The NVMe in my big HP Workstation died yesterday. I’m not sure why other than it was cheap and used from eBay. I, however, decided to treat this as an opportunity instead of crying in my beard.

Something I’ve planned for a while now, but had been putting off, is a significant refactoring of my home lab. My setup consisted of a huge HP workstation with a Xeon processor and 128GB of ECC RAM. It was entirely overkill for what I used it for, and it was costing some serious money to keep running around the clock.

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 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).