After 5 or so years of active streaming usage. I ditched my only streaming subscription. The reason is quite simple and comically pragmatic — money. 500 stablely backwards growing money units per month is a bit to much for poor library and discustingly slow music app.

# Streaming is evil

Seriously, there is no streaming service that i could use without it getting in my way.

You know how it gets. You wanna listen to some beats, open an app, wait for a whole minute till it fucking loads, get an advert for the most well known musician just released a new piece of crap you will never listen, wanna listen to something new, press a legaly destinct very smart ai algorythm button, wait for another minute till this terminator loads up, and finally… listen for some of the blendest, most boring list of sounds played in sequence ever heard by human squized to the size of a few kilobytes, say ‘fuck it’ and then go to ‘my favorites’ list.

It is horrible, i hated every moment of it, musicians are payed pennys of pennys, and who the hell thought it was a good way to listen to music?

# And now what this post is about

So how i solved my music listening problem? The answer is simple: legal purchase of the music discs and copying their data on a local device in flac format… by some good folk of the high seas :)

I’ve been using my local library for few weeks already and the result is pretty good by now. I finally started to listen to full albums… Got to know a bunch of new artists… And now i found some albums i would never discover listen under the recomendation algorithm dictate.

No seriously, who of you would listen to a buch of random piano OST covers of one JRPG’s from 90s, about which i am sure even japaneese had forgotten. But this album is realy good actually. And i found out about it only thanks for a beautyful girl on the cover while scrolling through archive.org.

And with my wallet full of not much rubles. This is the closest feeling i’ll have with just browsing the vinyl store and getting something absolutely unexpected out of there. And i like this feeling

# My setup for music listening

1. I catalogued each album to the folders in my ~/Music directory, which in term was just a link to my second drive to not kill my SSD

2. Syncthing setted to send stuff from ~/Music on my PC to my phone(even if i think of getting a player)

3. Players: QMMP with WinAmp theme on my computer and Musicolet on my phone. Both of this players just work, launch quickly and don’t get in my way to listen to an album

4. Nice shloop to sail the high seas :)

# A moral question

Obviously puttin on a tricorn hat is not quite… legal.

But first, i would love to by music the right way, but there are few caviats in my way: i live in country there piracy stands victorious, so there is only one legal way to listen to most music, on streaming… full on three shitty streaming services, i would have no problems if Deezer was avalible, it at least gives me nice sound quolity, but it got under sanctions. Buying albums on Bandcamp is a pain in the ass too, fee for converting cityscapes to portraits is absurd, and thats if i have a right place to put this green things in, which i don’t. This hustle is just not worth it.

And last but not least, i am a student, which means i am broke.

So then shit stops being thrown on a goddamn ventilator i will buy all this albums, on disks. Digital purchase is still glamourized money burning anyway.

# As a result

To hell with steaming. Thanks to people from the seven seas. Sorry to musicians, i’ll be better.