SOUND THE SEA

The case for a smaller music library

May 1, 2026

I remember the feeling of sitting down in front of the peer-to-peer music service Napster for the first time. I had what felt like the entire music library of the world at my fingertips, and I couldn't for the life of me think of what I wanted to listen to.

Fast forward to today, a quarter of a century later. I open Spotify or Apple Music, and I feel the same way. Turns out the problem with having access to every song ever recorded is that none of them feel like yours. My music library is effectively infinite, and I can no longer keep it in my head.

There's a financial irony here too. In the Napster era — when music was ostensibly "free" — I was spending more on it than I ever have since. I bought CDs I couldn't really afford because I'd fallen in love with an album. I went to shows. I followed artists. Streaming gave me everything and somehow made me care less, spend less, and listen worse.

So here's what I've decided to do about it. I'm getting back to building a music library I actually own. Finite, deliberate, mine - ours, and stored on my own hardware. No subscriptions, no social algorithm recommendations and no music that disappears if I stop paying for access to it.

Getting started

I'll confess that I have a head start here. I still have a few hundred CDs lying around in moving boxes that I can rip.

After that, the first question is where to actually buy music. My go-to sources so far:

• Bandcamp — the best option for independent artists, although it is now my first stop for bigger names too. You buy directly, the artist gets a good cut and download lossless formats like FLAC.
• Qobuz — large catalog and a lot of hi-res music available.
• ProStudioMasters — strong on jazz and classical, and a reputation for genuine hi-res masters.
• Lastly, it's worth checking the artists websites. Sometimes they offer their music in digital formats.

A word on "hi-res"

Not all high resolution files are what they claim to be. Some stores sell files labelled 96kHz/24-bit that are really just 320kbps MP3s stored in a lossless container. The extra bits are empty air. I discovered this the hard way with a purchase from what seemed like a reputable store. Whatismybitrate paints a different picture however, flagging the file as a likely transcode from a lossy source.

It's also worth knowing that even honest hi-res files aren't always what you might hope for. If the original recording was made at 44.1kHz, or the master handed to the store was sourced from a CD, no amount of upsampling changes what's actually in the file. For a lot of back catalogue music, a well-mastered 16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC is genuinely as good as it gets — and that's perfectly fine.

The stores listed above have good reputations, but it's worth spot-checking purchases, especially from stores you haven't used before.

BitTorrents in 2026

I have to say, torrents were the obvious answer to this in the mid-2000s. That era is largely over - the big public trackers are shadows of themselves, and what remains is mostly private trackers that require invitations and good ratio maintenance. It's a lot more effort than it used to be, and frankly not a path I'm interested in going down. Buying music isn't expensive when you're buying deliberately rather than trying to replicate an infinite streaming library, and the stores listed above make it easy enough that I don't see a strong argument for torrenting these days.

The setup

The server side is simpler than you might think. Navidrome is the heart of it - a self-hosted music server that runs on anything from a Raspberry PI to a spare laptop. It indexes your music library, handles streaming and exposes a web interface. Importantly, it is also compatible with the Subsonic API, which means that there's a huge ecosystem of mature clients that already work with it.

For clients, the options are great:

• Feishin (desktop, cross-platform) — a modern desktop client built with React and Electron, with synchronized lyrics, radio support, scrobbling and support for lyrics.
• Nautiline — a newer arrival but the best iOS option at the moment in my opinion. Gapless playback, offline downloads, lyrics and CarPlay support, with an interface that feels at home on iOS rather than a port.
• Symfonium — the best Android client by far. Offline sync, gapless playback and excellent library management.

Your library lives on your hardware, streams to any device and works without an internet connection if you're on the same network.

So far

I'm still early in the process. The library is smaller than what I had on Apple Music, and that's exactly the point. I find myself actually deciding what to listen to, sitting with albums longer, and rediscovering things I'd forgotten I loved. The constraint is the feature.

If you're feeling the same creeping indifference toward your streaming library, it might be worth asking whether the size of it is part of the problem.

Leksi, a word game with a twist

Feb 28, 2026

My wife and I have launched our little side project, Leksi. It's a word game with a twist: blocks fall from the top of the screen, so you need to pay attention to where they land while also forming words by dragging across the letters.

Try it out, why don't you? It's out for iOS now.

52 things of 2025

Dec 27, 2025

This annual 52 things I learned list from synth maker Tom Whitwell has become something I look forward to as the end of the year approaches. Indeed, I have linked to it twice before.

This year's list is great too. My favourite is perhaps:

Marchetti’s Constant is the idea that throughout human history, from cave dwellers to ancient Greeks to 21st century Londoners, people tend to commute for about an hour a day — 30 minutes out, 30 minutes home. So faster travel leads to longer distances, not less time. Cesare Marchetti, plus a 2025 update

Reaper productivity tips 3/3

Feb 28, 2025

This is the third of three posts sharing some of my productivity tips for the Reaper DAW. Check out the first and second.

7 - Install Rodilab Color Palette

Life's too short to fiddle around with complicated colour palettes. Do yourself a favour and install ReaPack and find Color palette from Rodilab.

8 - Get a single physical fader

For a while I had a nine-fader controller. It wasn't until I sold it and got a single motorized fader sitting right next to my mouse that I really started getting the value of a physical controller.

It is super handy for making mix small balance adjustments to single or multiple selected tracks and invaluable for writing automation.

9 - Use templates

I have two project templates I use in Reaper: one for tracking, or recording, and one for mixing. The one for tracking is a simple setup: I have inputs in the studio pre-mapped to input tracks in Reaper so I'm ready to go with a new project in just a moment.

More valuable though, is my mix template. I keep this updated all the time as I learn something new, start using a new technique or plugin, or whenever I notice I've stopped doing something I used to.

Here are some highlights from my mix template that I think might be useful for you.

The template sets up nine buss tracks for drums, drum effects, percussion, sound effects, bass, guitars, keyboards, main and backing vocals. I also have single empty audio tracks for each of these groups in my preferred colour scheme and I duplicate these to however many tracks I'll need for the project.

I have a simple master buss set up, with an SPL Iron compressor, a Pultec style EQ and a tape emulator. I sometimes add to this but I prefer to keep my default master buss simple.

Each group have a few effects sends. I don't always end up using all of these but I often do. Drum tracks have some parallel drive or distortion sends, as well as a few reverb sends and a crush track. Guitars have separate left and right echo sends for stereo widening, as well as reverbs and a subtle shimmer. Vocals have parallel compression, thickening (love that SoundToys Microshift), delay, echo and reverb tracks.

I also have a main reverb send that I use if I want to place all instruments in a room together for some subtle cohesion.

Last, but not least - I'm completely hooked on the Andrew Scheps Rear Buss technique, I find it adds a lot of weight and fullness to my mix that I'm not able to achieve without, so I naturally have this set up in my mix template too.

Reaper productivity tips 2/3

Feb 26, 2025

This is the second of three posts sharing some of my productivity tips for the Reaper DAW. Check out the first.

4 - A shortcut for finding and opening plugins

I find Reaper is at its best when you get into using shortcuts. The powerful action system helps to make keyboard shortcuts in Reaper immensely useful. See tip #5 for another example of this.

A couple of the shortcuts I use the most revolve around managing plugins on tracks, as I mentioned in tip #2. Here's a couple more:

I've set up Shift+F as a shortcut for the action View: Show FX browser window. This way, I can quickly add a plugin to the active track using only the keyboard: Shift+F brings up the plugin search, I type in part of the name and hit return to insert the effect.

I also use ⌘+1 through to ⌘+9 for the action Track: Open/close UI for FX #1 on last touched track so that I can quickly open a specific plugin in the chain on the active track to make adjustments.

5 - Keyboard zoom

Rather than zooming with the mousewheel, try setting up keyboard shortcuts for horizontal and vertical zoom. I have w and e set up for horizontal zoom out and in respectively. And Shift+W/Shift+E for vertical zoom. That way, I can have one hand on the keyboard in a natural position while using the mouse with my other hand.

6 - Use macros and custom actions

The action system in Reaper is made all the more powerful using the macro or custom action feature. If you find yourself doing something frequently that requires a couple or more steps, see if you can't speed up your workflow by creating a custom action chaining those actions. Here are two of my most used custom actions.

I often group tracks into folders, most often if I have a guitar recorded with multiple microphones. I usually want the tracks inside the folder to only send to their parent track so that I can treat the multi-miked recording as a single sound. I've set up a quick action for this that I've called Send only to Parent (folder track) and mapped to Cmd+Shift+Control+G. This custom action runs these commands:

SWS/S&M: Remove sends from selected tracks
SWS: Enable master/parent send on selected track(s)

Those actions require the SWS/S&M Extension.

Another custom action that I use a lot is called Reduce breaths. Depending on the vocal style, I sometimes want to mostly remove or heavily reduce breaths in between singing on a vocal track. This custom action contains the following:

Item: Split items at time selection or razor edit
Xenakios/SWS: Nudge item volume down
Xenakios/SWS: Nudge item volume down
Xenakios/SWS: Nudge item volume down
Xenakios/SWS: Nudge item volume down
Xenakios/SWS: Nudge item volume down
Xenakios/SWS: Nudge item volume down

The Nudge item volume down action works 1dB at a time, so this action will be more or less aggressive depending on how many of those actions you insert. I have this mapped to Control+R, so when I Control-drag across an item to create a razor edit area in between singing I can hit Control+R to quickly reduce the volume inside that area.

Ghostty

Dec 27, 2024

The new terminal emulator Ghostty is out. My impression so far? Delighful ascii animation on the home page, gloriously crisp font rendering and impressive speed.

Yann Tiersen - Kerlann (Live at Kerber Church)

Dec 25, 2024

I've not kept well enough up with Yann Tiersen to know that he was into synthesizers, and I love this live version of his tune Kerlann performed on the Buchla. The melody of the original is performed on a piano but there's something about the organic and woody sound of the Buchla that I find touching.

52 things to learn

Dec 24, 2024

This year, like the last, I was looking forward to synth maker Tom Whitwell's list of 52 things I learned in 2024.

Many interesting rabbit holes here but this one was particularily fascinating to me:

If you run one specific, but illegal, database query on a set of widely used health data, you can access Tony Blair’s entire personal medical history. Ben Goldacre

The linked part of the lecture is well worth watching, an interesting look on the dangers of pseudonymisation - replacing your actual name and address in a data set with a code name.