De-Clouding: Music

Summary

I’m going through a phase of figuring out what I can get out of the cloud and “own”. Particularly with regard to streaming services. I’ve never paid for Spotify. But I’ve had iTunes Match so that I can take all of the weird, not-on-streaming music that I have (I wrote about this back in 2013!!!!), and we have an Apple One family plan that gets us all Apple Music – this was the best deal for us as a family when we signed up. But now I’m wanting to own my music again. For a while I’ve been trying to get my music out of the cloud. The Apple Music app is really bad. I find doing the simplest things in it stupidly difficult. And I’m not about to switch to something else. Storage is easily cheap enough now that I can carry my whole library with me – this just wasn’t true 10 years ago and it changes the game a lot. A standalone, unconnected music device! For my birthday I got a Snowsky Echo Mini, which is cute and has great sound quality and REAL BUTTONS (!) but a truly awful interface (they’re releasing pretty regular firmware updates though so hopefully it will improve). This currently powers the speakers in my office, and it’s perfect for that. If the user interface improves enough, I’ll almost certainly take it out and about with me too. Laptop and Phone music And then I’ve been looking at software for my phone and computer to use. Today I’ve finally landed on a setup I’m happy with that gets my music out of the cloud, removes subscriptions, and lets me take it with me on my devices. MacOS: I recently found Petrichor (nice name!) – a free, open-source MacOS music player that is simple, effective and just works. It’s great! iOS: For iOS I’ve settled on Doppler. It’s a one-off £9 purchase, and you can sync songs to the phone over USB or Wirelessly using the free Doppler Transfer utility. Again, this setup is simple, effective, and makes complete sense to my last-century brain. (Note that Doppler has a MacOS app too, but it’s £30 that I don’t want to spend right now, and,...