Don't depend on streaming and don't forget to download your favourite songs to your drive

Alexander Ignatiev

2 May, 2024 00:00

Sometime in early April, I spent a week downloading a couple of hundred albums from the internet onto my SSD and then organising them and filling in basic metadata.

A long time ago, back before 2015 when I discovered Spotify, I used music streaming in its manifestations such as SoundCloud, Bandcamp and genre-specific communities on VK. Prior to that period, though, there was a brief time period where something was downloaded in 127kbps.mp3 format during a limited home internet connection.

Having actively used Spotify since 2016, I, like many, have experienced the lack of a full library of artists’ tracks, regional restrictions and album withdrawals due to conflicts between labels and musicians themselves and streaming services.

For example, the album Michael Been - Light Sleeper (1992) is missing. This is the soundtrack to the 1992 Paul Schrader movie of the same name “Light Sleeper”.

Anyway, something occurred to me one day and I decided to finally get around to building up a music library without relying on the services of private companies.

While I was doing that, I got the idea to buy an inexpensive player, because:

my phone battery doesn’t hold a charge that well anymore;
I don’t want to clog up the internal memory with uncompressed audio files;
I want to decide for myself which album or song to delete (remove from access) and which to keep.

Downloaded just about everything using SoulseekQt and rutracker.org.¹

In case, my music can be found here or downloaded on Bandcamp.

Don’t think anything bad, but there is not enough money for everyone. Especially if we are talking about average values² in CIS countries. For some albums (less than half of half of half of half) I have paid or will still pay.

File manager, vangelis blade runner album directory