Comment by martin_a

I hike a lot and hate using my phone's battery power for music. On top of needing that power for other things, it just feels wasteful. I bought a cheap MP3 player to try out in 2016 and have been hooked ever since. These devices are smaller and lighter than spare phone batteries or power banks.

In addition, I find that I use the MP3 player when I'm out running normal errands precisely because I've organized my music by hand and even edited tracks by hand in some cases. Examples would be things like rare covers that can only be found on YouTube, or favorite songs from niche internet music communities which were poorly mastered.

It's also a bit of a gear hobby now since there are so many MP3 players on the market. Prices are low and performance is great.

I have to agree about the iPod though, as I found the need for proprietary software, and really annoying software at that, made me use it less and less until my 32GB iTouch was mostly used as an ebook reader. I also prefer physical buttons for my mp3-listening while on the go.

But aren't you worried you'll lose access to your music? I have to own it! I can't have it at the whim of multiple third parties to take down as they see fit. It's too important.

> I'm not sure but I think "owning" music like in "I got some files here on my drive" seems dead to me.

I really don't think that's true. I think the "listening market" looks a lot like it did before; a large number of casual listeners and a smaller number of people who are in to their music enough to care about details. The second category does things like talk about differences in mastering between different releases, for instance, and Spotify or Apple are not going to offer you that 1973 Berlin recording or whatever. Tidal tries to cater to this market, but they don't have a massive amount of stuff. And then you get to bootleg collecting and people who record performances, old music that didn't make the digital jump and all sorts other recordings that will never make it commercial services.

I'm not a "real audiophile" or obsessive about collecting things, but I do have a lot of music (last I looked, about 60k distinct artifacts - mostly individual songs, but some of those are albums or nonmusical, also some dupes and garbage). And a lot of that is not on commercial services.

> But who is using MP3 players these days any more?

I use my iPod Shuffle exclusively for portable music listening. Cannot beat the form factor, only have to charge it once a week or two (and sometime far longer between charges), and helps me relegate my mobile surveillance/communications device to phone-duties-only as much as possible.

I rip my CDs in a two-step process: first to FLAC, then convert to mp3. The mp3s go in my phone, I have 33GB so far and my collection isn't even half ripped. I haven't checked how big the FLACs are lately but I'm sure they'd be a much bigger burden.

Well I never used CDs. Unfortunately what.cd got taken down, but a couple years ago, it was probably the biggest and most complete collection of music in the world.

Nowadays, I also just use spotify since I don’t have a quality source for music. But if what.cd was still around, I would dump spotify in a second.

I use my phone as an MP3 (Opus, actually) player, with a selection of music from my ~20K track collection. This works better for me than unlimited access to all music, because it makes me have to listen to a smaller selection of content, so I give each album more attention.

While I do also have a Spotify Premium subscription, I am using it a lot less now than I used to. At least 10% of the album's I have simply aren't available on Spotify, and possibly never will be. Underground self-released artists very often don't bother with streaming services, or are outright against the entire concept in the first place, claiming that it devalues the music. It certainly doesn't pay very well. There's also the issue of music disappearing because of rightsholder disputes, such as most of the Motörhead discography being unavailable for an extended period of time. That sort of thing just isn't acceptable.

Honestly I've come to realize that I prefer a smaller nicely curated collection over a massive unwieldy semi-unlimited library, with questionable curation. I have reported hundreds of curation errors to Spotify, but they keep popping up, especially errors involving two identically-named artists being mixed together.

I will admit that I am very particular about tagging, labeling and sorting by genre. Spotify is woefully inadequate in this regard. For my own collection, I am in full control, which makes it much easier to sort and handle.

Your smartphone or laptop is like an MP3 player with respect to mastering, not like an expensive amplifier and speakers. Your smaryphone/laptop has an amplifier that's optimised for low energy usage, not fidelity, and loudspeakers optimised for size. Music which has been mixed and mastered without regard for how it sounds on your smartphone is sold as "24/192" or "vinyl" or such. The 192 does not matter technically, it's just an identifying mark, and some sort of identifying mark is necessary.

I don't think this advice is aimed at your typical Spotify user (i.e. the majority of people).

Spotify is fine for casual listening, but if you're picky about quality, you're going to diy it, and if you're diying, 24/192 is pointless.