#the first 'guy' was my sister at christmas who borrowed my laptop because she couldn't get her bluetooth speaker working

[whetstonefires]

hey, random question! what platform/method do you use to keep your robust digital media when ripping CDs? i havent done it since i was a kid with itunes (when itunes let you upload your own stuff....) and wanted to start again

Platform...they are files?

Like, mp3s; I keep them in my hard drive and thumb drives and so forth. My 'music' folder has subfolders, mostly by artist, which have subfolders per album. I just. Have the files. In my computer. Very basic method.

I organize and play them through VLC mostly. Or, on devices that still have it, I have kept using Windows Media Player, because I'm comfortable with the UI and why not, but they're actively phasing it out so I can't recommend adopting it lmao. And ofc if you're in the apple ecosystem it's not remotely an option.

I don't know that much about macintosh tbh but afaik they do let you have a file directory where you put your files that you own, which is definitely what I consider to be the most sensible baseline, if you have a device with enough memory. And memory has gotten pretty cheap.

I don't know of any cloud client service that's actively catered to letting you upload stuff you own and then stream those files on any device you please without having to jump through extra hoops, and suspect it might not be a thing at this point because there is no profit in that and it's not free to provide. They really want you to have to pay money to access content that you don't own. Sorry.

I bet you could figure out a way to keep a reasonably large music library in the amount of free storage google gives you with an account, and then play from there, but I don't think it would be very seamless. Maybe even less so on iphone.

But if your phone of whatever type has or can be modified to have sufficient storage space, you really can just. Keep your music in it. And then play it. VLC is open source and very good, and they have it for apple; I definitely recommend it.

But you don't like, keep files in it, it's just a player and sorter. So it doesn't feel like it answers the question you asked exactly, sorry.