The other week I decided to get some new music from a band I enjoyed. Looking at the options to download their music on a platform seemed limited and often poisoned with Digital Rights Management (DRM).

The easiest solution to the problem was to just go to the bands online shop and buy their albums on CDs. It costed a total of 84€ including delivery fees to buy 10 albums and added a window of 3 days between buying them and listening to them.

Which sounds like “quite an inconvenience” compared to opening an App like “Spotify” and start listening, it’s actually not that bad. You get to own the music, in the sense that you can not only listen to it, whenever you like independent of any contract situation of Spotify, and you also get to put the disks on your shelf, which might kick-start a conversation with some visitor one day.

Obviously, it’s a bit unhandy these days to carry around a backpack full of music along with your Discman if you even still own one. Plus the facts that disks get scratched and might even be lost. Instead it would be very handy, if one could get the music on all your devices (phones, laptops, desktops, …).

Here is my flow for that:

1. Get an (external) CD/DVD/Blueray drive for your device desktop/laptop
2. Get Sound Juicer
3. Insert the Disk, wait for the disk to load, with all metadata
4. Press “Extract”

Now all the Songs from the music disk is in the Music directory.

To get it synced across all devices just go ahead and use whatever tool you like to sync files across devices. Might be Nextcloud, might be iCloud, … For me it’s Syncthing.

Instantly, all my music is synced and organised across all devices and whatever music player app I open, I can just play it.

And the best of it all: It’s cheaper than a Spotify subscription, provides more money to the artists creating the music and no one can take this music away from you (except people raiding your house and other properties taking all your devices and backups, but that’s unlikely).