allen hansrisuk

A Year in Review

Spotify's Wrapped posts are taking over social media and I am reminded my of my own grievances with music streaming. While I'm well aware many of my opinions regarding music streaming would out myself as a music grouch, the main issue is that I feel less connected with the music I enjoy.

Over time, I felt Spotify's recommendations were way off base or repetitive. I couldn't help but start to feel the role of major record labels in song and artist placement in these playlists.

For the longest time, I thought this was solely a personal problem - a problem stemming from my stubbornness and inability to adapt. Turns out, the convenience of having unrestricted access to arguably the largest music library in the world (aka streaming) has lessened my own enjoyment of music. But it seems that with the resurgence of iPods/mp3 players and open calls to media piracy, I might not be the only one who feels this way.

Back to Basics

I've decided to take my listening habits back into my own hands and try to rekindle my love for music. Throughout my youth, I religiously downloaded music and labored over organizing, tagging, and arranging my tunes into playlists. It was a time-intensive way to build up a music collection but it was a process I enjoyed.

Given that its been almost a decade since I've opened iTunes, I set out to find modern software that allow me to catalog my music library my way.

I was pleasantly surprised that my iTunes library was compatible with Apple Music and I could even sync my still working iPod Classic with it but the streaming-first approach in Apple Music made it an unacceptable replacement.

foobar2000

I was pleasantly surprised at foobar2000's minimal interface and functionality right out of the box. I simply pointed the player to read my music files in my iTunes media library and I was able to get a familiar interface from where I could start organizing music.

While this is a nice tool to organize music and listen directly on my computer, I still wanted a way to stream my library when I am out and about.

Plexamp

While I was aware of Plex, I had not heard of Plexamp ,their music streaming product which comes with their Plex Pass subscription. As much as I would like to avoid subscription fees, I'd happily pay for this service. You provide the music library hosted on a home server and Plex just allows you to stream that media on all your devices.

The setup of my home server will warrant a longer, more technical post but so far, I am incredibly happy with my decision to rebuild my music library from scratch.