I think I might be about to embark on “A Project”.
Until about 2015 I was diligent about maintaining a local music library (in iTunes) with playlists for each new album that I bought/downloaded, and for each gig I attended. Then Spotify kind of took over, and I just don’t have that kind of historical record for the last ten years. I do have playlists in Spotify. A lot of them. But they’re more likely to be themed, or copies of a Discover Weekly that was particularly good, or copies of a collaborative playlist that I contributed to along with other folk.
A couple of posts last month added weight to a growing sense of dissatisfaction with Spotify: “Here’s how much money Los Camp! make from streaming…” by Gareth from LC! and “How to quit Spotify” by Brian Merchant.
Earlier in December I spent some time with a trial of Qobuz, but I didn’t like it. The app is bad, and their catalogue is too small. Tidal, however, seems fine. Their catalogue and app are both good enough for me. But I’ve been buying a lot more music on Bandcamp this year, and I like that. I like knowing that more of my money goes to the artists than to the platforms. Also, Alex doesn’t use a streaming service at all; he uses Bandcamp all the time, and VLC for playing his music locally.
So this itch has been developing. I don’t like knowing that I’ve got a 20000+ track library (of mostly albums) sitting on my hard disk as well as an entirely separate library (consisting of lots of single songs as well as albums) in a cloud service.
The cloud service will — almost inevitably — become enshittified over time. But the local library is in the App Formerly Known As iTunes, which Apple has already shat all over. What a cloud/streaming service has got going for it is consistency across multiple machines. Having the same library, with the same set of playlists and ratings on all my devices is trivial.
The same can’t be said for a local library. My personal (not work) computing is split over a desktop machine (Mac Mini) and a laptop (MacBook Air). That’s not going to change any time soon. I use both machines interchangeably depending on context, and I play music on both of them. Ideally they’d share the same files, and the same library/metadata. But local music library apps don’t seem to play nice with that kind of setup.
I’ve been trying out Swinsian, which is really nice. But it uses a SQLite database for its library management, and (from what I remember), SQLite isn’t built for a multi-user cloud-synced scenario.
So after thinking it through, and discussing it with Alex on our road trip to see the flamingos today, I’m thinking: just a Bunch of Files on Disk. The music files I have are already on disk, and nicely organized.
The library management is the interesting part from a syncing perspective…but this could also be a Bunch of Files on Disk, I think…? m3u playlist files are a near-universal standard, and they’re just Files on Disk. Almost every music player can import and export them. m3u playlists can use relative paths to music files, so if I configure everything right, I could move the music library around wherever I wanted to, and use whatever player I like. 🤔 (This will also be helpful for when I — SOME DAY — abandon MacOS for Linux. Current Martin might not need the platform independence, but future Martin will probably appreciate it.)
So, yeah, “A Project”.
I thought I was “just” going to move from Spotify to Tidal. But now I think I’m going to (a) de-iTunesify my old iTunes library, and (b) reconstruct my last 10 years of Spotify listening in a platform-independent, Bunch-of-Files-on-Disk way. This is going to involve spending a lot of money buying single tracks that I had previously only streamed. That’s fine. That’s good. I can do this over time.
My secret weapon here is Last.fm. I’ve been using it (mostly consistently) since 2005. It powers the “Listening To” section in the sidebar of this blog. It was there in the iTunes era, and I’m glad that Past Martin had the foresight to keep using it in the Spotify era. I’m honestly amazed that it still exists. It feels like a throwback to a more innocent web.
A second secret weapon is this little tip: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/44333/how-do-i-transfer-music-ratings-from-one-computer-to-another In the iTunes era I used ratings a lot, and iTunes stored those ratings in a big bucket o’ XML along with all of its other metadata. But ratings (and other attributes) don’t have to be stored in a proprietary library format. They could just be indicated by the song’s presence in a specific playlist. (And therefore back to a Bunch of Files on Disk again.)
We’ll see how it goes… If it works out, I’ll try to describe the solution here.