Got myself in an odd thought spiral tonight while listening to some oldies. What would the world be like if Buddy Holly had lived? What would the world be like if Hank Williams Sr. had lived?

There are so many artists out there that died long before their time, men and women who were genre defining artists. Elvis may be the biggest name there. If he’d stayed away from the drugs? He might still be alive today (though he would be in his 90s). Think of how music would have changed if he’d been whole and healthy for another 50 years?

I spent the last day or so completely redesigning the Music page here on the blog. I took inspiration from the week view on Last FM. It’s not as colorful, and I still have some work to do (the background of the div containers are not right), but it’s pretty great.

LastFM provides quite a bit of info via their API. I hate relying on LastFM, so I’ll probably eventually grab the data from ListenBrainz (which I mirror to already), but I know the LastFM API better, so the redesign still works off of that.

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.