever be able to clear, and I don't believe I should ever have to pay a monthly subscription for music, let alone music that I already have, I guess It's not popular opinion any more.

Music streaming sites do nothing to earn the money they make and that people give them, and they don't pay artists fairly at all... I write this as an artist myself.

zcal
My suspicion is that a lot of people feel the same way you do about paying a monthly subscription, but that it's just that working to curate their own collection and keep it synced between devices is well, work. It's like the same way that the iTunes of the world "beat" the Napsters: convenience.

But you've touched on one of the reasons I'm trying to de-Spotify myself. I have a lot of music that I've gathered from various sources over the years, not all of them represented by streaming services' catalogs. This includes small-time local music and stuff that's come out of Internet communities like Newgrounds and OverClocked ReMix. I want my collection to be fully representative of the things I want to listen to regardless of where it came from.

thepra
Yep, on a self hosted Nextcloud instanceis quite easy