Despite moving basically full time to streaming music a long while back, I have always loved building and curating my own little music library.
I had a bit of a disaster while switching computers at one point where I lost everything and had to start from scratch, but since then I’ve managed to build up a pretty massive collection of music I want to have on hand if someday streamers all die, or the internet falls over, or some other extremely unlikely scenario. Mostly I just like buying and having the music that is important to me. Here’s how I do it.
Ripping from CDs
The bulk of my music library came from ripping CDs I’ve owned over my life. The CD really is the peak physical music format. Bit-perfect rippable to digital, unladen with DRM of any kind, quality that is about as good as the human ear can perceive, and just plain cool. There’s music on this shiny plastic disc! Back in my Windows days I used a mix of Windows Media Player’s ripper, Exact Audio Copy, and finally iTunes disc importer once I became an iPhone person.
These days I do all my computing on a Mac, and have found XLD to be the best option there. I’ve ripped my entire CD collection (and that of my partner for some insight into her music history which was fun) into 44.1KHz 16-bit FLAC files.
Buying from digital stores
I have a bit of a tiered system for where I buy digital music.
From an artist’s own website, if they have one
Not many can manage this, but some artists actually sell their own music from their own stores. Where I can, I do this since it means no other store takes a cut and the artist gets more of the money I give them. Suzi and Ninajirachi’s sites are some examples I can think of that I’ve bought from recently.
Bandcamp
Bandcamp is the goat of music stores. You won’t find every large record label on here, but it’s great for independent artists and some of the bigger ones. I’ve been using Bandcamp since about 2010 and I’ve yet to find a friendlier music buying experience. Buy music and download it in about any format you could care to, re-download it forever even if the album gets delisted from sale and an app to freely stream your purchases. I was worried when they got acquired by Epic Games of all companies a few years ago, but all seems well so far.
Qobuz
If an album I want isn’t on Bandcamp, usually because the album is part of a record deal with one of the bigger record companies, Qobuz is my next port of call. Best known for their high quality streaming service, they also offer a download store with a good range of bigger artists at reasonable prices and with CD-quality downloads (or hi-res files if for whatever reason you want to use up more space and pay extra).
These options cover basically every way I buy digital music. There’s a few other occasional methods like download codes in record sleeves but this covers pretty much every way I directly buy music.