Not a big fan of music streaming.
I have a good size, custom curated, very well organized library of music on my hard drive. It’s taken me years to create, it’s all backed up. I have a subsonic server behind Wireguard so I can listen to it from my phone or other devices, and it’s all also synced to my Sony Walkman NW-A55 hi-res digital audio player that I use with my Ikko OH1 IEMs.
I’m really very satisfied with this setup.
But still, I find myself not being able to decide what to listen to way too often. The paradox of choice. Fairly often I’ll just throw the whole thing, or maybe some specific genre on shuffle, and that’s pretty good. But I also like listening to albums. When I’m just choosing an album myself, I’ll gravitate to the same few dozen or so artists. Other stuff might go months or years without being listened to.
I think my devices and software let me shuffle albums, but I wanted to create a long range plan to get to all of it over time. Here’s what I did:
- Printed out a list of all artists. Literally just went to the terminal and did an
lsin my music folder, directing it to a file. - Pulled that file into a Google spreadsheet, one artist per line.
- Shuffled them.
Now I’m just working down the list. I just grab the next artist in the list and choose an album and start playing.
If I’m not feeling the vibe with that particular artist or album, I just move on. But I try to listen to at least one or two songs anyway.
When I move on to the next artist, I mark the previous one as done.
Here’s what’s on my playlist for today:
- Ministry
- Van Morrison
- Harry Nillson
- The White Stripes
- John Lee Hooker
I’ve really been enjoying this strategy. Been listening to music that I haven’t in a long time, not just the same albums over and over. And it’s all content that I’ve chosen to put in my library, so it’s all artists I generally like to some degree. And sometimes get totally different genres up against each other, which is fun.
This is going to take months to go through, but it’s been keeping things fresh.