Yeah good times, I’m nostalgic about managing my own music collection using directory structures, everything consistent and well-organized. Tagging metadata using musicbrainz, listening with foobar2000.

Nowadays I’ve been sucked into the Spotify vacuum because of convenience, but I do miss out on more obscure music. And I have no idea how to find that, except from sites like SoundCloud and mixcloud, but their UX is horrible for this purpose.

Bandcamp is great for this. You can buy albums from indie artists and download in your preferred format, DRM free.

In addition to 99% of artits providing the download version when physical media is purchased. I really appreciate the ability to flip between digital and vinyl media when DJing for many tracks.

Double agree.

I’ve kept my library on an external hard drive and recently abandonned Deezer and Spotify because of the same issues mentioned in this thread. Plex (on a VPS) has been a godsend, and hype machine for discovery is top notch, check it out if you want to find obscure but great music

I miss Waffles.fm but even more so, Oink. I did What in the end.

These were rich, music-minded communities focused entirely on music.

They were made up of people who went against great friction to discuss artistic works with others willing to do the same.

I've paid for Apple Music since the onset and it has never come close to the weekly top seeded albums of these communities.

The audio world lost big when what.cd went down. Even non-members benefitted because what.cd fed so many people who went on to share the track lists, and albums, and “did you know this artist was in the background of this”, and so on.

They could have open-sourced the whole thing, put a paid API endpoint on in, and kept on.