#local files

Prerequisites

It helps if you have the following, from most to least important:

A desktop or laptop computer running Windows or Linux (Mac and ChromeOS are also fine, but both are more restrictive. If you're on ChromeOS, use the Linux VM)

A thumb drive with an appreciable amount of storage (mine is 500gb but I only use about 50gb for music)

Experience using this computer and desktops/laptops in general, especially file handling and command-line experience

An external CD R/W drive if you plan on ripping from or burning to CDs (Speed will vary a lot depending on the drive, so find a fast one if that matters to you)

A Bandcamp account, since a lot of artists host purchasable digital/physical copies on here.

And some things to note before you start:

You will lose out on the convenience of traditional streaming, but it's worth it for a myriad of reasons since streaming is hell and every company sucks.

Your catalog will be very restricted if you want to avoid piracy for some reason. It's actually for real impossible to get some music without illegally downloading, so I don't care.

This will take time---a lot more than just opening Spotify and hitting play---and you will have to learn things, unfortunately. Every album or song will require an investment of your precious time, plus cost money if you plan to compensate the artist.

Do not worry even a little bit about the argument of "the artist isn't making as much if you don't stream!!". Buying a single CD, vinyl, cassette, or digital album from an artist gives them many times more money than streaming their music.

Software

OK, first steps: You'll need a few pieces of software that will massively help you.

VLC Media Player: This is an open-source media player that has so many features and extensions/add-ons and is incredibly useful. Also available on basically every device for free without any ads or any of that. There are many other pieces of software that have a more streaming-service-like UI, but I've never gotten into them. VLC rocks.

yt-dlp: This open-source software, available on Linux, Windows, and Mac, allows you to easily download the video/audio from basically any website using the command line. I mainly use it on YouTube but the supported sites list is ridiculously long.

Some kind of music tagger: These allow you to edit the metadata (metadata are a bunch of pieces of information connected to a file that help to categorize and organize it. music files usually have metadata fields for title, artist, genre, track #, etc.) of files, create/edit playlists, tons of useful stuff. There are so many free options for these. I use Mp3tag on Windows and MusicBrainz Picard on Linux (also available for Mac and Windows), but you can find a good one for any platform and they all do basically the same thing.

Organization

You're going to want a system for organizing all of the things you download. You really don't want a bunch of cluttered, loose files in a single folder without any metadata attached to them.

Create a folder specifically for your music and plan out how you're going to store different files. I personally split it into four categories: I have a folder for albums (and a folder inside there for each album), a folder for specific artist playlists, a folder for general playlists, and a folder for singles/loose songs not on any album.

To do this, you can use the default file handler for your device (File Explorer for Windows, Files for Linux), or a third-party file handler, or the command line if you're cool like that.

When you do have albums downloaded, it's common practice to store them in their own folder with the track number first in the filename. This is so that they generally display in order, and for organization purposes. Below is an example:

It's up to user preference what the filenames are. Generally the bare minimum, as shown, is just the track number + title.

File Formats and Compression

This section is just an overview of different file formats and what they mean for music. You can skip over it if you already know about this.

When you store audio data in a file, there are three different ways you can do this: uncompressed, using lossless compression, or using lossy compression. Each has their own file formats, upsides, and downsides.

Uncompressed: This is the raw, unmodified audio data. Nothing has been done to it to save on space or efficiency. This is usually only used by actual music producers and archives. File formats that are uncompressed include .aiff and .wav.

Lossless compression: These formats use some tricks to reduce the file size and make storing the audio more efficient, but don't lose out on any of the actual audio quality. It'll sound the same* as uncompressed but take up less space. I recommend this if you're looking to have the highest quality possible and don't have concerns about storage space. FLAC is by far the most popular lossless file format.

Lossy compression: These formats compromise on some audio quality for the purpose of using less storage space. In most cases, the reduction in file size is significant and the loss in quality is not. Sometimes, lossy compression formats only get rid of details you can't even hear, so in some cases it sounds nearly identical to lossless. I'd recommend if you have storage concerns or don't care a lot about extremely high quality. You'll almost always see these as .mp3 files, but you'll also come across .ogg, .aac, and .opus files sometimes.

I personally use .flac files when I can, but it is completely up to user preference and there's no wrong choice. MP3 files with sufficiently high bitrate (bitrate is the amount of information per second that is stored inside the file. It's basically a proxy for audio quality.) will sound nearly identical to lossless. Any sampling rate (sampling rate is the amount of times per second the audio signal is measured) above about 48 kHz is actually useless and you as a human cannot hear the difference.

Downloading

Good. Now you've got your computer with all the right software and a nice organization system and thumb drive (hopefully). You know the basics of file formats and compression for music. You're ready to start downloading your favorite albums and songs.

There are a few places you can reliably find the music you want. If you don't want to deal with a peer-to-peer service (A peer-to-peer or p2p file sharing software is an application that allows thousands of users to download files directly from each other instead of through a central service) like Soulseek (I highly recommend Soulseek if you have the technical experience), I have found that Internet Archive and YouTube are your best bets.

Internet Archive:

The Internet Archive is a database of many, many files that have been stored for archival and preservation purposes. A lot of the time, you can find full albums on here by searching for the artists or the albums. There aren't a whole lot though, and sometimes you'll get censored or compressed files. When you find an album you want,

find where it has the audio files. It will usually read "VBR MP3" or "FLAC". Click on this and find the button to download the files as a .zip.

Click this button and save it to wherever you keep albums. Unzip it into its own folder (zipped files are a collection of files that take up less space but can't be used until they're unzipped, which is just converting the files from the space-efficient format to the usable format). On most devices, unzipping is as easy as right clicking the .zip file and selecting something like "Extract to [filename]\".

Congratulations! You have downloaded an album from Internet Archive. It's really easy and convenient and they usually have very good download speeds.

YouTube:

This is where yt-dlp comes into play. You can download full albums extremely easily from YouTube just using the yt-dlp command line tool.

Find an album you want on YouTube and go specifically to the playlist page for it.

Open your command prompt (On Windows: hit the Windows key, type "cmd", then hit enter. On Linux: right click on the desktop and hit "Terminal"), and navigate to the folder where you're going to store the album. On Windows, do this by typing the drive letter of the drive you store the music on (or not if it's on the C:\ drive), then use the "cd" command to navigate to the correct directory. If you need to, use the "mkdir" command to create a folder for the album.

Note: YouTube stores audio in a lossy format using .opus. Converting to another format will never increase the quality, even if it's an uncompressed or lossless format. I do convert to lossless sometimes for strictly organizational purposes.

The basic command format for yt-dlp is:

yt-dlp [OPTIONS] [URL]

Where you replace [OPTIONS] with the specifics of what you want to do and [URL] with the link to the album. I would recommend always extracting the metadata and using a custom output format, but other options are optional, as the name suggests. Linked here is a cheat sheet for all of the yt-dlp options. Here are some templates for specific use cases. Replace [URL] with the link to the album.

Download the album in FLAC format with all of the metadata included and the video thumbnail using the filename format "[Track Number] - [Title]": yt-dlp -x --audio-format flac --embed-metadata --embed-thumbnail -o "%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" [URL]

Download the album in MP3 format at the highest quality with all of the metadata included and the video thumbnail using the filename format "[Artist Name] - [Title]": yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0 --embed-metadata --embed-thumbnail -o "%(uploader)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" [URL]

Download the album using the default audio format and default naming convention without any metadata: yt-dlp -x [URL]

You can also use all of this information to download specific songs, or if you want the video too, remove the -x and just do yt-dlp [URL]. The same commands also work for any other site on yt-dlp's supported sites list.

Congratulations! You now have downloaded an album from YouTube. It's worth going over each file to make sure the title and metadata and stuff are correct, since I've found this to be spotty in my experience.

Playing Your Music

So now you have the music downloaded and on your device. Great! Now how do you listen to it?

You'll recall that you downloaded VLC Media Player earlier or some other software to play local music files. To listen to an album, open VLC (or the player of your choice), go to "Media" or "File" or something like that in the top-left, go to "Open Directory", find the album, and select it. It's that easy. You can also drag-and-drop an album into VLC, but it depends on the specific software what you're able to do. VLC is also able to play .m3u playlist files, which we go over in the next section. You can shuffle or loop whatever you're playing as well, and you can change the order by dragging the songs around just like any streaming service.

Creating playlists

Playlists are one of the main appeals of streaming over physical music. Luckily, we can easily create playlists with local files as well. The .m3u file format exists specifically for this purpose, and basically stores an ordered list of the locations of files in a playlist with some extra metadata. I use Mp3tag to create playlists, but there are many softwares that allow you to do this.

On Mp3tag, begin your playlist by selecting one or two songs, going to "File", and then clicking "Playlist (selected files)". Save the file to somewhere, open it using Mp3tag, and voila! You can now edit and add to this playlist. Add songs by dragging the files from File Explorer and holding ctrl when you drop them. Save your changes by going to "File" then "Playlist (all files)" and saving it in the same location with the same name.

You can play m3u files using VLC (because of course), and many other softwares support importing/playing playlists in the m3u format. Some music players also have in-built support for making playlists, which is likely easier than using Mp3tag or a similar software.

Doing All This On Mobile

Things get more complicated on the phone, but not significantly so. Phones generally have less storage space and less software support, so many of the things mentioned here wouldn't work. I wouldn't even try doing file management stuff on mobile unless you have an Android and experience. The solution I've found is best is to convert the music you want to .mp3 or some other smaller format, organize it on your computer, zip it, move the zipped file to your phone, and unzip that file to have the whole organized directory of compressed music on your phone. From here you can play it using a lot of different softwares. I'm on Android and the one I use is Musicolet (highly recommend). VLC is also on mobile but it kinda sucks on Android and has not nearly as many features as the desktop version.

I would love if people could drop tips or recommendations for playing local files on mobile.

Summary

Like, RB, or leave a comment if you actually read all of this. My prediction is zero people get to here.