Good music is important. It can bring a soul up out of a funk, it can motivate and inspire to press on even more during exercise or work, and most importantly it is essential to a Christian’s walk to praise God.
“Sing to God a brand-new song. He’s made a world of wonders!… Shout your praises to God, everybody! Let loose and sing! Strike up the band! Round up an orchestra to play for God, Add on a hundred-voice choir. Feature trumpets and big trombones, Fill the air with praises to King God. Let the sea and its fish give a round of applause, With everything living on earth joining in. Let ocean breakers call out, “Encore!” And mountains harmonize the finale…” Psalm 98 MSG
“Shout with joy to the Lord… Come before him, singing with joy… Enter his gates with thanksgiving; go into his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and praise his name.” Psalm 100 NLT
Except, it’s kind of hard to get one’s worship on when ads want to pop in and interrupt. I’ve used Amazon’s music service for years to play music that I’ve bought as their Auto-RIP feature was pretty slick: buy a CD and as soon as the credit card is authorized, the songs start downloading to the app on my phone. Later, I stopped buying CD versions and just the MP3 versions. This has worked great for years, until the ads started late last year, trying to push for Amazon’s “Unlimited Streaming” service which I didn’t want no did I need as I owned all the music I listen to.
One feature I really like about buying my music is owning it, and not paying any monthly fees. The other feature about owning music is that my devices playing them don’t have to “check for permission” nor need any Internet access. This is a concept rapidly going away. Companies want to ensure monthly revenue, including people overpaying for data plans they just don’t need if they planned ahead and pre-downloaded.
To today I downloaded all of my music from the Amazon Music website’s Purchased section to my PC. Then I connected a USB cable to my Android, put my Android into USB File Transfer mode and copied over the music I wanted access to. On my phone I opened the Amazon Music app, cleared all the file storage and cache, and uninstalled it.
I’ve been using AIMP (Artem Izmaylov’s Media Player) for some time to play DRM-free audio books. It’s easy enough to create M3U playlists either on my PC or on-the-fly within AIMP.
Another thing I’ve been doing for a bit is backing audio kickstarter projects. I really like the idea of money going directly to the artists and not Amazon or Apple.
KJ-52 has been doing kickstarter projects for some time. I really appreciate what Jonah (KJ-52) has been doing with his kickstarter projects: if people back the project to raise enough to get to a “stretch goal” for an album, he’ll often record a bonus track to include. Additionally, he makes available to kickstarter backers not only mp3 files, but CD-quality and the original loss-less master WAV files. I convert these to FLAC (lossless compression) before transferring them over with SoundConverter these days instead of mucking around with CLI as I only have to do an album here or there and not an entire library.
It is a little work to download the music to my PC and copy it to my phone, but thanks to Amazon’s ads, I’ll be doing it anyway, but well worth it to control music I own with an ad-free playback that doesn’t require any cell data usage.
Update August 5, 2023: What have I been listening too? I use last.fm to track my “audio scrobbling” from my phone or laptop.