Alternatives To Streaming Music
To avoid streaming music, we have to venture the dark realms of the good old days, the days of owning your own music. You can do this physically, with CD’s and vinyl records, and yes, you can get a CD player you can plug into your computer. But today were going to talk about owning your music digitally, mostly with MP3s.
Gathering Songs
Bandcamp
There are a few ways to get these. The best, and most preferred by far is Bandcamp. They make it easy to purchase, prices are reasonable and they don’t try to sell you anything you don’t need. Even better, a huge percentage of what you buy goes to the artists (much more then other places), and artists and theirs a lot more flexibility on pricing then most other sites as well.
One of the major downsides is simply not many people use it. Bandcamp was started as and is still by and large a place for indie artists. You won’t find songs from Taylor Swift, or Black Sabbath, or Green Day on there. Though you will find my friend Stephen (shameless shout out). You will also find every artist from Napalm Records, which just so happens to include most of the artists I listen to.
Once you’ve made a purchase you can either stream songs through their app or website, or download them to listen to offline, anywhere you want.
Amazon Music
Amazon has a much wider selection of songs, but Amazon has made it increasingly difficult to buy them. In an effort to get more subscribers to their streaming service, Amazon has added hoop, after hoop after hoop to be able to do so.
Once bought, you can download the songs and albums as MP3s.
YouTube to MP3
When using this method, I would recommend having an ad blocker enabled on your browser. You’ll have to do a Google search for “YouTube to MP3” and find a site that works well. They tend to switch fairly often, so you’ll need to stay alert to ones that seem like scams and ones you can actually use.
The bright side is, YouTube has just about every song you can possible think of, no matter how obscure or lost. Whether you’ll be able to find a good quality version of that song is another question, but I digress.
The down side to using this method, is you’ll have to manually edit the metadata for every .MP3 you download. This means adding album covers, track titles, track numbers, album titles, artist names, and anything else you can think of. Otherwise the tracks will just be a bunch of long garbled file names with little value.
Listening Software
Windows
PROS
FREE
Lot’s of control over the interface
Can edit and adjust meta data directly from Music Bee
CONS
Can only play audio, no video (.mp4)
Music Bee using the Tron Lightrider Skin
Android
PROS
FREE
Interface is simple but has full functionality
Able to play both audio and video
Plays almost any media format ever (Seriously, I’ve never found a format VLC won’t play)
CONS
Cannot edit metadata at all. All files must be fixed with another program.
Moving MP3s from Your Desktop to Your Phone
Connect phone to computer with a USB cable
Click “File Transfer Mode”
Open Windows file explore and go to your music folder
Drag & drop MP3 files from your computer to the "Music" directory in the phone's internal storage.
VLC Media Player for Android
Fixing Songs and Albums
Normalizing Volume - MP3 Gain
Converting Audio Formats - DB Power Amp
Repairing Meta Data - MP3 Tag
Making Your Own Album Covers
Titles and Names
Audio Normalization & File Conversions
Album Art - Re-sizing & Creating Your Own
Affinity Photo
Photoshop
