How I Built My Own Music Streaming Setup
In this world of endless streaming, we own nothing anymore. Nothing. Our digital music library, so carefully curated over the years, is nothing more than fairy dust blowing somewhere through the cloud. The movies we so dearly love are available to us only as long as they generate enough money or until licensing deals end. The books on our e-readers vanish in the blink of an eye, as if they were written with magic ink.
Yes, maybe we should all get back to owning our media.
While my own digital library is far from complete, I have begun to take my first steps in building it back up. And when it comes to my music, this is how I do it.
Sources
Using music streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music or Qobuz, there is no question about where to get your music from. It's that single platform that holds all the music you could ever dream of. But when you're building back your own library, the number of sources grows. And yes, that's more cumbersome and requires more effort than just a few clicks. But then, there's something calming about discovering music stores in your local city, while on holiday, and sometimes even when you least expect them.
So, physical music stores have been my first source for buying music to own. Specialty music stores that sell vinyl and CDs, but also thrift stores that sell discs for as little as a euro per piece. I've become a fan of visiting these stores, browsing through the racks in the hope of finding that one album that's been on my wishlist for a while. A kind of dopamine rush you'd normally get by scrolling through TikTok or Instagram, but then a lot healthier and way more fun.
My second source for finding music is online. I buy CDs from cozy little craft shops or online marketplaces like eBay or Discogs. I prefer these because I like to have a physical copy of the music I own. But sometimes a CD is hard to get, leaving me with the option to buy it digitally from services like Qobuz, 7digital, HDtracks, or Bandcamp. Less fun, but online digital stores do their job as well.
Playing
I fondly remember the early 2000s. I had my first real job as a newspaper boy, delivering the weekly news through people's doors. A job that paid well for a thirteen-year-old kid, but the money was not the most important thing. The cool thing was that I could enjoy a few hours of listening to my favorite music on my MP3 player through wired earbuds (and let's be honest, who needed money anyway when you got πβπ©). A device that could probably hold only a few hundred megabytes of songs, but it was enough.
Those were the days. And actually, there is something to say about separate devices and wired music listening. It's a thing in digital minimalism to have single-use devices, used with a clear purpose. Sure, you can listen to music on your smartphone, but that opens up so many other distractions: you unlock your phone to pick another song and suddenly you've spent fifteen minutes checking your messages, swiping through social media, and being annoyed by all those horrible, ignorant comments from people you don't even know.
It brought me to where I am now, owning the MP3 player of the future: the FiiO JM21. It has quite a few gigabytes of internal storage, expandable with an external SD card to multiple terabytes. And it offers high-quality, high-fidelity music playback through a 3.5mm or (balanced) 4.4mm connection. Let me tell you: it works perfectly with my noise-canceling headphones on crowded train rides. And best of all, I can keep my smartphone in my bag so it doesn't distract me so easily.
Quality music, played locally.
Streaming
What? Streaming? What do you mean, streaming? You just wrote a love story about local music on your shiny new player!
Yes, I did. But sometimes, streaming music is a solution when that player is forgotten or simply not taken with me. And bear with me, because streaming music can also mean streaming your own music. And that's what I started doing recently.
One way to do this is to buy yourself a NAS system, put your music on it, and stream from there. I did something similar, but without owning a NAS.
I use the open-source app hosting service PikaPods, which lets you spin up a container somewhere in the (European, if you wish) cloud. The cool thing is that this platform offers a whole range of apps that you can automatically install on the pods, one of which is the streaming service Navidrome. With one click, you can get a PikaPod with Navidrome up and running and use SFTP to transfer your music library to it. Then you navigate to the PikaPod URL, log in with an account you create, and enjoy listening to your music from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. You can even connect your own custom domain. Cool stuff!
To listen to the music I put on my PikaPod from my phone, I use an app called Symfonium, which can connect to the PikaPod server (which is running the OpenSubsonic API under the surface).
And then to close off, I actually do use a "regular" streaming service as well, which helps me to discover new music and keep up with new releases without immediately having to buy them all. I use Qobuz as my go-to service, mostly because of the high-fidelity music quality but also because their pay-out to artists is one of the biggest in the land of music streaming.
I'd love to hear your stories about music streaming and building (back) your personal music library!