how to: collecting music
do you want to collect music? omg me too!!!! ahaha but seriously, it can sometimes be hard to start, so here's a little dinky guide for you to follow to get your footing.
- Adjust your expectations
if you came from a streaming service, you’ve likely been spoiled by how easy some aspects of having a music collection are. Everything is presorted, pre tagged, and you have a guarantee on the quality of the music with most apps. But you don’t really own the music. As I’ve seen with some of my favorite songs, they can be taken off the sites and disappear (apple music I’m talking about you). Creating a music library can be very time-consuming, and possibly frustrating if you don’t know what you’re doing.
- Make a list
I personally like to decide what songs I should prioritize when making a new library. For example, I would prioritize my favorite artist’s songs, then their genre, and then whatever else peaks my fancy. If I didn’t know what I was going to download I could spend hours just going through the process.
- Acquire cd's
The easiest way to acquire your own music is to obtain the cd of the album you want, whether through online ordering or checking your local library. The benefit of buying a cd is that it both supports your artists and it also provides the best quality music you can get outside of streaming. The negative, however, is that it can end up being pretty expensive.
- Download your music
The method I usually use for obtaining music online is using yt-dpl, a command line interface (cli) for downloading video and audio from youtube. Because I use linux, the steps may differ depending on your os. First, I search for the album I want on youtube music (rather than the standard youtube website). It’s up to preference, but I’ve personally had a better experience with youtube music. Then, I input the parameters into yt-dlp. My usual parameters are “yt-dlp -x -P home:~/LocalMusic/UNSORTED”, the -x means audio only, and the -P works in conjunction with the file path to list the output location of the download.
After inputting the parameters, I paste in the website link of the youtube music website into the command, after all of the parameters. It should look something like “yt-dlp -x -P home:~/LocalMusic/UNSORTED https://music.youtube.com/123456”. Once you press enter on the command, the music should be downloaded to your computer. After downloading you may need to mass rename the files to remove any unnecessary tagging, like [12kt093bet] for example. You can use a mass renamer and a regular expression to quickly remove them.
- Tag your music
Tagging may seem cumbersome at first, but don’t worry! It doesn’t take very long at all if you tag your music as you download it. I personally use puddletag, which works almost like a spreadsheet for your music, but you can use any tag editor. The main fields to worry about are artist, album, and title. Track number may be important in some cases but usually you’ll be fine without. After tagging those 3 (or more) fields you may want to have an album cover on your music as well. I typically will right-click and download the album covers from youtube music as well, but you can also find them by a simple google search most times.
- Organize everything
You can use any organization method, but what I’ve found to work the best is Music/[artist]/[album]/[song]. This method allows for some music players to detect the album and artist of a song even without tags, which is a huge bonus for those who don’t want to bother.
- Repeat steps 3-5 until satisfied.
and there you have it! your very own music library to listen to and maybe even use to make cd’s?? I’ll also be making a guide on that soon, so you can easily see a walkthrough on how I make them for my friends. buhbye!!