your music

This is a page I have put together to help provide resources and information for managing digital music! After Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek was seen funding military artificial intelligence companies with the money directly from his streaming service, along with the various other issues around music streaming as a whole, I personally chose to ditch the service in favour of physical music as-well as digital music bought from online storefronts. It's hard to drop completely, I still will use Youtube Music for listening to newly released music, but Spotify is at least one more subscription off the monthly bill.

The benefits and quality of life features afforded by streaming services for their monthly fees are hard to pass-up. Being able to access whatever music you can think of anywhere you have an internet connection, suggestions based on your listening and all your playlists, likes and listening data kept server-side ready for end of year Spotify wrapped (or your service equivelent) are very aluring. Yet in-part due to many people becoming disenchanted with their near-infinite library of music, and the choice-paralysis that it can create, cds have been making a bit comeback. I know lots more people have been wanting to enjoy a smaller more intimate library.

So if you're wanting to ditch Spotify or whatever streaming service you use or just wanna try physical media but would like to have them available without access to a cd player and cd-book around there are some pointers and resources here to get you started!

This is how I go about it, there are a million other ways but I think this is a good way to go when it comes to being nice and simple way to enjoy your music digitally while off of streaming services and I've tried to make this all informational without going too overboard. I hope it proves useful to someone!

I'm going to link all the main resources here for ease of access but I'll talk about them in more detail below!

Radio

Radio Garden

Storefronts

Bandcamp
Qobuz Store
Amazon Music
iTunes Download

Software

Exact Audio Copy
MusicBee

Misc.

Last.FM
MusicBranz

Radio

Radio is as accessible as it’s ever been and completely free. You can support real DJs instead of AI or algorithmically generated playlists. You probably already have an app on your phone that can access local FM stations such as Apple Music if not there are hundreds available on the App Store or Play Store. If you’d like to browse stations a bit further afield however I’d definitely recommend Radio Garden. You can easily browse radio stations globally by their broadcasting location on a map of the Earth!

File Formats

Lossy

Very reasonable file sizes (i.e. the amount of space it will take up on your device) at the cost of audio quality.

Lossless

.MP3 and .FLAC are the most popular formats while .AAC and .ALAC are Apple's own versions of them and by default Apple Music (the iPhone's default local music player) will only play them and .MP3. Apple Music will not play .FLAC or any other format. However I will go over an easy option to give you more options if you use an iPhone.

Digital Music Storefronts

With that out the way here's some places you can directly get some digital music!

Pros - Also a very large catalog, physical purchases often come with a digital download.

There are of course less legitimate ways of sourcing digital music online. Doing so is really a personal decision. If you've purchased the music before in a format you can't make a digital back-up of yourself, have lost or damaged it or the original artist has long since passed are all questions you might want to consider.

Ripping

Now if you're going the physical route we can go over how to get the music from your CDs copied into any of the digital file formats we've mentioned.

Hardware

A computer with Windows and a cd drive (an external cd drive works perfectly too!)

Macs and Macbooks work a little differently and I'll have to get my hands on one to help here but I assume there is a similar method.

Software

There's many different ripping software but I highly recommend Exact Audio Copy as its the gold standard these days for ripping. Musicbee will be how we will organise and play our digital music. It has many many features and customisation options but also works out the box as a simple music player with great metadata editing options built-in plus it's own ripping feature if you'd like to keep to one single program it's very simple and intuitive so highly recommend it too.

Transferring to phone!

Essentially if you use Android just connect your phone to you pc/laptop and drag and drop your music files to the Music folder on your device and you should see them and be able to play them with the app of your choice. For Apple devices you can either use iTunes and add them the official way (this will only work for MP3s) and play the music through Apple Music on your phone. Alternatively (and absolutely recommended) use VLC. With the VLC app installed on your iPhone you can use iTunes or the "Apple Devices" application to move your music files over into the VLC folder through the file manager. After doing that they will appear in the VLC app. Unlike the official iTunes + Apple Music method VLC will play anything you want including FLAC files.

Other Helpful Alternatives to Streaming Features...

Spotify to M3U

Spotify to M3U is an open source Windows program made by TypNull that lets you convert Spotify playlists to .M3U8D files which can be imported into many different music players including MusicBee.

Listening Stats and Recommendations

Last.FM allows you to "scrobble" while listening to your music. Scrobbling keeps tracks of your listening habits and saves them to your Last.FM account. Last.FM can suggest you new artists based on your listening this way! You can scrobble across many different services and apps including MusicBee

Alternatives To Music Streaming

Plus a Guide to Ripping CDs and Managing your Digital Library

Radio

File Formats

Lossy

Lossless

Digital Music Storefronts

Ripping

Hardware

Software

Transferring to phone!

Other Helpful Alternatives to Streaming Features...

Spotify to M3U

Listening Stats and Recommendations