Gratitude Day 2: Personal Music Libraries
Wed 02 September 2026
Over the past few years, I've been on a journey of migrating from streaming services to personal music libraries. I haven't yet made the jump from streaming video services to personal video libraries, but it's definitely on my radar.
I got an Apple Music account right about when it first came out, and when I switched from iOS to Android in 2017, I switched to Google Music, which eventually morphed into Youtube Music, under Youtube Premium, which used to be Youtube Red??? Not confusing at all. 😅
I used all-you-can-"eat" streaming music services solidly from about early 2016 until late 2023, so about seven years. But all the while, I had been collecting my own music library starting all the way back in the early 2000s, initially using Windows Media Player (yech!), then iTunes, and now... wait, what am I using now?...
Well, I don't really rip CDs anymore, so I usually just download my music from Horrible Evil Gigacorp, but I'm moving towards Bandcamp for music that is available there. So, I download the music from a web browser, manage and move the files around on the command line, play the music either with mpv or something like kew, and use Kid3 when I need to edit metadata (media tags). On Android, don't even ask me what music player I use, as it changes about monthly. I'm never very happy with mobile media players, as I don't enjoy using a phone very much, and either the UI is terrible, or the players are buggy, or they don't let you whitelist your media library, so it tries to play media that isn't music.
My first digital music player was an MP3 and WMA-capable portable CD player that I used in the car. No, wait. Maybe it was my Sharp Zaurus. That little device was freaky cool. I also used my Palm Zire as a media player for a little bit, but at some point, I bought an very cheap RCA Lyra that used an SD card for storage, and I seem to recall it was 128MB. Those were the days. XD
That was followed up with an iPod Nano 2G in 2007, an iPod Touch 2G in 2009, and then various smartphones.
All this time, I was buying CDs and ripping them, and my music library grew from a humble 2-4GiB (initially WMA, then AAC, now mostly Opus when I have a choice (which is sadly rare), to now being 17GiB, most of which is fairly low bit rate (128kbps) lossy-compressed audio (so don't compare it to your 128 GiB FLAC library ;)
Still, it's not a TON of music:
$ find Music -type f |tr A-Z a-z |sed 's/^.*\.\([^.]*$\)/\1/g' |sort |uniq -c |sort -n
14 ogg
17 flac
104 opus
223 jpg
285 mp3
1539 m4a
There are times that my somewhat limited library of songs I've already listened to a bunch of times gets a little redundant, but I've made a point of buying a new album every month and really listening to it (like olden times when you'd buy a new CD every now and then and really listen to it "cover to cover"), rather than just playing everything on shuffle all the time.
But the really cool thing about having your own personal music library, other than the fact that you're actually supporting independent artists (rather than something like Apple Music/Spotify/Youtube, where smaller artists make an absolute pittance, and only the really big names get any meaningful money), and the fact that your music is under your control, is the fact that you get random memory jogs when a song you used to enjoy a lot 10, 15, or even 20 years ago plays again for the first time in a while.
I was driving to work this morning, and a song came on that I used to really enjoy a decade ago when I was back in University. I remembered being stressed out about things like papers, reading lists, and deadlines, and had to smile at how much simpler everything was a decade ago.
But most importantly, I really appreciate the fact that I have a curated library of songs I enjoy listening to, which can never be taken away from me or hidden behind a silly paywall. Because while the streaming services promise the ability to access practically every song ever recorded, the reality is that they tend to push big-name artists, or even worse, in-house A.I. "artists" so that they keep 100% of the revenue.
Homey don't play that. Own your music, peeps. And let your listening actually benefit the (human) artists, not some corporation with fifty thousand ravenous "shareholders" in the place where their soul should be.
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Category: Entertainment
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Lars looking on wistfully while ingesting his sister-in-law's retort to his rant 