Building a Digital Music Library [Blog-Diary]

Okay, with that utter clown moment out of the way, I wanted to write about how I've been making a digital music library lately. I figured out how to use windows media player legacy, and turns out it has a sync feature, which makes keeping my files organized on my MP3 player way easier. Before, I was just manually sorting them in the default windows 11 file manager. Absolute game changer.

This has also made it way nicer to listen to music on my computer. I don't really listen to music much when I'm out and about, so honestly it's far more convenient to use windows legacy player at home for me. I sorted through what music I had already downloaded via. my old phone, and started downloading new tracks onto my computer. I had no idea that when I downloaded files that they came with metadata that displayed stuff like who the artist was and what album it's from! My library is actually organized. Of course, I've had to go through and manually edit some of it myself, but now I can listen per album/artist rather than per file. It's amazing.

A side effect of having my own personal music library is that I'm now listening to way more music. It's just so much easier to pull up media player and his play rather than fiddle with Spotify's UI and worrying about whatever AI garbage might randomly appear in my playlists. It's nice to have the peace of mind that my music won't just change track or disappear on a whim due to streaming services.

I ended up downloading a software called Stacher7 to download music from YouTube. Currently, most of the online converters are down due to something on YouTubes end, but this fork of yt-dlp works wonderfully for my purposes. It's able to download in Mp3 320Kbps, which is nearly as good as a raw WAV file. It technically can download the WAV files as well, but they're way bigger, so I've decided to only download my absolute favorite songs as WAVs to save on space. I'm currently at 3.41 GB of music, which seems so small considering that I have 61 albums/377 songs. 

My end goal is to be able to buy most, if not all of the music off of Bandcamp so I can directly support the creators. I've managed to buy a few [alongside download some of it for free- shout out to Hakita/Heaven Pierce Her for having pay what you want downloads :D], but I'm watching my finances, so hopefully I'll be able to fully transfer to buying music soon! I know that streaming services pay extremely little, so I don't feel too bad about listening offline.  For now, though, I'm just gonna make sure I spread the word about my favorite creators.

Speaking of favorite creators, I'm absolutely obsessed with sElf right now. Weirdly, they're not on Bandcamp [save for Subliminal Plastic Motives], but thanks to a kind citizen on Reddit, there's a ZIP file with all known releases! In hindsight, I shouldn't have trusted that the person posting that had good intentions, but luckily it was legit. It's really nice to be able to listen to all the niche releases that aren't on streaming. I was worried the listed 'free downloads' on their website were lost media. There's actually a whole community dedicated to patching together sElf's discography! I'm super glad, because their music is incredibly unique and itches just the right spot in my brain. My current favorite is the bonus track to Gizmodgery- Resurrect. It makes my heart feel like it's floating at the start, and then the chopped drums... Oh my GOD the DRUMSSS!!!! AAAAHHH!!! I love that song to DEATH. 

Although Gizmodgery is probably my favorite album, I can listen through pretty much all their songs without feeling like I need to skip. They're all just such bops. While trying to figure out where to access the B-sides, I found out that "Placing The Blame" sort of blew up lately, and I'm really glad. I heard that Matt Mahaffey was planning on releasing a new album soon, which is pretty insane considering they released most of their stuff in the 90's-2000's. They released a single, "Love You Less", and it's pretty good. I'm just hoping with this new audience that the band can find some more success!

sElf fangirling aside, I figured out that my CAR also works as an MP3 PLAYER! Supposedly, all I have to do it stick a thumb-drive into the slot next to the aux-in and it'll be able to play files straight from the storage! This is HUGE- mostly because I've been using my Mp3 player into Aux to play music, and it doesn't let me skip with the car controls, so I have to reach down and blindly fiddle with it while I'm driving. And I can't see what's playing because there's no way in hell I'm looking down at a dinky screen while I'm driving. So hopefully, if this works, I can just plug and play with the USB I loaded up, and there won't be any concerns of cable noise or external control. Oh- and for context- I probably would just use CDs if it weren't for the fact that the CD player is broken. Broken as in when you put a CD in there, it's stuck for months. I managed to get the old owners CD out and put in some easy listening classical, but now it's stuck again, even with the method I used to retrieve the old disc. Beatrice [yes, I named my car Beatrice-] hates me. 

Aaah. Well, I suppose that's it for now. I would like to start a bit more often- I think it's good for me. If you read this far, here's a screenshot of my current music library!