Delving into the Ear Canal Annals

Recently, I got around to setting up a little PC I bought off of Ebay for 200 bucks or so. It was bought with the intention of self-hosting a set of personal services to replace public mainstream ones I want to move away from. It took about a year for me to finally get around to plugging it in and delving into the rabbit hole of configuring it to my liking. The process of inching towards a setup that I am pleased with has been very satisfying (though perhaps to the detriment of my actual work). As of now I have Immich to replace Google Photos, which was the main starting point for this whole project. I have Copyparty to replace Google Drive as well. Sensing a trend here? Well, don’t, the third thing I wanted to replace was Spotify.

Spotify is known to have started out as an underhanded piracy platform and has since grown and flourished into a beautiful butterfly, leaving their piracy roots behind and adopting a wage slavery model instead! With the added cherry on top of major investments into the AI military complex, it really is a hard package to leave behind, isn’t it?

Where is one to go instead, then? Youtube music? Kinda, Youtube music isn’t too shabby. It does a far better job of recommending good music. Alongside lots of user-created mixes, it’s a decently compelling package. My problems with music streaming go deeper than that, though. I have very fond memories of getting my first iPhone at 13 years old and being really excited about downloading -Race Around The World- (a song from the game Castle Crashers) onto it and listening to the song anywhere I wanted. Now looking back on it, the Nokia 5300 XpressMusic that I left behind was probably a cooler phone. Though at the time, iPods and iPhones were basically the kings of mp3 players. I remember the Nokia’s UI being so slow and clunky, but the media buttons on the side were so sick, I didn’t care.

My main point about this isn’t really about the device but what’s on it. My excitement of playing this little rinky dink video game song on my phone was in large part that it was a niche personal choice that I got to revel in. Over the years of using Spotify, that feeling of developing a library for myself faded, as I constantly had to grapple with what is and isn’t available to stream on the platform. You might say, “Hey! Can’t you put your own local files into the Spotify app and play them alongside the rest of your music?” to which I say absolutely NOT.

Let me tell you about a little piece of software called foobar2000, one of the few golden rays of light in the world of cyberspace. Foobar2000 is fundamentally just a music player for local files, but it was a joy to use. You could configure the UI however you wanted, mess with the colour schemes, add plugins for extra functionality, and so much more that I didn’t even interface with. It was my main music player before I switched to Spotify. Most notably, however, there was a plugin somewhat aptly named “foo_input_spotify” which let you plug Spotify into the program and play tracks like they were songs on your computer. Had I shown someone else my music library, they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the Spotify songs and the Foobar ones just by looking at it.

In software development, there is a concept called the “first-class citizen,” which, to majorly abbreviate it, means that this aspect of code is capable of all the functions as any other chunk of code. This lack of differentiation between the Spotify tracks and local ones in foobar is kind of the same thing, those songs were essentially first-class citizens of my music player.

Eventually, Spotify updated their APIs, permanently breaking “foo_input_spotify” and leaving my once harmonious relationship between two music players in shambles. So how does Spotify handle the mirror scenario? By putting all of your local files in a playlist called “local files”… that’s it. No searching, no album view, just playlists, and you have to pick through them all to add them to your playlists. I also remember the sync being inconsistent, so it wouldn’t even send to my phone. Is that true? I don’t care, I am being a hater.

I decided to bite the bullet and leave my music files behind. Collecting cyber dust in my hard drives as I moved on from that personal era of music. A lot of that stuff was kinda juvenile anyways, I should be listening to “real” music by now (this was late high school). So I took what I could find on Spotify and started again from scratch.

I’m not that avid of a music listener despite what these 814 words so far may imply. I think if I compared the two periods of my personal music history, I would say I generally spent more time listening to stuff when I was using foobar than when I was using Spotify. I had access to pretty much everything on Spotify, but that also meant that I rarely found anything I genuinely enjoyed just through Spotify alone.

So that brings us to today, as I spec out this little personal music streaming setup on my not-new server computer, I decide to crack open that casket of .mp3s and .flacs. Dubbed “Old music”, these files had been carried with me between multiple hard drives and computers. What treasures lie within this vault of ones and zeroes?

Ah yes… well to set the stage a little bit, imagine you’re a young boy on the who doesn’t have a fully formed idea of what music he likes yet. Pretty much all he has to go on so far is “no lyrics”. Hey, game soundtracks don’t have lyrics, and they’re pretty enjoyable, so let's try to find more of that. Imagine this boy’s delight when he finds a website called “OCReMix” which hosts a massive community of artists that remix video game songs and post them there for free. Free is pretty good, that guy can’t afford to buy anything anyways. So the final result ends up being a massive chunk of video game remixes, a handful of actual OSTs, and then the odd smattering of whatever else he enjoyed that was also free to download. A notable absence is the Minecraft soundtrack, which was not downloaded but instead listened to on repeat on Bandcamp.

Notice there is no mention made of the music’s quality. With my older ears and matured taste, I can definitely say that there is a lot of variance. At the same time though, it’s pretty fun to just embrace some of the garbage anyways. In general most of the actual game OSTs hold up perfectly fine, there’s definitely a couple I still listened to up until now. The tracks that are on the lower end of the spectrum are what are best described as “Royalty Free Youtuber Outro” songs. Some of them are alright, but the few that are there just generally aren’t great. Not sure what I saw in them back then, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t huge on them at the time either. For the remixes? It’s mostly comprised of passionate amateur musicians, so while things aren’t very consistent, there is an earnestness to them that I find endearing. Plus, they have a nostalgic soft spot in my heart, cheesy as they may potentially be. That being said, there are definitely some nuggets, but I cannot be truly trusted as a source of information on this, so perhaps I will leave it up to you to decide.

The best thing that’s come about from having set up this private spotify replacement is that I have had to more intimately seek out tracks, download them, and add them to my library like the good old days. In serendipitous accordance with doing things the old-fashioned way, I have made my way to a certain bird-themed peer-to-peer music sharing service. I had always lamented that I missed out on what must have been a magical time when Napster and Limewire were in their heyday, so I am glad I get to experience something that evokes a similar feeling.

Through this service, I have already discovered so many tracks that I love and would have never in a million years found through spotify. The shining star that ties my past and present selves is one of my favourite artists, Nujabes. I had discovered him a bit before switching to spotify and adored his jazz hip-hop style. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2010, and so we will never get another album from him again. What I personally hadn’t realised is that he released music under a different name in the past, “Hydeout Productions”. I had been living in ignorant bliss for all these years, and it wasn’t until I started using this music sharing service did I discover two whole albums he produced that I had never listened to before.

It was like getting a new album from him after all this time.

Obviously, these days my listening range is far broader, but it has been fun and rewarding going back through my own past and rediscovering the things that were always there. Thank you for reading my sleep-deprived rant. I'm gonna go listen to some shitty youtube outro songs now.