An Inconvenient Truth: Music Deep Dive ⭐

I still pay for two music services, but I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months with a local music collection too. You can go in either direction, of course, and if you use the right music streaming service, you can even combine them. I’m still looking for the right balance here, I guess. What else is new? But this is fascinating to me.

Two services to rule them all

I’ve used YouTube Music since it was called Google Play Music. Among the many things I really like about this service is that you can incorporate music from the vast and exclusive library of YouTube videos into your library and playlists, where they can be accessed as audio-only songs. This works in both directions, too, since your YouTube Music library is available on YouTube, the video service, where you can play music playlists that display as music videos (assuming you saved the right version of the songs).

Living without this benefit isn’t catastrophic per se; I haven’t tried to count how many music videos that are exclusive to YouTube that I’ve added to music playlists in YouTube Music, but I suspect it’s a small number. And though I’ve worked to minimize my subscription services, I am sticking with both YouTube Music and Apple Music for the foreseeable future.

Ideally, I would have just a single music service and cut yet another subscription. But there are reasons I’m not doing that. YouTube Music and YouTube Premium are tied up in the same subscription, and the latter makes YouTube, the video service I watch the most by far, watchable (there are no ads). And Apple Music is part of a broader Apple One subscription that everyone in my family uses. So neither is going away any time soon. And there are things I like about both, so I go back and forth. Yes, it’s messy.

A local music wrench in the streaming music plan

Tied to this and to my broad desire to add a bit of friction or inconvenience to my interactions with content of all kinds, I have been experimenting with what it looks like to mix a local digital music collection with subscription services. There are so many buzz words and terms when you get into this and I react very poorly to that. For example, many refer to maintaining a local music collection as “self-hosting,” which feels like an overinflated name for what used to be a very common activity. But it gets worse.

If you think about what it means to be a bit more intentional–another crappy buzz word–when it comes to listening to music, there is a wide spectrum, I think, between old-school physical media and a pure streaming experience like Spotify or the services I use. And, as is often the case, I find myself somewhere in the middle. But maybe I’m drifting a bit more towards one end of that spectrum than has been the case so far in this streaming era.

At one extreme end of that spectrum is an embrace of physical media, especially vinyl, the idea being that you can–and to some, should–listen to music the way the artist intended, another terrible buzzy term that surfaces constantly in that community. My wife and I spent several months listening to music this way during the pandemic, when the world went mad and nothing made sense. But vinyl is just an affectation, an imperfect delivery vehicle for music with flaws that outweigh whatever benefits. Key among them is that a typical album side can hold just 20 to 25 minutes of music, which turns what should be an engaged, dare I say intentional, listening experience into a Catholic mass-like series of positional interruptions. Instead of sit, stand, kneel, it’s sit, stand, flip album, position needle just right, and then enjoy the crackling before repeating it all again 20 minutes later when you have to gingerly hold this razor-thin piece of wax and carefully insert it back into an inner dust sleeve that then needs to be carefully inserted back into its cardboard outer sleeve. Ah yes. Intentional.

Ridiculous is what it is. But it’s not portable, which is one of my pet peeves with all kinds of entertainment: You can only enjoy this experience in one room in one building somewhere, and if you’re anywhere else, you’re on your own. This is one of my issues with videogame consoles, for example.

Hipsters–again, those who are nostalgic for a past they did not experience–embrace vinyl largely because they are still trying to figure out who they are and what matters in this rapidly evolving world we all live in. But the issues with vinyl are too real to ignore. Among them, the costs are extravagant and the inconvenience is just too high. So now many are moving on to audio CDs, the allegedly perfect physical media format that arrived in the early 1980s that’s several generations newer than vinyl and solves many of its problems. As originally envisioned, CDs are single-sided discs that typically held up to 74 minutes of music, though that edged upward a bit over time. The discs themselves are much more durable than vinyl and the quality doesn’t degrade every single time you listen to music on these discs as is the case with vinyl. And the quality, well, variable. It’s 16 bits at 44.1 kHz and usually uncompressed, though some latter-day shenanigans in the recording industry led to some less-than-perfect recordings.

Whatever. Basically, audio CDs can sound just about as good as the original source recordings can sound–I’m being general here, yes–and in this modern era one can rip a CD to a digital file that can be lossy (typically MP3 or M4A format) with a nicely portable small file size or lossless (typically FLAC), where the quality is indistinguishable from the original but bigger in size than a lossy version. Of course, in this modern era, we’re at least two generations beyond the time when the practice of ripping audio CDs was common, with the digital music (iTunes, etc.) and streaming music (Spotify, etc.) eras having since occurred. But audio CDs are experiencing a comeback of sorts, even though it’s not as dramatic as some headlines would lead you to believe.

Not that it matters. I am not going to start listening to music on audio CDs again, just as I am not going to start building out a vinyl collection. The downsides are just too great, the most obvious being that portability and time/place issue, but also because I’ve always, since I was a child, wanted to listen to music the way I want to listen to music. Today, we call this making playlists, though like the devil, its names are legion. In any event, like vinyl, audio CDs are just too inconvenient.

But that’s only true from a listening perspective. Which, yes, is what music is all about. But if you’re going to create and maintain a local digital music collection like we did in the early 2000s, audio CDs play the same role today that they did then. They are excellent as source material for those digital files because they are (sort of) perfect and can be ripped losslessly to your PC. When I first started ripping CDs in the very late 1990s, there were blockers tied to the sizes of (what were then) MP3 files and the limited hard drive storage I had. But those blockers no longer exist. I don’t own a PC with less than 512 GB of SSD storage, and most have 1 or 2 TB. I have two NASes with 12 TB of storage each, and they can be expanded. Even my iPhone and iPad have a lot of storage, 256 GB and 1 TB, respectively. We live in an age of wonder.

Mix and match

One of the advantages of the two music streaming services I use that is common to both is that you can upload your own music to them and those services will store those files in the cloud for you so you can intermingle your own music with whatever they offer in their libraries. (You can also do this on the Apple side through iTunes Match if you don’t have an Apple Music subscription.)

One of the disadvantages of the two music streaming services I use that is likewise common to both is that they don’t retain the quality of your uploaded files; in Apple Music’s case, an uploaded FLAC file becomes a 256 Kbps M4A song file instead. Which is good, maybe even very good, but not perfect. I don’t need perfect, but I have been experimenting with what it means to also access perfect lossless FLAC rips using other apps on my PCs and devices. The experience varies, of course. And the process of ripping CDs and then obtaining the perfect metadata that my ADHD brain requires is not ideal. There is some friction there.

That might be a good thing, as friction is, in some ways, the point. And the mixing of the old and the new is interesting. You can discover new music or listen to existing playlists and whatever else in your music subscription, but you can also have this other thing, this local music collection, over on the side. They can be mixed and matched if you use Apple Music or YouTube Music, and they can be enjoyed separately.

Granted, my existing local music collection, some mix of MP3 and AAC/M4A formats, is far from perfect and never will be. The thought of unboxing all my CDs and re-ripping them for what must be the 20th time isn’t all that appealing, but I suppose doing so for some key CDs might be worth doing. And I have done a bit of that, experimentally. It’s interesting, and while I wouldn’t call it nostalgic per se, there is a familiarity, probably because I had done this so much in the past. It’s like riding a bike.

What’s not familiar is the interaction between the local music collection and the libraries and playlists I maintain in Apple Music and YouTube Music. But from a friction perspective, it’s possible that ripping CDs and maintaining a local music collection in addition to using a streaming service is just inconvenient enough to make sense. It’s to the right, if you will, of listening to music solely on vinyl or CDs on that spectrum, I guess. And it’s far to the left of just giving in and listening to music through Spotify or whatever service, which is definitely the best choice for most people. But I love music. And I feel like this effort is worthwhile for me. There’s no downside, really, just a bit of time and effort, and then the storing of these files. Which is essentially no cost at all at this point.

Real-world local music acquisition

My full MP3/AAC audio collection is archived on the two NASes and takes up a bit less than 44 GB of space. That said, 5.5 GB of that is New Age and other instrumental music and 4 GB is Christmas music. So it’s about 34 GB of rock and pop or whatever.

As noted, individual file sizes are all over the place. As one example, my (most likely ripped) version of the debut Boston album in 256 Kbps M4A format is about 77 MB on disk, with each song taking up between 6.1 and 10 MB of space.

To get this into a lossless format, I used an old standby, Exact Audio Copy, which is like a time machine from the Windows Vista era. It lets you rip CDs in lossy MP3 and WMA formats, speaking of time machines, but also FLAC. And the resulting rip of the same Boston album is about 267 MB on disk, with each song taking up 23 to 53 MB.

Can I hear a difference? No, not at all. Not when playing through the speakers of a laptop, and not when playing through earbuds. This will vary by song, I guess, and by the source, but this speaks to one of the standard issues music fans have always dealt with as we move forward in time and the formats evolve. Lower quality MP3s can sound terrible, for sure, and streaming can too if you don’t configure the app right or have a good connection. But at some point, with all kinds of variables, good enough is, well, good enough.

This reality introduced a new uncertainty about the way forward. I figured re-ripping key albums only–grabbing Boston from the box is a good example–might make some sense, and have done some of that. But I also considered buying CDs that post-date my CD collection, if not the digital download era, since these transitions are never clean.

This may or may not make sense. Some CDs are reasonably inexpensive, some are surprisingly expensive. Interestingly, that Boston album, which is literally 50 years old now (Christ), is just $5 on sale at Amazon as I write this, though it’s normally $10. The vinyl version is $20, which is actually inexpensive for vinyl because vinyl, again, is ridiculous.

But what about newer music, music that’s been released since the streaming era began? Looking at the five most recent albums I’ve played on YouTube Music and then looking at how much each costs on Amazon, I came up with the following:

• Foreigner: 4 (Deluxe Edition) – Not available on CD, but $6.98 for Remastered version with a few extra tracks
• The Beatles: Anthology 4 – $24.99
• Sammy Hagar: The Residency – $13.65
• Collective Soul: Here to Eternity – $13.83
• Billy Joel: And So It Goes – Not available

Yes, these are all what I would call legacy bands–and I’m sure that’s a huge coincidence–but these are all recent releases. So kind of a mixed bag. And enough so that I have yet to actually buy a new (to me) audio CD. But now that we’re in Mexico, I will visit some of the used music stores in the neighborhood and see if I can’t scare up some used CDs. Most of these places are all-vinyl or mostly vinyl, and the one I’ve visited so far was all-vinyl.

One small issue here is that you don’t see many optical drives in PCs these days and almost never in laptops. I don’t have a single computer with a built-in optical drive, desktop or portable, here or in Pennsylvania, but I do have a USB-based optical drive back in PA. I didn’t think to bring it here, there’s always something to forget, but I was able to buy a $17 DVD-RW drive from Amazon Mexico that supports just about every CD and DVD format save Super Audio CD (SACD) and has a USB 3.0 connection with both Type-A and Type-C. I just don’t have a disc to use it with. Yet.

(That drive is not available in the U.S., but it’s made by a company called Lostrain and the Amazon product code is B0BCVX6MGH. There are many similar drives, of course.)

The other friction-y music acquisition issue is the YouTube video thing. The other day, I was on YouTube and saw that The Offspring, one of my favorite bands, had covered the Taylor Swift song Love Story, which is amazing. The video isn’t ideal for adding to a music playlist because there’s too much talking at the beginning and then some more in the middle. But that actually made it a good test.

I don’t remember how or why, but at some point I purchased a license for an app called 4K Video Downloader Plus, so I downloaded, installed, and signed into that app with the license key. Among other things, it lets you download just the audio from a video instead of the full video, and you can configure it always choose the best-available quality for audio or video. My memory is that the audio quality on YouTube isn’t usually that great, and that was true of this video, which tops out at 192 Kbps. But whatever, it’s small, and it’s a song I can’t get anywhere else, at least to my knowledge.

If all you need to do is trim the beginning and/or end of an audio file, you have plenty of options, but I wanted to also remove the gabbing in the middle of this particular video. I’ve been working on a rewrite of the Clipchamp chapter in the Windows 11 Field Guide and had noticed some new audio options, so I gave that a try, and it turned out wonderfully. I trimmed the beginning and end, added a 1-second fade-in at the start and a 1-second fade-out at the end, and split the video at the beginning and end of the mid-song talking. Then I delete that and put the two halves of the remaining audio in different tracks in the timeline so I could slightly overlap them for a transition.

This shouldn’t have worked so well, and I figured I would need to subtly massage it until it was good enough. But the transition is perfect, I can’t hear it no matter how hard I try. So that was that. I exported it as an audio-only file and the result is a tiny 4.4 MB M4A file at 192 Kbps. It sounds good, given the source material. And the amount of time I spent on this was minimal, maybe 15 minutes. I did this in the hope that a higher quality formal version of the song will appear one day, but this will do for now.

Real-world local music cleanup and management

Once you have whatever music files stored locally–in my case, a subset of my full MP3 collection, some newer FLAC rips, and that one downloaded YouTube song–the next step is to make sure the metadata is correct. This is the bane of any music fan’s existence, or it was in the early 2000s, for sure. I can’t even tell you how many times I copied my collection to whatever PCs back in the day and then brought it up in whatever app–Windows Media Player, Zune, iTunes, and probably 20 others–only to immediately notice missing album art and other issues.

And that’s what happened with me recently, too. So I put a halt to the playback part and inserted this middle step. I needed an app that I could use to write the correct metadata into every music file I have. I want each song to display the correct album art in its thumbnail as viewed in File Explorer, too. You know the drill.

I don’t remember what I used to use for this. But a Google search of the available options here in 2026 led me to an app called MusicBee that’s free and has been around for years though I’d never heard of it. No app is perfect, of course, and MusicBee has a few quirks. But this is exactly what I wanted and it works perfectly for my needs.

I have MusicBee installed on multiple laptops, but on the one I’m using to write this, I have it pointed at my Music folder, and I copied over a few Boston and Def Leppard albums I’d ripped previously. These are all fine from a metadata perspective, so there’s nothing for me to do with them now. But I copied that edited YouTube song into the Music folder so I could go through the normal workflow with Music Bee.

Basically, I open Music Bee and click File > Scan folders for new files. There’s no metadata for this thing at all, so the new song shows up as an Unknown album with no album art.

When there’s no album art for a song or album full of songs, I usually just right-click the blank album art thumbnail and choose “Search Internet for Picture” and that does the trick. But that didn’t work with this song, of course, as there is no album art. So I right-clicked and chose “Edit” instead.

Filling out and correcting the relevant metadata was easy enough. But then I needed something for the album art, so I used the web developer tools in a web browser to find the thumbnail for the video.

I downloaded that, used Affinity to crop it to a square aspect ratio and then dragged the output into MusicBee, being sure to embed the image in the file.

And there you go. Decent.

It’s usually not that arduous, of course. And you can obviously play music in MusicBee. But it’s not ideal for that; in fact, it’s pretty terrible. Plus, it’s Windows-only. So there is more to do.

Real-world local music playback

I’ve gone through so many different local music playback apps across PC, iPhone, iPad, and a bit of Android, so I’ve lost track of everything I’ve tried. Plus there’s Apple TV for those times when I want to play locally stored music on some decent speakers. (We have numerous Sonos speakers and a pair of full-sized Apple HomePods in PA and a pair of small HomePod Mini speakers and a portable JBL Bluetooth speaker here in Mexico.) But here’s where I’m at.

Media Player comes with Windows 11, and it’s fine. It picks up all the metadata edits I make correctly, at least, and it’s just there, so there’s nothing to install.

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This isn’t how I typically listen to music, of course. Most of the time, this occurs through my phone using YouTube Music or Apple Music. Or, now, through whatever third-party app just for local files.

YouTube Music makes it incredibly easy to get local music into the service: Just drag and drop the file(s) onto the web app.

Once you do that, the song is in the library and you can access it from anywhere. As good, you can add it to a playlist. This all happens in seconds, at least for one song, and then it’s accessible anywhere I have YouTube Music. Like my phone.

Getting local music into Apple Music should be just as easy, but Apple’s support document describing how is incorrect: There’s no “Import” option there. But you can just right-click on the file(s) in File Explorer and choose Open with > Apple Music. That does the trick, assuming the Sync Library option is enabled. And Apple being Apple, the song shows up on all your devices immediately too.

But I also wanted to find an app for just local music playback. This is that intentional thing again, sorry, meaning that this will typically be used for a straight-up playthrough of an entire album. There are probably hundreds of choices here, but I settled on a free app called Evermusic that seems to work pretty well. It’s on iPhone and iPad (and the Mac, apparently). There are probably many ways to deal with local music on an Apple device, but I just use an external USB-C hard drive to copy files over to the internal storage using the Files app. And I point Evermusic at that folder. New music appears immediately.

For the Apple TV, I can just stream from the Apple Music or YouTube (which has a Music section) apps on the device and use the remote as always.

I use an app called Infuse for NAS-based video streaming to Apple TV, and I sort of wish it supported music too. But this is good. Real good.

So there you go. It’s not perfect. It’s not right for everyone. But I’ve had a good time revisiting a local music collection and it’s neat that such a thing can still integrate with at least some modern music streaming services. Now I just have to find a good local source for used CDs.