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Last.FMMusicBranz
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This is a page I have put together to help provide resources and information for managing digital music! Since Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek has been funding military artificial intelligence companies with the money he makes off of his streaming service lately, along with the other issues around music streaming as a whole, I personally chose to ditch the service in favour of physical music like cds and vinyl as-well as digital music bought from online storefronts. I haven't completely dropped streaming music yet, I still use Youtube Music to listen to recently released music or when I can't keep the immediate gratification at bay... 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 any music anywhere you have an internet connection, suggestions based on your listening and all your playlists and likes and listening data kept server-side in Spotify HQ ready for the end of year Spotify wrapped are very aluring. Yet in-part due to many people becoming disenchanted with their near-infinite library of music and acknowledging the choice-paralysis it brings cds have been making a bit comeback. 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 need to carry a cd player and cd-book around here are some pointers and resources 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 gonna link all the resources here for ease of access but I'll talk about them in more detail below!
Storefronts
BandcampSoftware
Exact Audio CopyMisc.
Last.FMFirst off we should talk about File Formats!
Digital music usually comes packaged under two umbrellas.
Very reasonable file sizes (i.e. the amount of space it will take up on your device) at the cost of audio quality.
.MP3 .AAC and .OGG are all lossy formats
No loss in audio quality at the cost of much larger file sizes.
.FLAC .ALAC .WAV are all lossless formats
.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.
With that out the way here's some places you can directly get some digital music!
iTunesFormat: .AAC
Pros - Largest catalog out there
Cons - Difficult to use outside Apple ecosystem
Formats: .MP3 & .FLAC
Pros - Also a very large catalog and physical purchases often come with a digital download.
QobuzFormat: .FLAC
Pros - Very Good Selections and excellent for extremely high quality lossless music
BandcampFormats: Various
Pros - Indie store!
There are of course less legitimate, more ethically questionable ways of sourcing digital music online. I won't be giving specefic examples but if there was a megathread of pirate resources I bet they'd put it on a forum based social media website. Maybe in a sub-community called...
"arrrrrr/piracy"
Now if you're going the physical route we can go over how to get the music from them copied into any of the digital file formats we've mentioned.
What you'll need...
A computer with Windows and a cd drive (an external cd drive works perfectly too!)
Macs and Macbooks work a little differently link
There's many different ripping software but this guide will use 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
Insert EAC screenshots
Insert MusicBee screenshots
wip...
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.
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