A friend of mine never quit collecting physical albums. He justifies their physical footprint by calling them “secure external storage for emotional memories.”
The older I get, the more I think he’s on to something. I’ve started picking up CDs and DVDs at thrift stores just so I can own the stuff I really want to keep. I also have all my favorite albums stored on my phone. Rebuilding a music collection takes work, but so far, it’s been entirely worth it.
Yes!!! I’ve been slowly building up my mp3 hoard since middle school! It started with some music my parents had on a computer burned from CDs, and I’ve been using very trustworthy (lying) YouTube to mp3 coverters to add to it since. I have at least one song on there I can’t find the same version of anywhere else. They’re downloaded locally to my phone, my computer, and a flashdrive.
My mom now uses Amazon’s music app and fights with it all the time. I have no problems with my music playing app.
I don’t watch much movies or tv shows so I’m not inclined to download those, but I do download PDFs that I find valuable.
It’s nice knowing this stuff is mine forever as long as I copy it and back it up.
When official sources make their “content” (art) unavailable, piracy then becomes a measure of preservation
What music playing app do you use? I have yet to find one I really like.
I use pi music player :3 though I think it may only be for Android. The free version has a narrow ad banner at the bottom of the screen, but no popups nor auditory ads.
I honestly just listen to all of my music in alphabetical order or occasionally shuffle, so I don’t know how it does with playlists, albums, metadata and such, but it’s plenty good enough for me.
They also have a user manual which I think gives a lot more useful info than the download page
Funny to see this pop up at the same time as I’ve been dramatically trimming down my downloaded music collection. I totally agree with the sentiment of the article, but I’ve been rethinking my own archival habits lately. Typically, I find new music (or other media) that I like, listen to it for a while, and then never touch it again. Despite that, I would obsessively archive music and save entire albums even if I only liked a few songs. My music collection grew to 70gb and I had a massive list of music I used to listen to that I wanted to archive, but I recently realized that I actually don’t care all that much. Even some of my favorite songs and albums ever don’t interest me at all anymore.
Anyway, I’d like to hear other people’s thoughts on how long they like to keep files around and if anyone else ever feels like they go overboard with archival. Having a ton of files I don’t use on my computer kind of feels like having a cluttered house even though they don’t take up any space. Of course, it’s totally valid to archive things just for the sake of it and building up a large physical or DRM-free media collection sounds prudent with the way things are going.
This wasn’t mentioned in the article specifically, but I’m surprised that it’s still possible to buy and download DRM-free music from Amazon and iTunes. I wonder how long it’ll take before that changes. Once I get done cleaning up my files, I plan to mostly find new music on Bandcamp going forward.
I use shuffle far more than I use artist/album sorts, so that may be fine for me. I’ll check it out!
Yeah this fits me too, with all my files though not just music, though I don’t much mind having a deeply cluttered filesystem. I’ve copied my files over from drive to drive so many times over the past… *counts rings* 17 years.
For the most part it’s not so bad, my photos and documents are fairly well organised, and my media library is perfect as I can be bothered to get it. When it comes to folders I care less about, I do “Nested archiving” I guess: E.G., once a year I select all files in my downloads folder and pack them into a single folder, containing all the mess but also the folder which contained all the mess from last time. It works out a lot better than you’d think.
It can be kind of fun sometimes peeling back the layers of folder structure to peer into my history.
Relatedly, some others from my group of friends have now started to keep their own media collections, which is awesome. Lately when we meet up we’ve been using the good old-fashioned sneakernet to transfer each others music/movies, it’s been dope! Don’t forget to share and lean on your friends collections :)
For music specifically I actually like having some stuff downloaded that I haven’t listened to in a while or, in some cases, haven’t listened to at all. (Re)discovering music in my own library is fun and is pre-curated, in a sense. As far as storing it goes, I have a secondary disk in my PC that stores all my offline media. It’s out of the way of my daily usage but accessible enough to still get use. That way, I don’t feel like I’m cluttering up my filesystem.