New side project: owning my music

Folks that have been following along for a while will probably remember that over the last couple of years, I’ve been building up a music collection away from streaming services. You can see it over at https://music.andy-bell.co.uk.

I’ve slowed down purchasing physical vinyl copies because I’ve got most of the ones I wanted — especially my top 10 albums of all time — and I’m running out of storage space for them. I’m moving on to the next phase now: completely owning all my music digitally.

I don’t really have a huge problem with streaming services. They don’t pay artists anywhere near enough royalties but they vastly improve discoverability. It is what it is. I don’t want to contribute to that though and want to pay artists what they are owed. In a world of way too many streaming services across all media, it would be great to chip one off the list too.

Right now I use Apple Music and it’s fine. I do much prefer Doppler as an interface, both on Mac and iPhone. The problem is, my digital collection is rather thin, so I’m gonna slowly start to build it up. One part of that is buying CDs and ripping them, just like the glory days when I got the first iPod. The other is digitising my Vinyl collection.

I’m using VinylStudio to record and process albums. So far it’s pretty darn good. I could have used something free like Audacity or even Adobe Audition via my Creative Cloud licence, but I’ve spent way too many hours mixing, mastering and slicing audio in my previous work as a sound engineer to ever want to do that for fun. It would be like wireframing for fun these days lmao.

One thing that’s really good about this process is it’s getting me listening to vinyl again which I’m sorry to say, I’ve been pretty bad at recently. I’ve missed that analogue warmth, so it feels good to be doing it again.

I also know this is going to take ages. At the time of writing, I have around 240 vinyls to get through. Even at two a day, it’s gonna take well over a quarter of a year. I like the idea of a slow hobby project though.

Maybe this year is the year I finally give my music collection site a proper design too. It’s been in it’s proof of concept state for around 2 years now…