Digital Decluttering: Music Collection (Premium)

I am a lifelong music fan, and while there were many amazing advances to the ways we enjoy, curate, and share music over my lifetime, the advent of digital music in the late 1990s changed everything.

Well, not overnight: at the time, my friends and I were aware of the MP3 audio format, but computer hard drives were still too small to even dream about ripping what we, at the time, believed were the perfect digital recordings on our audio CDs. Indeed, my first hard drive, which I had purchased for my Amiga 500, had just 30 MB (not GB) of storage, so using 5 to 10 MB of that for just one song simply didn't make sense. Even by 1998, I was more taken with the inclusion of Deluxe CD Player in Plus! for Windows 98, as it downloaded the artist, album, song, and other information about each music CD you used and displayed it in the app. Useful!

But things change. And as hard drive capacities grew, we enjoyed a nice evolution of the tools and file formats we could use to not just digitize our music collections, but store and manage them entirely on PCs, and sync some subset of those songs to portable media player devices. The rise---and fall---of Napster, competing formats like Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), iTunes and then the iTunes Music Store and its 99 cent singles, the iPod, the iPhone and the smartphone revolution, and streaming music services were all major milestones that defined the intervening 25 years for me and other music fans.

And when it comes to digital music, devices, and services, I've done it all, and more. I used every single music service to come down the pike, both pre- and post-streaming, dozens of different MP3 players, and almost every single iPod model ever made, and I ripped and re-ripped my audio CD collections more times than I can count or remember, in various formats and quality levels, over the years. As digital music stores came and went, I purchased more and more of my music online. And when the music industry finally gave up on DRM (digital rights management) copy protection controls, I made sure to download the unprotected tracks I had purchased everywhere and I added them to the local copies of my music collection.

As an obsessive ADHD type, I curated and managed these collections with great diligence, and I carefully copied them from PC to PC back when that was necessary so that I could enjoy my music on the road and sync it with whatever device I was using at the time. In using almost every Windows Home Server (WHS) server ever made, then some servers based on Windows Server Essentials, and finally, my NAS, this collection has always come forward with me.

But it's also sat largely unused in the many years since I moved to streaming music. Here, things are a little fuzzy, but I actively used Zune Music Pass, which became Xbox Music Pass and then Groove Music Pass, and then Google Play Music, which became YouTube Music, all while experimenting with other streaming s...