One thing that I love about the 8bit community is that there is a lot of knowledge, wisdom, and experience knocking around and I think that we have a great deal that we can learn from each other.
Therefore, today I come to you with a personal query, what do you think I should do about my music situation?
You see, for the last couple of years I have been using an awesome service that is available mainly in Europe, Spotify. Some of you guys in Europe may also use this service. For those of you who don’t know what Spotify is, it’s a streaming music service where you can put together your own playlists from a vast library of music, and it even has cool social features so that you can connect via Facebook and share playlists from your friends.
I opted to start using Spotify a couple of years ago as I was impressed by this vast library I could choose from. I currently am on the premium version which is £10 per month, and allows me to not only stream, but also to download chosen playlists locally so that I can, for instance, listen to preprepared playlists on a flight with no internet connection (as I am doing right now as I type this post!). For me, it seemed a no brainer to have Spotify premium, I listen to music all day whilst I’m working and I get access to this vast library of music for less than the cost of a CD per month.
In the last few days this whole idea has, I guess, been called into question. I am someone who likes to have things firmly in one place, and so really for me either Spotify or MP3’s on iTunes are the options.
The Problems With Spotify:
- Although Spotify has a vast library of music it doesn’t have some of my favourite artists
This is especially true of independent and Christian artists based in the USA, of which I like to listen to a lot of! I suspect that this is simply because Spotify is only available in Europe and therefore the artists and labels are not signing up because either they don’t know about Spotify or because of the location they don’t feel that it is relevant to them. - There is no sense of investment
Although I’m getting access to a vast library of music, as soon as I stop paying my fee I have nothing to show for it. I know that the fee is not that high, but still would the money be better spent purchasing MP3’s? - I’m getting married soon!
I know that this might sound like a strange problem but you see it is something that I need to think about. Firstly in my mind it would be cool to have a joint iTunes music collection in the same way that we are going to have a joint Amazon Kindle account. Secondly, we are going to be building a home together, and I would like to eventually get some kind of cool multi-room music system going, utilising some of the cool gadgets that are available for this kind of thing, it seems to me that an iTunes MP3 library would make this process a lot more flexible than Spotify which may well not be compatible with a lot of this stuff.
The Problems With iTunes
- I would be starting off with not much variety
One of the things that I love about Spotify is that I can listen to all sorts of different artists and have extremely road playlists. I own very few CDs and MP3’s so I would have to build my library slowly and no have nearly the variety available to me right now for a long time. - I might get a bit trigger happy
Purchasing music on iTunes is scarily easy! I would be scared that I would end up spending more than £10 a month on music, especially considering the above point. - Storage is a pain
To me this is a real problem, as I really live a “cloud” existence! The majority of my documents are stored using cloud storage services and my mobile devices are light, I never have to worry about running out of storage. The rumoured cloud storage services for iTunes COULD change this, so it might be interesting to see how things go in that area.
So, people, tell me, what do you think I should do? Should I stick it out with Spotify or start investing in my own MP3 collection?
Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Justin says
I’m a big fan of Amazon MP3, plus they already have their cloud service up and running (although who knows how long before some litigation shuts that down).
James Brooks says
Yeh, I guess that is something that is work looking into, thanks!
Wes H says
Is Amazon MP3 Cloud available across the pond?
I have moved 100% to the Amazon MP3 Cloud and have not been disappointed. I carry an Android phone. If you have an Iphone I am not so sure the Amazon Cloud would be as nice since there is no app to stream to your device.
James Brooks says
Luckily, I do have an Android!
BenJPickett says
I second Amazon. I haven’t jumped into their cloud yet because I want to make sure I won’t lose anything but have been using the mp3 service for some odd tracks here and there and love it. I myself, however, am old school through and through and love to buy albums I still think CD is one of the greatest thing to happen to music, but for those real great albums (think Dark Side of the Moon) nothing beats a 45.
So I buy a lot of CDs and have even more MP3’s and have looked into similar setups to what your talking about. First things first, I push nearly 400GB, maybe more when we get caught up on ripping all the new CDs we’ve purchased, of music and iTunes is complete garbage at organizing a library that spans over a couple hundred years and more genres than I can count. I’ve actually found the Zune software is very effective at keeping everything put together, at least what I bought and ripped, it’s the stuff I just dumped in that didn’t pan out as well as I would have liked. So for organization, you will spend a lot of time customizing a good structure and tagging system for you.
For equipment to do the task, there are literally hundreds of great options for Linux based OS’s and Windows has some pretty slick options when customizing Media Center. I’m sure Mac has a couple solutions for this too but I’m not a heavy iCrack user. One of the most affordable ways to go is actually with the Wii and home brew it; very effective, powerful and an all around attractive end result if your looking at having a central control hub.
If you want to break away from a single point of interaction and create a control center for your house, you will hit problems. Most notably there is the lack of great affordable remotes and I mean $300 or less. Beyond that the problems will mostly revolve around power consumption and making sure you have a system powerful enough drive however many speakers you have of multiple sizes and level ranges; audio balancing and acoustics are different in every room and furniture type, size and location can adjust this too. Last but certainly not least is the price. Great audio equipment can easily destroy a budget in minutes.
James Brooks says
Wow, Ben, thank you so much for your in-depth reply, it’s SUPER appreciated.
I’m interested in this Wii thing that you talk about, I’d love to look into that more – do you have any links or anything to some documentation?
Also you make a very good point about organizing a library. I didn’t think about that too much. As it grows storage could certainly become a pain in the ass.
BenJPickett says
http://wiibrew.org/wiki/WiiMC
http://wiibrew.org/wiki/MPlayer_CE
http://wiibrew.org/wiki/GeeXboX
Those are probably the best media center hacks for Wii. Keep in mind, some official Nintendo updates won’t work once this is done; it voids the warranty and may brick the Wii in the process.
Plenty of other apps and things you can use the Wii for http://wiibrew.org/wiki/List_of_homebrew_applications
I haven’t done this myself, I’ve been interested in doing it but old releases that broke the ability to get up to date Nintendo patches potentially leaving me unable to play new games until a hacked version of the update were available was a big deterrent. If I had a second Wii I’d certainly give it a try.
James Brooks says
Thank you very much! Have added them to my instapaper to read! 🙂
Adam Lehman says
I use Rdio.com. Syncs across mobile devises, desktop clients & web access.
James Brooks says
I will take a look. Thanks!
Stephen Bateman says
I dearly miss Spotify. I was *denied* paying for the service because I didn’t have a credit card issued in the right country.
How many things do you try to pay for and they deny you!?
James Brooks says
Sad times bro. Sorry to hear that.