I’ve invested thousands of hours and $$ in a local music collection, but now I can’t even play it in Roon without the internet. Having finally trailed Qobuz, I’m thinking of giving up and going all out minimalist like @Jim_F I can’t really see the point of buying, curating, backing up, etc. Change my mind?
I see your point.
I still use the local music I bought and ripped. But for newly discovered stuff, I use Qobuz exclusively and then buy isolated albums on vinyl. That works very well for me, but if Qobuz should no longer exist - which I hope it won’t - I’ll have a lot of work to do.
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I have been buying physical media for around 55 years and still have it all, still perfectly playable.
You sell yours will you still be able to stream what you now have in 50 years time?
Also if you don’t have internet access you can’t stream either.
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It’s not about changing your mind Mike it’s about choice. So if you enjoy just streaming then keep going.
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You will have to pry my physical media from my cold dead fingers…
In my case that’s the only local music I care about.
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I’ve shut down my Roon server and gone back to logitechmediaserver with squeezelite. Doesn’t care about internet, works on the road, has no issues displaying cover art and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t sound better too
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At this point, I would keep it and enjoy it. Get a subscription to Audirvana Origin for $120 or $90 if already a customer. Audirvana Origin should work when/if your internet goes down.
I just bought a second lifetime subscription to Roon so I can use Roon away from home on my laptop while keeping my Nucleus activated for Roon ARC. Do what you need to do to be happy.
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I doubt I can. I don’t see why I’d try.
What does going minimalist actually mean to you? Would you delete your collection? Or just stop adding to it?
I stopped buying digital music years ago. My collection isn’t large by the standards of this community, and it’s all 16/44 FLAC ripped from CDs that I’ve held on to for ownership rights reasons. Most, but not all, of what I have is on some combination of Qobuz and Tidal and I now find that my local library is actually problematic because Roon chooses it over higher resolution options when playing Radio, which is a big part of what I do. This issue of streamable options being preferable to local options is only going to get worse over time and it contributes to me thinking maybe I should just treat my collection as archival.
My reliability/backup strategies are well baked (Synology RAID + HyperBackup to Azure) and I don’t see any reason to discontinue that. My music backup is part of a larger backup which includes photos, documents, other stuff so there’s no additional headache involved in continuing that.
Interested to hear what you do…I suspect that, over time, more folks like us will walk away from, or at least stop growing, our collections.
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Depends if all your music is on streaming and if you believe it will stay. Mine isn’t and I am not sure. And I like my favorite artists well-curated
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I’ve just looked for Beatles, only the remastered versions are on Qobuz… reason enough to keep local files, ripped from the 1984 cd’s.
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I use Roon & Qobuz in exactly the same way—auditioning new music on Q and purchasing selected titles on LP. I’ve been collecting vinyl for over 55 years and realized a couple years ago (when I first became aware of Roon) it’s time to start downsizing. I’ve reduced my collection from 3300 titles to 1900 (and still working on it), recording LPs and saving the files as 48kHz/24 bit AIFFs. Roon has made this less painful because of its integration of metadata, cover art, lyrics.
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That’s the same for a lot of music, the Remasters go up and they take most of the originals down (but not always)
I lost a lost of live albums in lockdown that disappeared from Tidal completely without explanation or notice. It annoyed me into buying a load of albums (and I have continued). You don’t own anything on Streaming and while it’s quite unlikely you will lose access to your library as it is under someone else’s control.
Apple, Google or Spotify can shut your account down for any reason they want (again it’s unlikely)
My son lost access to his Google account for two months late last year and it was a complete disaster as everything was tied to it including he YouTube music subscription which he could not get into.
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Just stop adding to it. I just bought a couple of new albums at $9.99 each and realized that equals 2 months of all you can eat. I feel a bit had TBH.
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@Jim_F wins. Doesn’t matter what the rest of you have.
Yes, local music is still relevant. I can easily imagine that the state of music streaming is like the early days of Netflix which was a one stop shop for video streaming. Today the video streaming landscape is so balkanized that one needs several subscriptions to various platforms to view what used to be available on Netflix. I divested of hundreds of DVDs, assured that all the content would be available. Guess what! So much is not available online at all, and much of the rest of my former movies are only available via the studio’s services that created them. When will one have to have multiple subscriptions to have access to what is in our local collections? I have access to Roon until one of us dies, and if Roon is the first to go, I’ll still have access to locally stored music.
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