2026-01-15

My music library is dead, long live my music library!

Answering "why, exactly, don't I want to do this thing" is surprisingly difficult. Also difficult is to remember to periodically check if you still care.

I had been telling myself for years that I'd find the time to properly tag my library according to the MusicBrainz database and that I'd create my own superior library management tool.

But I realised a few days ago that I genuinely didn't want any of these things anymore.

So here are the ways in which my thinking has changed.

I don't want my music library on my phone

I had read a bit about digital minimalism, and how when a digital experience becomes too seamless and easy, it becomes hard to prioritise when and how much to engage in said experience.

I also conveniently received an Echo Mini for christmas from a great friend 😌.

Oddly, it advertises that it can play "OGG"s, but I couldn't get it to play an Opus or a Vorbis file lol, so I settled for AAC.

Though this is certainly overkill and any mp3 player would suffice, this does the job of keeping my music library off my phone.

Edit 2026-01-17: Having a lot of trouble with the Echo Mini now that I've added more than a handful of albums 😌. Lots of "unsupported format" and just plain hanging and shutting down when selecting a song. So if I don't post another update, then maybe reduce your opinion of the Echo Mini player lol.

I don't want to make ad-hoc playlists; enter, albums

My old library is full of incomplete albums.

My thinking was that if I like a song off an album, why would I add the album's other worse songs to my library?

But a problem appears if I want to put some music on in the background. Suddenly I need to curate 30 minutes of music that fits my mood from a big jumble of songs.

(Now of course if you are the type to maintain mood playlists, this is not an issue for you, but I never could get into the playlist making business. Hard to decide what playlists to have, hard to choose what song goes where and hard to decide what mood I'm in.)

I'll stop beating around the bush; albums fix this. Scrolling through a list of albums and picking one is an instant 15-30 minutes of songs that share a common vibe.

I'm not sure why I'm spending time convincing you that albums are good, when they've kinda been the industry standard for 100 years lol.

I am planning to cerate a separate library full of singles in the future though. Some artists are just in the business of releasing singles, but also there are some albums even I can't justify having all the songs off of 😌.

I'm not scared of beets anymore

I got annoyed with beets a while ago because it had a bug where it would internally separate artists with one character, and then write the tag with another character, so beets would always think it needed to write changes. Or something like that, it's been a while.

But this bug has long since been fixed, and I'm just a little more carefree with my music now anyways, so I'm back to using beets.

I use it literally just to put my music into folders, and I use the beets-alternatives plugin to convert my songs to AAC for my Echo Mini player.

I don't care if my music is tagged 100% accurately

Artist/Album/TrackNumber SongTitle

In the sense that my library is a collections of albums, this is all I care about.

I'm never going to shuffle songs from a "genre", I'm never going to shuffle songs "from 1997" and I certainly don't care if any featured artists are recorded correctly.

I do still appreciate what the boffins over at MusicBrainz do, though. They're fighting the good fight, but I just don't have that fight in me. I don't think not caring about accurate tags is going to help me very much in providing tags for random internet goers lol.

I'll let beets auto-tag my music with MusicBrainz tags, but if it asks "could you pretty please go find the exact album match 🥺", I'm using the files' tags "As-is".

I don't care if I have the 2009 CD release or the 2010 vynil label release, just let me listen to my music.

I don't care if I don't have all of my old music

Sometimes starting fresh can feel great, and for the longest time I didn't think to try that with my music library. I feel like a music library is the quintessential thing that people try to maintain and keep tidy and organised, and certainly don't like to lose any of.

Funnily enough, after setting up my empty library and adding a few albums, the weight off my mind gave me the willpower to go through my old library anyways and pick out some good albums lol.

You can do this too! (but u don't have to ofc)

If you shill for Spotify or Apple Music, you can make an effort to only add albums to your library and use a playlist/playlists for singles.

And you do not need beets or to be super techy to buy a cheap mp3 player, use something like Open Video Downloader and manually put files into folders.

As a present for reading, go listen to I'm So Serious by Daryl Johns.

Or perhaps listen to the entire album 🧠.