Rethinking My Music Storage

I’m not a huge music collector, at least not compared to some other people I know. I do have about 150 GBs of music in my iTunes collection — lots of it being video game soundtracks I enjoy listening to while I program.

A few things I have not liked about my historic setup:

• Because the collection was 150 GB I could not store it on my main computer’s SSD (which was 256 GB in size).
• iTunes sucks. I don’t want to get into details here but as a music player and organization tool it’s awful.

Some goals for my new setup:

• I want to get rid of iTunes.
• I’d like to store my music on Dropbox, preferably in a way where I can control which Music (if any) gets synced to my other Dropbox setups.
• I have recently become a Spotify member. It’s got a nice collection I feel I can lean on AND it has some tools the player UI to support local files as well as streaming songs which I think will be key.

With all that said, what I’m up to:

First thing, I made a new iTunes library on my desktop and have started re-downloading my old iTunes music purchases. I have lots of music that is still DRM wrapped and these new downloads do not have such DRM.

Next, I’m going to slowly start to put the music into Dropbox. I’ll have a root level Music folder but inside I’m going to split the collection into Rare and Common. Common being for songs that are streamable from Spotify and thus being a folder I can selectively NOT sync on my other computers. The Rare folder will have all of my video game soundtracks and other albums I find to be incomplete or missing on Spotify. As I said, I like how Spotify can bring in local music into playlists and even lets you control the source folders and I’m hopeful this will work nicely.

We’ll see how it goes over the next few weeks. I’d love to hear if anyone else has an exotic setup like this.

Also, next up for a rethink is photos. Again, I’m really not happy with the current Apple solution and am thinking of alternatives. Feedback welcome.