Music Library

I’ve started to think that I should do these weekly, so here’s your weekly music library post, I suppose. I really oughta make some other posts to vary it a bit more, but that’s a problem for later.

As of today, my music collection officially (as opposed to unofficially) reached 136 GB!

You might be wondering: “Wait, your collection quadrupled, but the size only grew by about half???” Yes, and that was on purpose. Very quickly I decided to give up on this whole hi-res thing, since, again, I can’t tell the difference between 96kHz and CD quality. Therefore, while I’m still getting FLACs when possible, they’re all CD quality (44.1kHz, 16-bit), which is perfectly adequate for me, not to mention that they’re easier to find. Plus, since they’re lossless, I can easily transcode them down the line to something else without having to worry about transcoding from lossy to lossy and making the quality suffer a bit.

As for my music player: I gave up on WACUP literally the day after my last post, which is pretty funny in retrospect. But to be honest, the limitations of WACUP were starting to annoy me. For one thing, it does not support disc numbers, so any multi-disc albums aren’t properly sorted, which is very annoying. And there are some very minor nitpicks, like the little spectrum analyzer on the player not working that well with higher sample rate stuff. Still, they and the more major issues got to me, so I switched to a very suitable alternative, and that is foobar2000!

I really like this music player a lot. The interface is very pleasing to me (and to be honest, I functionally prefer it for browsing a music library), the spectrum analyzer works brilliantly with anything I throw at it, and I can even minimize it to a tray icon! In general, it’s worked brilliantly for my needs the past week and I don’t really see myself using anything else in the future. I do plan to try other alternatives as a fun side hustle, but foobar already does everything I want it to do, so it’s unlikely I’ll switch, but who really knows.

I still use Spotify for my phone, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon, but I am still buying albums from Bandcamp and downloading them. I personally have more attachment to music if it’s something I legally bought. While Soulseek still works great for the music I want, there’s something about music I bought for my own money that gives me more sentiment for it.

(I literally bought Super Ghostbusters the moment I found out that it existed on Bandcamp.)

So yeah, that’s been the progress so far. I’m slowly running out of albums that I’ve heard of before to download on Soulseek (in fact I probably already did, minus any Bandcamp releases I wish to buy for myself, of course), so at this point it’s mostly getting stuff from artists or bands that up to this point I only listened to one album from. Really, the music discovery is kinda what enticed me to use Soulseek and to start my library in the first place, so if I find anything cool I end up liking, I’ll make sure to share it here!

I was supposed to make this post exactly a week after the original post but I’m too impatient, so I’m doing it RIGHT NOW. Because it’s my fucking blog.

As of literally today (current date) (yes I’m doing this bit again) my music library has reached a whopping 87 GB!

I know you’re going to ask “how the fuck”, and I will answer. Basically, from the very beginning, I was always going for downloading FLAC files for the highest quality, since I figured, if I’m going to download music, I might as well go all the way. Yes, that includes hi-res FLACs with 96kHz and all that jazz. Plus, I do listen to a variety of music and artists so I tend to switch often, hence the amount of albums and songs.

Some of you will rightfully point out that it can be difficult to tell the difference between lossy and lossless, and it’s true. I can barely tell between FLACs and MP3s or even streaming via Spotify. Ultimately, it boils down to me being more happy if the files are lossless and in higher quality, hence my insistence on downloading all of the music in this format. Yes, this does mean it takes up a hellaloalaolot of space compared to an MP3 library, but I don’t really mind personally.

(My epic music setup. I think it fits the various metal albums that are on there.)

As for Spotify? …I still use it. Yes, I know, I LIED like the evil gremlin I am, but to be honest it’s very difficult to manage such a library elsewhere, and I’ll explain why. Essentially, my main ways of acquiring music go between Bandcamp and Soulseek (really fucking good app, btw), and while I can download stuff from Bandcamp just fine, synchronizing the whole library on my phone is basically impossible, unless I redownload or transcode EVERYTHING into MP3, since most of my music is in FLAC and comes from Soulseek or even torrents. And since a lot of stuff I listen to is on Spotify already, since it’s mostly from labels, I still use it for when I’m out and about. Sometimes there are exceptions, but I typically either download them on my phone anyway, or more likely, I use YouTube and move on.

Of course, me using Soulseek doesn’t mean I completetly gave up on Bandcamp. I still buy and plan to buy more albums from there when my monetary status allows me to, but for now, the vast majority of music I obtain is from Soulseek, due to the confusing amount of music download websites and the very high prices they charge for the hi-res versions of albums on them. Plus, some of the stuff isn’t even on those websites.

(Did I mention I like Soulseek? My username is “Karkat”; feel free to browse and check out what I have so far.)

So, that is the status of my music library as of today. While I still use Spotify for portable devices, I’m a lot less reliant on it than I used to be, which I think is a net positive. The library will definitely continue to grow as I discover new music and replay some old favorites.

Literally today (current date) I have decided to start downloading and/or purchasing music on Bandcamp to make myself less reliant on streaming services. As of today, I still heavily use Spotify for all my music needs, and have done so for slightly over 3 years now. Of course, none of the fees ever being paid by me, like the cheapskate freeloader I am. I’ve used it on and off before then of course, but mid-2020 was when I really got into it and used it practically every day of my life since then.

Why have I done so? Well, I was (and still am) of the opinion that in terms of music, whatever way you consume it doesn’t really matter. Whether you download it, stream it, or play it on physical media, music is just there for me. One might argue it’s more fun to collect physical media, and I do agree, but I am not made of money, so my everlasting dreams of owning a proper sized collection (not to mention the lack of space) are a bit dead in the water. Maybe next year when I get a job for once.

Anyway, like I said, I’ve never really cared for a while how my music gets delivered to me. I used to be big into CDs a while back and ripping them to my iPod, but nowadays, I’m perfectly comfortable with using Spotify all the time. Of course there is stuff that isn’t on Spotify, but even then, I just fire up YouTube and all is good. I’ve never really bothered with maintaining a digital library of sorts that is actually permanent to some degree and won’t be taken away suddenly by the big bad corpos.

That is, until today.

I still don’t really know what made me want to do it. Even tho it was literally today (current date), the thought and will to do so just popped into my head and stuck to the point where I bought a sizeable chunk of albums on Bandcamp for those sweet, sweet FLACs.

(Here’s my profile if you care to see what collections of noises and instruments I enjoy enough to purchase with my moners.)

However, I must ask myself: will this really last, or is this going to be a passing fad like the time I tried to start my own Blu-Ray collection? Well, considering I’m dealing with instant access digital files I can access on my phone and computer, and not physical discs that I need to wait for while they’re getting shipped, I’d say it’s much less likely that I’ll grow indifferent and bored of it. Plus, I listen to music practically every day, where as my movie watching habits are much more infrequent. No guarantees, of course, but I’d say I’m probably going to build up my library with Bandcamp and direct downloads enough to the point where I can easily cut myself off from Spotify and enjoy the tunes on my own terms (even offline without having to download it beforehand!).