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