Quote:
Originally Posted by Guybrush
Just a quick comment about streaming services. The right one for you may be youtube music for a couple of reasons. ... As for collecting, ... The maintenance of it was its own fun, but in hindsight, it didn't leave me with much besides satisfaction in the moment. It's a bit like being hooked on World of Warcraft  |
Thanks for your input! That's interesting that you suggest YouTube Music Premium.
Several primary drives have wed me to my personal media server all these years. Namely, the server is advert-free, has thousands of hours of content not available on commercial services, and permits me to queue it as a background process from any web-enabled device. And if I proactively pre-buffer a few hundred hours of content at a time the way I usually do each week, I'm gold to listen all day even without a network connection.
And perhaps the most significant factor is that of my favorite genre - long-form ambient and drone music. Many of the songs I listen to are in excess of an hour or even eight hours in length. That motivated me to move away from vinyl which would require my getting up to repeatedly flip a 20-minute side of an LP, ruining the bliss of meditating or even sleeping to a night-long dreamscape session. I wonder how well YouTube Music Premium would handle my hundreds of carefully curated playlists which are each thousands of hours long. Would I have to manually reconstruct all those playlists after uploading all the missing content to YouTube? Also importantly - would YouTube Music Premium preserve and maintain my lossless archival FLAC or would it compress the audio to 320CBR, v0 or lower? And how would it interpret and retain all the ID3 data I've worked so hard to uniformly structure and tag?
I'd be curious how YouTube Music Premium stands against those factors, and in particular what features it offers above and beyond the glory of the personal server setup I already have to warrant all the labor of uploading and tagging tens of thousands of tracks missing from the service. And would those uploads be privately my own, or would I be handing them over to the masses?
You're right about the curious nature of collecting. I thrived on experiencing the art of flow every time I sat down and started writing or cataloguing. It was a thrilling endeavor.
Thanks again!