I wanted the highlight my very complex process of how I listen to music, whether that is at home on my computer, on the go or even on obscure devices.
A bit about what I listen
Lets first describe what I listen to. I listen to mainly J-pop, some J-rock and Vocaloid. Mainly a mix of Japanese music; though, recently been adding some K-pop. I organise my songs into 2 playlists. ‘Sekai’, contains J-pop and similar, and ‘Melody’, contains Vocaloid
No streaming, all local
Rule No. 1 no streaming. Now streaming has its pro and cons. It is very easy to get started listening to a new piece of music. But, I prefer having control over my data and specifically metadata.
Actually, when I first started listening to Jpop I used to listen using Soundcloud, allowing to me to access a larger range of music and more obscure ones like lesser known vocaloid songs that weren’t on Spotify. Also, to to just not use Spotify as I wanted to be different. The main reason I went to local music was to skip the minimal ads on soundcloud, use less Mobile Data on the go, and also allowing me to control the metadata. The one thing I didn’t like about Soundcloud was that the music cover art were up to the uploader to decide the cover, some of which I didn’t like or were not the original. Also, some artist were behind Soundcloud go+ subscription.
Finding new Music and acquiring Music
I usually use YouTube to find new music, I get recommend music and I will click it, and if I like it I will save it to a playlist for later. Most of the time, if it’s a new artist, I will go into the artist’s channel and try to find music that I might like.
Recently, sometimes I would open Spotify in the browser and play a curated playlist, based on what I listen to. And, if I like it I might save it for later. Right now, as I am writing this, I am listening to the ‘Gacha Pop’ playlist on Spotify. I have added 3 songs so far.
A few times a month, using a little tool known as ytdl, I would download the music I saved earlier from YouTube. I then add them to a m3u file using a small script I wrote.
Adding metadata
To add metadata I will use the Musicbrainz Picard. I try using the auto tag, but sometimes I use the MusicBrainz website to search for the recording and tag it.
Also, as I love hoarding files, I download the lyrics. I use lrcget. When it can’t find the lyrics, I than go to the source, lrclib.net.
Listening to it
I mainly listen to my music on Mobile and Desktop. On Mobile I use Gramophone. It was love at first sight. Every other music player I have tested since this one, I have had a small nitpick with it. The only other one that was close and I daily droved it for some time was Retro Music Player. I just love Gramophone for it’s simplicity and great minimal features and the Material You design support; it isn’t as powerful as other apps and it’s equalizer is a bit lacking in terms of amount of control. But, still a solid choice in my opinion.
On desktop I use MusicBee, with a catppuccin theme. This has a ton of features in it and quite a customisable UI. But, the only features I use is the playlist view, shuffle and now playing.
Scrobling
I also scroble my music for statistics purpose, to see my data and trends over time. I use ListenBrainz (My Profile) to scroble, as it nicely integrates with MusicBrainz database. On Mobile I use Panoscrobler, to upload data from my phone.
On desktop, I use a plugin in MusicBee.
I love seeing every week the amount of data points increase and seeing who I am listening to the most and how my listening habits change over time.
Listening on non-standard devices
One of the big reason for local library of music was the fact I can put my music on my psp. This is kinda useful, I mean I don’t use it often, but when I do, it feels good. I also found an old ipod nano 6g my parents had. So I decided to load my library on it, but I rarely use it. As the convenience of wireless earphones and scrobling just outweigh it’s cons.
Syncing my library
I download and store my music on my Computer, which has Syncthing running on it, and I have Sycnthing on my phone which pulls music from it. I also back up my library to my Raspberry pi using the same Syncthing.
The End
And that’s it, that is my music listening workflow. I rambled quite a bit here, but I love nerding out about my setup and how I do things because, my setups aren’t always simple like normal people used to, and I love that charm.
I hope I might have taught some people about new things, or even introduced them to have a local library.
Any way see you next time.