From 1985 to 2019 I have been listening to music less and less over time. Nowadays I don't listen to music.

In general when I listen to music or watch a video, I want to:

  • have control over where and how the data is stored
  • have the data in my device
  • don't want anybody besides me to know when or what I listen to

I store my music library in my home server and the tracks come from ripped CDs that were discarded because they took too much space. They is no DRM and I can listen to the music from any computer at home since the disk is shared with samba.

I know where to find the tracks, they never get deleted and I always have access to them.

On the move, I listen to music with my phone and my library is stored entirely on the phone since it is 96GB and the phone has enough flash storage.

When I'm at home, I copy my tracks to my phone using sftp, no streaming.

In the past, I was regularly getting new music and every month I was transfering the new music the mp3 player or phone.

I think using streaming services have some drawbacks:

  • there are ads, as much as possible (waste of time for me).
  • the subscription price increases over time.
  • there is no warranty that the tracks won't be deleted in the future.
  • when listening on the move, it consumes data on the mobile internet.
  • the streaming services know when and what the users are listening to.

If you don't have a computer at home, my advice is to subscribe to a cloud service, setup a VPS and store the library there.

If you want to stream the music to your devices, setup a service like navidrome.

hashtags: #musicplayer