I miss my record collection

At the end of December 2023 I decided to switch back to CDs and stop using Spotify. The idea was triggered by the announced price increase and I thought, that for all the money that I spent on it per Year, I can actually buy a few CDs that I then own. During this thought-process I also remembered a very foolish decision from a few years ago:

In a basement cleanup session, I decided to throw away a whole box of CDs. I didn’t own a CD player at the time and haven’t touched the box in years. I thought Spotify will be my music source forever. If I could turn back time and change that decision, I would.

In the years before music streaming services, I collected all my MP3 files in folders sorted by artist and album. It was the logical thing to do, because CDs contained one artist and album (apart from Bravo Hits and Dream Dance ᕕ(⌐■_■)ᕗ ♪♬). Then Spotify came and I had access to virtually everything – that changed my listening behaviour. I moved from a sorted folder full of artists and their albums to playlists. Since I didn’t have my folder collection anymore, I sometimes didn’t know what music to listen to. In the end I almost only listened to one particular playlist. Thinking about this today, makes me feel limited somehow. I stopped listening to whole albums, and just played the few songs that I really liked. If you only ever play the really good ones, they can get boring over time.

Now that I decided to buy CDs and rip them myself again, I can’t wait to get started. But of course there are some challenges along the way:

Copying discs requires a disc drive 🕵️ #

No surprise there, but my current tower has no space for a optical drive (I still love it, though: Meshify 2 Compact from Fractal Design). When I assembled the computer a year ago, I thought the time for optical storage media is over. I still have a drive in the basement and will need to look into something like S-ATA to USB-A or C and simply put it on top of the tower.

Transferring music files from Windows to my iPhone 📠 #

I thought that would be an easy one: use iTunes. It turns out, Apple just released version 1.0 of the iCloud for Windows app and with that came a couple of new tools as well:

Apple Devices - Used to manage devices and synchronize selected content
Apple Music - Used to manage the music library, replaces iTunes but is limited in it’s features

iTunes also received an update, which removed the music part from it. Now you can only manage your audio books and podcasts, everything else is gone.
(っ °Д °;)っ

Funny enough, even though Apple introduced the new apps, they still share an error that I already had on iTunes in the past: MDCrashReportTool, Backup, Sync, Preparing to Sync.

Apple Devices recognizes my iPhone most of the time. If it doesn’t, I need to kill MDCrashReporterTool.exe. Selecting Music shows an error that the media library from Apple Music couldn’t be opened. I only got it working the first time I ever used this app. Since then I always receive this error.

A cropped German error message that says “Die Mediathek von Apple Music konnte nicht geöffnet werden. Öffne die Apple Music-App, um dies zu beheben.”

Clicking on the button to open Apple Music brings the Apple Music app in focus, but does nothing else. (I can see and listen to my music in Apple Music).

A really long time ago, back when I used my iPod Photo, I had a software from a company with a red chair as logo. They offered a simple tool to transfer MP3 files to the iPod without using iTunes – after a quick search I found it, the company was actually called “Red Chair”, the software was called Anapod (Snapshot at web.archive.org).

So today, I looked for alternatives again and tried CopyTrans Manager as well as iMazing 3 Beta to transfer files. Both were disappointing.

CopyTrans Manager works, but the interface is a really scary and not fun to use.

iMazing 3 has too many features. I just want to copy my music to the device. I think the price for iMazing is justified if you use all the features, but for me that doesn’t fit. Therefore it’s too expensive.

For the moment I will use CopyTrans Manager and simply hope, that Apple fixes the issue with the Windows app ( ˘︹˘ ).

Other Streaming services #

I would have a huge book library by now, looking at my kindle ebook collection. And I wish I would have bought them all as paperback. (Also, I like looking at shelves full of books).

I have similar issues with Netflix and other streaming services. I happily switched from the bay to Netflix and enjoyed easy access to current movies for a while. But things dont last. Movies are removed from Netflix from time to time and it’s not trivial keeping up to date with that. Also more and more streaming services are popping up, using “exclusive” blockbusters to get people to use their service. Just another 10$ for this service and another one for that. It doesn’t take long and this accumulates to a few hundred bucks a year.

This development is no fun, but I haven’t found a good solution for movies yet. (I’m too impatient to wait for BluRay to load). And regarding books, I switched back to paperbacks in October already.