I’ve never been a fan of streaming subscriptions.  The trend over time is always less content, higher prices, underpaid or even unpaid artists and, eventually, ads.  And since my musical tastes tend to be diverse if not unusual, lots of music I want to listen to simply is  not available on popular streaming services.  I recall the first three things I tried to listen to on Spotify weren’t available (I think it was Don Walser, Neil Young and Warren Zevon).  Not a good first impression.

I ripped my music from CDs eons ago and tend to keep my music in MP3 on a Plex server.  Even paid for a lifetime subscription to Plex.  It also manages my photos and movies.

These days I usually buy MP3s directly and download them.  But this week I had a CD I wanted to rip.  Popped it into the wife’s Windows PC, but everything was broken.  Especially tagging.  I get the feeling the Big Guys don’t want me to own music.  They want me to rent (from them).  So I went over to Linux to see what I could do.

Abcde was a nice front end and got me MP3s and even some CD information to name the files.  All command line, but simple.  Except I couldn’t get tagging to work.  Something missing.  I will revisit it and see if I can make it work, but for now went over to Picard and tagged the files and was done.

The Great Subscription Trap: How Streaming Broke Its Promise and What It Means for Everything Else