In 2023, I canceled my Spotify Premium subscription to try YouTube Premium (which includes YouTube Music). It’s a great service and, in my opinion, better than Spotify. For nearly a year, I listened to music almost exclusively through YouTube Music. However, a few weeks ago, I decided to cancel my YouTube Premium subscription.
Knowing that I had been listening to almost the same music for the past ten years while using streaming services (which adds up to quite a bit of money), I decided to try something different: going back to the early digital era by storing my music locally on my device (aka my smartphone).
Before I could enjoy my music locally, I had a few things to figure out:
- How much free space do I have on my phone, and how much of it am I willing to allocate to music while keeping enough space free?
- Which music (albums, playlists) do I want to store on my phone?
- Which software will I use to play my music?
- How will I transfer my music to my phone?
- Streaming services offer well-tagged, well-organized music with cover art. What will it look like on my phone when I listen to my own files?
How much free space do I have on my phone, and how much of it am I willing to allocate to music while keeping enough space free?
My phone has 128 GB of memory. After removing all the stored files from the YouTube app (both music and a few videos), I ended up with about 80 GB of free space, which was more than I expected. A few days earlier, I had also deleted a lot of unused and/or boring apps that were just taking up space for no reason.
80 GB is a lot of free space and could easily be filled with music, but I didn’t want to:
- Store too much music and end up not knowing what to listen to, as too much choice can sometimes be overwhelming.
- Risk not having enough free space for my phone to run smoothly, or get stuck if I needed to install or download something else.
So, I decided that around 25 GB of music should be more than enough for my needs.
Which music do I want to store on my phone?
I mostly listen to the same artists and playlists. Even though, from time to time, I explore something recommended by a friend or by the algorithms, I usually stick to my favorite artists and their best albums. Plus, there are a few playlists I’ve created or discovered over time.
I’ve also bought quite a few CDs (and MP3s) since the ’90s, so I already own a lot of the music I was paying for monthly. Let’s be honest though, not all the music on my hard drives was acquired in the most legitimate way.
Anyway, I plugged in an external hard drive—the one where all the music I’ve collected since the late ’90s is stored. Thankfully, I’ve been pretty organized with my files since back then, which made the process of finding the music I wanted to store on my phone a breeze. I made a large selection of music and transferred it locally to my computer. I finally ended up with around 27 GB, which is actually a lot of music!
Which software will I use to play my music?
For years, I used the Spotify and YouTube apps to listen to my music. But now that I wanted to do it the “digital old-school” way, I needed an app for that.
I remembered the good old days of listening to my music on my computer with Winamp 2.x, back in the late ’90s and early 2000s. But there’s no Winamp for my phone. Then I recalled another software I sometimes used back then to listen to music: foobar2000. To my surprise, it’s still alive, under active development, and available as an app for my phone! Moreover, it’s light, fast, simple, easy to use, and even has its own FTP server feature to transfer music from my computer to my phone. It sounded perfect (spoiler: it is), so I downloaded it.
How will I transfer my music to my phone?
As I explained in the previous paragraph, foobar2000 has a built-in FTP server feature. All I have to do is activate a toggle within the app on my phone, which starts an FTP server and provides an IP address I can connect to from my computer. The only requirement is that both the phone and the computer need to be on the same Wi-Fi network—and, of course, knowing how to use an FTP client, such as FileZilla in my case.
So, I gave it a try and transferred a few albums and playlists from my computer to my phone via FTP, which leads to the next section of this article…
Streaming services offer well-tagged, well-organized music with cover art. What will it look like on my phone when I listen to my own files?
Well, at first, it looked really bad. Despite having a well-organized folder and file system, if the files aren’t properly tagged, it leads to a poor music browsing experience. Some albums were split into several parts, cover art was missing, and some tracks or albums didn’t have any tags and wouldn’t show up in foobar2000… It was a total mess, and I had to fix it. Good thing I hadn’t uploaded all 27 GB of music to my phone, because I would have had to do it all over again.
Here came quite a laborious task. I opened all my albums, one by one, with an ID3 tag editor and spent a LOT of time filling and fixing each category: artist name, album name, track number, track title, etc. Most of the time, I also had to add the correct album cover, which I either found online or created myself. I also had to fill or fix some tags for my playlists. I sometimes made mistakes, like typos, so I went back and forth between my phone and my computer quite a few times. It took ages, but I eventually finished what turned into a tedious chore. It was totally worth it, though, because now I can browse my music beautifully. Everything is in order, with nice cover art for each album and playlist.
Here is a video of what it looks like:
I really like the simple design and the way I can easily see the cover arts and choose something to play in a glimpse. Do you recognize any music you also like?
Pros and cons of storing and listening to music locally on your phone
Pros
- No subscription fees
Once the music is bought and/or downloaded, there are no more fees. Unlike streaming services, there is no need for recurring payments.
- Your music is yours
You own your music. This means it won’t suddenly disappear due to issues with right-holders, expired contracts, or legal matters between artists, record companies, and streaming services.
- More full album listening
Since switching to local music, I’ve been listening to full albums more often. With Spotify and YouTube Music, I mostly listened to playlists, whether made by myself, other users, or the platforms (like Spotify’s “This is [artist]”). Now, I’m enjoying a more traditional and immersive way of listening—going through entire albums from start to finish. I don’t mean to sound elitist, but there’s something special about albums: a flow, a mood, even themes or a story. It sometimes reminds me of loading a CD into my stereo, flipping through the booklet, looking at the art, and reading the lyrics while listening to it.
- Offline access
Sure, streaming services allow you to download music locally. However, sometimes you still need an internet connection to launch the music.
With music stored on your phone, you can listen to it anywhere you want, even without an internet connection (such as in airplane mode). There’s no need to worry about network access or data consumption.
- Full control over selection
There’s no overwhelming number of choices, and no algorithm influencing your decisions. You choose exactly what you want to listen to without being annoyed or having your screen cluttered with recommendations you didn’t ask for.
- Privacy
No data tracking. No service will monitor your habits or collect data to run commercial and marketing operations with you as the target. You are in control of your personal information and listening habits.
- It’s fun
Yeah. There’s something cool about doing things the old-fashioned way—manually picking your music, slowing down, and taking the time to do it all with care.
- Also : full control over sound quality and custom organization of your music.
Cons
- Limited storage space
With streaming services, you can access an almost unlimited music library that doesn’t take up space on your phone’s memory (unless you download the music). When you store your own music on your phone, it can take up a lot of space and occupy a large portion of your device’s memory.
- Manual file management
Organizing and managing a local music library is a manual task. You need to properly organize and tag your files, which can take a lot of time and effort. It also requires some computer skills to handle ID3 tags, FTP connections, and so on.
- Fewer new music discoveries
What can be a pro can also be a con. Streaming services constantly recommend music based on your listening habits, and sometimes it’s a great way to discover new artists and songs, or to rediscover something that was buried deep in your memory.
- No automatic synchronization
Unlike streaming services, which sync your music across all devices where the app is installed, managing a local music library usually requires manual effort. If you want the same music library on your phone, computer, etc., you typically have to handle everything manually, which involves a lot of copy-and-paste operations.
- Takes time to organize and tag music
For a great and smooth experience, you need to properly tag your music files (artists, titles, cover art, etc.). This can be a time-consuming task, especially if your music library is large.
- Also : no automatic updates when artists release a new song or album, and limited backup options (for example, if you lose your phone).
Conclusion
It has been a few weeks since I started listening to my music locally. I enjoy it—it’s fun and simpler.
Sometimes, I think of an artist, an album, or a piece of music I’d like to listen to, but I can’t play it right at the moment I’m thinking about it. This is something we’re no longer used to. In those cases, I have to wait until I’m in front of my computer, then manually handle it by launching the FTP server and transferring the music to my phone—just like in the early 2000s.
Believe it or not, it’s actually refreshing to wait before having access to something. We’ve lost the art of patience over the past few decades.
In a world where everything is becoming faster and available instantly, I believe there is value in slowing down, being satisfied with what you have in the moment, and rediscovering the skill of patience.
Note: This post is all about listening to music on my phone. Regarding listening to music on my computer, I do it the same way: local files dropped within a player, such as VLC or Re:AMP for the nostalgic vibes.
