How do you manage your digital music collection

#1

Let me state up front: this is a judgment-free zone. If you let Spotify choose your music and are free from the shackles of collecting, storing and organising audio files, that’s great. I’d love to know that!

I have opted out of the streaming lifestyle, but I have also dismally failed to maintain anything like a coherent digital music collection. I used to have thousands of tracks in iTunes, but they now only exist on an old iPod that I don’t use but can’t bear to reformat. I rely about 80% on the Bandcamp app to listen to music I’ve bought, and 20% on records and tapes. I guess that’s risky because Bandcamp could disappear one day but (a) I work there and I know it’s not happening any time soon and (b) I could download all my Bandcamp purchases if I wanted to, I just don’t have anywhere to put them.

Does anyone keep a digital audio library any more?

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#2

I do. I still buy CDs from Truck (don’t know what I’d do without Carl’s recommendations), but I view them as a physical backup, the first thing I do is rip them into iTunes. And of course there’s the stuff I buy from Bandcamp. That goes into iTunes too.

I pay for an iTunes Match subscription so everything is available across all my devices, but I’ve a sneaking suspicion that Match may get folded into the iTunes Music subscription, at which point I’ll find another solution. I really hate this death by a thousand subscriptions we’re suffering from.

The primary reason for having them all in one place is because then I can use Beets to do all sorts of nerdy stuff with them.

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