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musings on downloading music

it's been 5 months since i stopped paying for spotify and started downloading music instead, no regrets for a fellow like me.

what were my reasons? it wasn't really anything in particular, but i think just the sum of: the usual suspect - all the horrible things that spotify, as a corporation, does, and more importantly - all the little annoyances i've experienced while using it (some music not being present on it, "UI team needs to get paid", etc.) and so, i hopped off the ride a bit ago now, and never looked back.

i had felt that spotify stopped deserving my money a long long time before that, tho i couldn't really think of good alternatives at that time. my main idea was just listenin' off youtube instead just to save the 5 bucks USD, and even though i do have youtube premium (makes mobile listening a possibility), courtesy of my brother... i've heard nothing but horror stories of YT playlists used for music.

downloading music was an idea there since the start, but i didn't consider it much because of the effortless last.fm scrobbling spotify provided and the idea of using VLC to listen to all my music sounded like hell. now, both of these issues had simple solutions, desktop scrobbler is a thing and is in fact how people scrobbled their songs before the audioscrobbler could be integrated into programs, and i could've just... not used VLC. i thought the desktop scrobbler was a lot more antiquated and finnicky to use than it probably actually is, and for the other one i simply just didn't consider a dedicated audio player. happens.

that was until january, when my good friend brought up that he started playing around with foobar2000, an audio player for windows. he was telling me all about it, and it sounded really really fuckin' cool - extremely customizable, buncha cool plugins for it. thought "huh, that's neat!"... until he told me about the audioscrobbler plugin. that is precisely the thing what i was looking for, and so that very same day, i made the jump.

^{my foobar2000 setup}

i love foobar so much, it just feels pure... dunno how else to put it. again, it is very customizable - go look up foobar2000 and click on images, see for yourself. the milkdrop visualizer plugin up there is something i didn't expect i'd like as much as i do, too. nice to stare at, even if a lot of the visualizers
i downloaded would actually kill an epileptic.

at first when i made the jump, i sourced my music from torrents; sorry, but
i don't have the cash to be buying 10 dollar albums from bandcamp, that's just not gonna happen at this stage in my life. nowadays, however, i use soulseekQt, a really cool P2P music sharing platform that has pretty much everything under the sun, short of the 200 view indie music artists that get recommended to me on youtube every 3 days or so (you can spare the 2 bucks for them). it was a little scary starting off, i'll admit, cuz if you download music on soulseek, you are also expected to share your own library - big taboo to not do that - and i was having some issue where it wasn't registering the fact i did put up music to share. that was just temporary though, it's been smooth sailing since then.
it does feel nice to see somebody downloading music from me, too.

there's also a chatroom feature baked into this that sometimes i consider using, but am immediately dissuaded upon looking at them.

^{fresh off the lines at the strange people factory}

as hinted at earlier, i didn't do all of this in isolation - it came sort of as a wave to me and a bunch of my friends; though, i think i'm the only one who ditched music streaming completely in favor of it, mostly because of the mobile factor. there IS a version of foobar for phones, and if i am out and about, then i use that (no plugins though, so i use a separate app for scrobbling). UNFORTUNATELY, DOWNLOADING MUSIC HAS A VERY OBVIOUS DOWNSIDE TO IT.

omitting the fact that i'm already a data hoarder, so i'm used to it, this is doubly (or triply or some greater magnitude) more of a problem for me, because
i download lossless music. not going to get into why, because i'm only going to embarrass myself; it's kinda like trying to convince someone into believing foreign superstitions. point is, it can take up a lot of space, and in a world where even microSD card slots are being removed from phones now (Fuck you samsung), that can be a problem. not for me, i don't really use my phone for much aside from listening to music in my car (with one of the worst usb-to-aux cables in existence), but if you DO, that's a lot of storage that could instead have been used for like... videos n stuff. not to mention, it's kinda annoying to have to keep syncing your music libraries (the microSD card in my phone is only about 64 gigs, so my library is annoyingly divided between that and the internal storage).

but, i consider it rewarding. i've been throwing around the word "scrobble" here, which i'm sure is gobbledygook to somebody that doesn't use last.fm; it's what it calls logging a song you've listened to. i like tracking my music, but that can often be a problem with stuff like game soundtracks which, especially if from an older game, would not be on spotify. all i gotta do is fill out my metadata right, and bam! it's there. video game music is real music too, man!

another (more broad) amazing aspect of downloading music is that going out of your way to do it makes you way more mindful of the music you listen to (at least in my experience), and personally, i think that's worth something.

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