A Case for Offline Music

To streaming and back again

2025-05-11

Screenshot of Elisa, the KDE music player app, showing a grid of album covers

I used to have a pretty large collection of MP3s when I was younger. I started accumulating them pretty much as soon as MP3 became widely available and I had a PC that was capable of handling them at all.Before flash-storage based MP3 players became cheap, I used to burn CDs full of MP3 files to listen to on an MP3-capable portable CD player. It was horrible because the CD would constantly skip when there was any vibration or even just brisk walking. Eventually I upgraded to a cheap MP3 player that just had internal flash memory and would plug into a PC like a USB stick. That was around the time the first iPods also came out but those were way outside my budget as a poor student and I didn’t have a Mac anyway.

My music collection was populated by stuff I got from friends, CDs I took out from the public library, CDs I bought myself, and of course file sharing. Back then Audiogalaxy was still a thing and it was just so good, even though downloading a single song at questionable quality could take something like 30 minutes.

I carried my collection from computer to computer over the years. Eventually I switched to a Mac in 2008 when I had started to actually earn some money and with that came access to iTunes, which was amazing. This was still a time when Apple made software that was actually good. Around that time, last.fm was also really popular and it was actually pretty good at surfacing new music based on what else I already listened to. I found one of my all-time favorite musicians through it: Polly Scattergood.

In 2010, Rdio launched, the first music streaming service as we understand them today where you don’t buy individual pieces of music and then download them but you pay a fee and get access to the entire catalog so listening to music requires an active subscription. At the time this seemed like an incredible deal. I was spending about as much on buying music per month as the subscription anyway and this was I got access to a lot more music. Rdio shut down in 2015 and I had a brief time with Spotify but I really didn’t like how their UI organized music. At the time it didn’t have a concept of a personal library. Instead you could only have playlists so I ended up curating a list for every album because I tend to listen to entire albums usually, but that a terrible way of organising a music library. This issue got me to switch to Apple Music once that became available in Germany in 2016 and I kept using for many years.

However with any of these services one major problem I kept encountering was that sometimes tracks or entire albums would become unavailable, or albums would be incomplete to begin with which was a major annoyance due to my album-centered listening habit. During the 2020s I also got myself a record player again and got some albums on vinyl that I particularly liked.

a black turntable playing a clear blue vinyl record

This made me remember how nice it used to be to actually own music, to have some kind of thing that couldn’t just be taken away. I started yearning for my old music library which I sadly had not kept around after switching to streaming. Although, considering how old some of those MP3s used to be and what low bit-rates they were encoded in, maybe I wouldn’t have enjoyed them much anymore.

In 2024 I decide to ditch the Mac ecosystem for good and move back to a PC and use Linux as my main operating system. I built a new PC, something I hadn’t done since 2006, and I made one critical inclusion in the parts list: a blu-ray drive that would also be able to read CDs and DVDs. With a library card, a Bandcamp account, and the download codes that often come with vinyl records I was now able again to build a personal music collection. It’s still small and if I want to listen to something I don’t have, I have to fall back on YouTube where many artists even post full albums these days.

I have to say, it’s been incredible. Even though I have access to less music overall, I have such a better connection to the music. I know that everything that’s there is because I curated it that way. It’s not just choosing what to get and to keep but also the practice of naming and tagging the files correctly, adding the album art when it’s missing, looking up track listings when automatic means like CDDB don’t catch something. The effort I put into my collection heightens my enjoyment of it.

Most importantly though, I no longer feel choice paralysis when picking something to listen to. The over abundance of stuff on streaming services often made me feel overwhelmed and despite having hundreds of albums in my library and an unimaginable number available beyond that led me to only listen to the same handful of things over and over again. By reducing my choices, I now actually have a more varied experience of music and I appreciate each individual album more.

I haven’t enjoyed music this much in years and I don’t regret ditching streaming at all.

Here’s what tools I currently use for my music collection:

Elisa, a very nice music players for Linux

(see screenshot at the top of this post)

It’s part of KDE and really well integrated into the desktop environment, supports album art, organizes a collection by artist or album, and has decent search and playlist functions.
abcde, “a better CD extractor”

A command line ripping tool that works really well. It supports CDDB and album art lookups and has a ton of useful options.

My default way of running it is:
```
abcde -d /dev/cdrom -o flac -G -x
```
- -d just sets the device to read from, in this case my only optical drive
- -o flac creates lossless FLAC audio files to preserve the full CD quality
- -G tries to automatically find album art and embeds it in the audio files
- -x ejects the CD after it’s done
Kid3, a full-featured audio tag editor

Not all music files come with correct metadata and not all CDs can be found via CDDB. In those cases having a powerful editor is important. It’s also part of KDE.
VLC on iOS

My phone is still an iPhone and will probably remain that until I really have to replace it.

For portable music, VLC does the job well. I can transfer music onto the device via WiFi very quickly and it supports the album-based organization that I’m used to.