I’ve been working on making it so I can self host my own music library over the last few months. This has entailed buying some music from Bandcamp and pulling in some tracks from a seafaring friend. Do I feel guilty for sailing the seven seas? A little, but most of the stuff I’ve downloaded that way is stuff that I’ve bought before. Sometimes twice. I’m mostly re-downloading this stuff so I can guarantee everything is the same quality. A lot of my older purchased stuff is from the late 90s and early 2000s when ripping was new, meaning it was all of dubious quality.

So, I’ve been working on my music collection and it is really coming along. I’ve downloaded a metric shit ton of music in the last month. My biggest problem remains, however. Metadata is crap. Even though now all of my files are meticulously named and organized, the so-called metadata search only works about 80% of the time. Why it is so hard, I’m not sure. These people have databases, right? All my folders have album.nfo files in them already, so the metadata shouldn’t even need to be looked up. It’s just an odd thing.

So now that I’m actually self hosting my own music collection (which I’ll write more about soon), something I’ve noticed is that music sounds better now.

It isn’t actually better, though. I always listened to lossless when I could and close to it when I couldn’t. Besides, I’m no audiophile. But it does sound better now. I’ve decided the reason behind this is entirely because now it’s being streamed from my own server and it’s music I own.

I’m going to start sharing some of the music I’m listening to. I’ve finally moved away from streaming music services and I’ve found it very nice to listen to my own music for once. I talked a few days ago about albums vs playlists, but I’ve actually found myself listening to a few albums. It’s been very nice.

Leave This Town by Daughtry

I love this entire album, but Life After You is by far my favorite track. I love Daughtry’s voice, I think he’s probably one of the most iconic singing voices of my generation.

So, I’m in the process of rebuilding my music library so I can finally get away from music subscription services. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that I download albums, but I don’t really listen to albums. I used to, obviously. Back in the CD days (and before that cassette tapes), you listened to one artist at a time, and usually you did so one album at a time. Unless you made mix tapes, which was fun. Mix tapes were the first playlists.

I’ve probably listened to this song 100 times in the last 24 hours. Love it.

I have talked a lot about regrets on this blog since I started out. Nobody wants them, everyone has them. One regret I didn’t think I had was about LastFM of all things. First off, I didn’t even know that LastFM was still a thing. I thought that died along with FourSquare and MySpace (to add to the list: Digg and Stumbleupon). But nope, it’s still around (even if the website is kinda broken and never gets updates).

So, since I’ve started scrobbling my music (after I created the /now page), I’ve been on a bit of a music discovery kick.

Tonight I was looking through country music playlists, and found one called “Classic Country”. Now, for me, Classic Country is Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Loretta Lynn, Ernest Tubb, etc. You know, classic country.

This playlist had songs from the late 90s on there, though. The late 90s? I was a teenager in the late 90s. That’s not classic. But apparently, to kids these days, Alan Jackson is downright ancient.

I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to music. I currently have subscriptions to (though admittedly a couple of them are free trials): Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, YouTube Music, Amazon Prime Music, Plex, Deezer, and I’m sure there is probably one or two I’m forgetting.

I’m going through what amounts to a crisis. I don’t know what I want to do about music and where I get it from. I have used Deezer for the last two years, but their Android app has annoying bugs that make me not want to use it. I really don’t like Spotify as a company. I technically have had YouTube Music for years because I pay for no ads on YouTube, but I hate that service with a passion. Amazon’s app is spotty when it comes to their collection, though they do have Garth Brooks. Tidal has the same issue, but without Garth. And Apple Music works great on mobile, but the desktop experience isn’t great (yes, I know about Cider V2).