Listen to What

I very much enjoyed Tracy Durnell's long post about listening without a streaming subscription, part of a series on wanting, or perhaps needing, less. It mirrors, at least partially, my own experiences of music in the past few years; having first reduced friction I now find that, in order to be more intentional, I need to reduce friction all over again

I had a free account on Spotify quite early on, and enjoyed it hugely back then. I looked forward to my weekly recommendations and my dailies in specific genres, and often regarded the tracks it suggested as uncannily good. But none of them ever prompted in me the desire to buy anything. I mean, why bother, especially with a shortcut to mute ads? Then, slowly, things deteriorated, with more instantly forgettable tracks by people I'd never even heard of. Maybe it was AI slop, maybe it was actual humans producing lacklustre music; either way, it annoyed me, and it isn't that I don't own plenty of music.

Music is the Problem

There are close to 9000 tracks in my music library, but frankly, managing music in the Music.app is a pain, which is why Spotify was attractive in the first place. I knew that there was a lot in my library that I hadn't listened to in ages, because when I'm scrolling through albums or songs I'm much more likely to stop on something that I know and that suits my mood at the time. And so, on 11 April 2023, I listened to A-Punk by Vampire weekend, having resolved to listen to all my music in alphabetical order.

It was fun while it lasted, which it did until 23 February 2024, when I stopped, without consciously deciding to do so, with The Dregs of Birch by The Duhks.

What this extended exercise did, more than anything, was to remind me of something I have wanted since my first, click-wheel iPod: a way easily to summon up an entire album when one track I like crops up in a playlist. As far as I know, such a thing does not exist.

Maybe I could construct it with Shortcuts, but one reason I haven't bothered is that Music.app is such pants in almost every regard. And yet, none of the others I have tried has stuck. I used to have some nifty smart playlists. One combined known favourites with tracks that hadn't been played for six months or more. Another was all either instrumental or non-English, for times when I wanted music but no words to interfere with writing. I can't remember the others, but they all vanished in a puff of smoke one time when Music just upped and lost all information about ratings and past plays. I suppose I could start again, but ...

Lying Around Listening to Music

The other big change in my life, which goes much further back that a couple of years, is that I no longer lie around and listen to music. That's not because I don't want to. It's because all my music is in my desktop computer (not the cloud, never the cloud) which has lovely active speakers but which lives across the room from the sofa on which I lie around. The sound isn't great and any time I want to change anything I have to get up and move. For a while I played with Plex, streaming stuff to my phone and headphones. That was OK, but complex. Then I bought a lovely little gizmo, a Qudelix-5K, a bluetooth A–D converter that is also complex but in a different way. That lets me control the sound while I lie there (and has great EQ profiles for different headphones), so the sound it great, but of course it doesn't let me control the music.

Back to Plex or similar, then? Or something new like MusicStreamer on the desktop and iPhone? I'm reading about things like Marvis that sound tempting. What would you recommend?

Ready to Spend

I want to get back into listening to music intentionally, and I don't want to stick with stuff I already own. How to find the good stuff? I've bookmarked Tracy's new process and want to work my way through it. To be honest, I haven't bought anything in ages, most recently Cardinals at the Window, a sampler to benefit flood victims in North Carolina, because it was easy. A lot of the tracks are great, some less so, but again, none has made me want to explore further. I'm ready to spend the money on software and on music, but I really do need to get rid of some of the friction.