Tending to my personal music library

Posted Feb 1, 2026

I really started listening to music after I got an iPod Video for Christmas in 2005. I used that thing daily for around a decade. Being a weird nerd, my music collection initially consisted mostly of video game soundtracks, many of which were unofficial game rips done by fans like myself. For instance, I’ve always been a fan of the soundtrack to Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, a PS1 game that never got an official OST release (at least until the collector’s edition of the remaster eventually ships), so I made my own rip directly from the game disc. I spent a lot of time on the FFShrine forums looking for interesting soundtracks, and it’s truly a shame that it’s no longer around.

Around 2015, I felt smartphones had finally become good enough to replace my iPod, and they also offered new possibilities. The collection of MP3s that I had been building for a decade was uploaded in its entirety to Google Play Music, and I eventually moved to a Spotify subscription a few years later. I still wanted to listen to my weird MP3s, but importing local files to Spotify was a truly awful experience – probably because they didn’t actually want you to do it – so I soon moved to Apple Music instead. Its import feature wasn’t perfect, but it was a massive improvement coming from Spotify, almost like someone on the dev team actually cared about it.

I’ve been using Apple Music for around 5 years now, filling the gaps in its catalog with my own files, and overall I’ve been pretty satisfied. But as with any streaming service, when the license for a piece of media expires, you are no longer allowed to experience it. From one day to the next, your favorite song might disappear from your library without warning or recourse. It cements the fact that it’s not really your library; you’re just renting it on a monthly basis. A well maintained CD or vinyl collection can last a lifetime – and digital files are basically immortal when regularly copied to new physical media – but how much of your online music collection will survive the next 5 years? 10 years? 30 years? Your Spotify or Apple Music library is ultimately ephemeral, and its lifetime is dictated by a corporate machine with no regard for sentimental value.

Streaming services are built for convenience, not permanence. You get a constantly updated library of popular songs available on demand, and in return you sometimes have to let go of things you’ve already listened to. It’s a tradeoff that makes sense for casual listening, but what about the music you really care about? That one song you’ve listened to on repeat for weeks, or the one you enjoy rediscovering every few years? The album that makes you reminisce about a joyful past experience? Maybe those deserve better. Wouldn’t you sleep better knowing those couldn’t be taken away by something as nebulous as record label licensing agreements? Me too.

After years of prioritizing convenience I’ve returned to my MP3 collection, slowly expanding it and listening to it. While MP3 files work exactly the way they did 20 years ago, the technology around them has changed for the better. VLC or foobar2000 still work great, but with the help of Navidrome or Jellyfin you can get a personal, always-online streaming service without giving up on the permanence that local files provide.

For me, tending to my music library is a mix of nostalgia for a simpler time, digital preservation of art that matters to me, and nerding out about niche stuff like file organization and proper ID3 tags. In other words, right up my alley. There’s also a dash of self expression: I’m not building a music library that will be to everyone’s taste, but a curated, deeply personal one where every album has a reason for inclusion, or maybe even a story to tell. I find it a comforting activity, and I’m in no rush. This is a collection that’s been around for two decades, and I hope it stays around for at least another two.