Yes, I realise this now… we could open another discussion about milking punter’s with endless (IMO pointless) remixes, but that’s another story. I’m happy I have the ca. 1984 CD ripped on my hard drive.
I have that one too, and I like it better than the 2011 remaster.
One of the advantages of streaming is you can compare.
If punters want to hear the same old tired stuff for decades, one could say it’s their problem. At least on Qobuz streaming there is actually less milking in this regard than with buying local downloads, but if someone wants 5 remixes, why not. Maybe they get continually adjusted for decreased hearing ability 
The 2011 remaster by James Guthrie is better than any of the original CD releases. It’s 98% as good as the 2003 SACD…
I’m with you on this. Never did get the popularity of that band (though of course I liked them in middle school circa 1979, before I discovered The Clash and Sex Pistols). Dark and depressing, but not in the good way. So much better stuff out there from that era. Give me Popol Vuh or Can over all that bombastic stadium rock any day…
Back to the subject at hand, I do think local music is still relevant, but getting less and less so. With Roon, I no longer really differentiate, and now have an overabundance of choice if needed. Streaming is fantastic esp if one wants to explore a new genre. I still purchase downloads from bandcamp now and then, and the occasional cd, but just can’t seem to get obsessive about it as there’s such a plethora of music, new and old, always to be discovered. Due to a recent house move, sold all of my cd collection that had been sitting in the basement for the last eight years, though hung onto one box of box sets and a few solos that have special meaning, covers etc. Might have to actually get a cd transport someday to play them, lol…
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Yeah, I’ve got some autographed vinyl and CDs that I can’t imagine parting with… Let my executors deal with them!
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Wow, if this works out, local music – any recorded music – is really irrelevant!
It’s probably not too much of a stretch to suggest that AI researchers will continue improving music generation technology until anyone can create studio-quality music in any style just by describing it
I’ll try to address both points.
First, your argument against locally stored music files is a false cause fallacy. Locally stored music files have many reasons for existing, of which one less and less common reason is offline access. Unless all the music you listen to is stored locally, you already require the internet to have an undiminished experience. I’m assuming you just care about the music and aren’t so attached to the files themselves.
While a small minority do indeed use their local files when their internet access is cut off, I propose that the majority have not considered this use case when designing/maintaining their libraries.
So why does anyone have files anymore? Well, I propose a few reasons:
- it’s historical baggage from pre-streaming
- it’s music that does not exist on streaming services
- it’s music that comes and goes from streaming services, and that unreliability is frustrating
- it’s music in a format or quality that you can’t get on streaming services
I would say the majority of music files are in the first category, and while the rest are much smaller by quantity, they are also the most important.
At some point in the past, I gave up on an enormous library of files. One too many hard drive failures, annoying backups, etc… all the reasons you state. I slowly started to build it back up, but this time, I stopped collecting anything that I could reliably find on the streaming services. I now have under half a terabyte of music files, which makes it inexpensive, fast, and easy to curate / buy / backup.
So, do you need that copy of Thriller or Back in Black you bought in the 80s or 90s? I would argue it’s baggage you need to let go of. Time to do some spring cleaning, but don’t throw away the baby with the bath water.
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What kills me is when the only copy of the music in existence is on Youtube.
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My library IS my local files, painstakingly curated, collected and enjoyed regularly. Yes, i do use Qobuz for stuff i don’t care much about, to sample new music etc. I have about 13K albums locally, and some 300 albums from Qobuz.
Let’s illustrate with something that’s been discussed recently:
Qobuz offers 2 versions of Dark Side, of which one is complete, the other a preview with one avaliable track.
Above them you can see a part of my local albums, where most of them are preferrable to the latest remaster from greedy labels trying to squeeze my wallet a bit more.
And not to axe grind, but the decisions to go to cloud based computing without a fall back plan is the worst decision. I actually use Roon a LOT less nowadays and use my “no internet required” apps rather.
Not that i have had connectivity issues (other than an introduced slowness due to the poor decision) but rather that my confidence in Roon to cater for my needs and desires have all but diminished.
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So, I’ve learnt some things since flirting with Qobuz:
- Collecting/curating is as much a part of the hobby as listening
- Bookmarking/favouriting things online is not collecting
- ‘All you can eat’ means you’re never satisfied
- The ‘all online’ ethic sucks
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A good list of reasons. A number of us also, as has been mentioned in this thread, enjoy the hobby of collecting and collating locally stored music. I even enjoy backing up my local collection! This is certainly a niche pastime, but aren’t all hobbies!
I definitely agree with your wider point that online access is not just about streaming. It’s about what Roon can offer that enhances users’ experience of both streaming and local libraries. Artist and album info is now cloud based, and this has allowed for the integration of Wikipedia. My only issue with this is the same as it has always been. What happens if/when the internet goes down? So far I have to say that 2.0 has worked really well as I’ve only had brief outages and Roon hasn’t stopped playing. I’ve put in place a couple of contingencies and so all should be well for the future.
One last point I’d like to make involves the state of the streaming market. It seems quite clear that there’s little money to be made for streaming providers with regard to the actual streaming of music. The money will be made through the exploiting of market share and brand loyalty. We see this now as Spotify is heavily promoting its original content (podcasts etc.) and Apple is, always, promoting its own ecosystem hardware. Where does that leave Tidal and Qobuz? Fine for the moment, but perhaps not so once the streaming market hits its next stage Only time will tell, but the medium term viability of Tidal and Qobuz does not look great.
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Why maintain local music files? I grew up in a family that rented rather than owned their own home. For various reasons, we moved every few years. I now own my own home and find this to be a preferable arrangement.
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One other angle to local music that I’ve found is Roon actually incentivising it.
All of the cool features in Roon around adding ratings, tweaking the genres to make albums findable and adding tags are all tied to a copy of an album. This means that if it’s removed from a streaming service, you lose everything you did.
This also happens when a streaming service “updates” a copy of an album. I recently had a furstrating experience with Qobuz where almost 30% of my library had been flagged as unavailable despite the albums still being on the service. As it turns out, if they change anything on the album they just flag the existing copy as a dud and put a new one up.
It’s very rare for an album to be completely removed from a service but it is very common for changes to be made that destroy a single copy.
All of this also applies if you need to switch streaming provider for whatever reason.
To me, I can’t use all the features of Roon with streaming because of this. It is far too fragile relying on that one copy from that one streaming service always being in your library, having zero changes made to it by the provider.
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Exactly this, I have started to limit extensive edits to albums I have as local files
There is also a range of feature suggestions for copying edits from one copy of an album to the new one (if the streaming service moved it), or even from one album version to another (like after making edits to the 16/44 version and then liking a new hi-res better, the edits are forever tied to the CD version. Some metadata should be tied to the virtual parent to begin with, so that they apply to all versions)
Does seem at odds with Roon as a whole. Roon shows you higher quality copies of the album you have but if you switch to that all of your edits, play counts and hearts are gone.
What’s really puzzling to me is that Roon has on their about pages a description of exactly what we are talking about:
They have the concept of global identities built in but don’t use it to carry over universal attributes like genres, hearts and tags.
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It’s probably not entirely simple to expose in the UI because some people may want to heart or tag just a particular version, or have separate play time per version. Or some credits may apply to all versions of an album but others may not (e.g. additional musicians on some bonus track, or a remastering engineer that worked on the reissue but not the original version).
So I can see the complexities but the current situation is nevertheless not satisfying and at odds with some of the marketing. (As in, yes, Roon let’s you edit streaming credits, but the marketing doesn’t tell you that you can lose them at any time)
That I have found to be a serious shortcoming in which Roon regrettably doesn’t help to identify the removed ‘duds’ or even replace them behind the scenes with the new copy of the album as published by the streaming service. I sometimes only notice the duds because Roon recommends to me albums without covers… clicking on the recommended album leads to a ‘not available’ message… If we are to depend on streaming music, Roon must be much smarter about that.
Agreed that there is no doubt it’s complicated and I understand why there is a separation for people that want it. I just think that Roon argues and is developing as a product towards streaming.
If they are going to move that way then having library integrity issues is going to hurt them when trying to achieve a streaming first product.
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Hmmm. I think I agree with this, but it seems disingenuous. The reason they haven’t explicitly considered this use case is because they never considered that internet access was necessary to play their local files. There’s a long history of using iTunes, DLNA, media servers, and, yes, even Roon, to play music locally without an Internet connection.
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