How to Make Your Own Digital Music Library to Quit Spotify

    Updated October 12, 2025

    So you've heard all the terrible things about Spotify and you want to stop giving them your money. Or you want to actually be able to own your music. There are many alternatives you can take, but this blog post will focus on making your own digital audio library! Particularly in a low cost way? It's what I did and I'd love to share what I learned. I reccomend you use this as a guide and do further research on the things that interest you!

    Videos about this topic:
    How I quit Spotify with an MP3 Player by Marcika
    It's Time to De-Spotify Your Life By Notes from The Archives


    ░ Where to get Music

    Bandcamp

    A great place to both discover music and support indie artists!

    Ripping CDs

    If you already have a CD collection you can digitize it by ripping the files with an audio grabber program like Exact Audio Copy. You could also rip CDs at a low cost with thrifted or second-hand CDs, and for free with CDs from the library!

    The Internet Archive

    Good for old records (early 1900's stuff), live recordings, or any artist that uploads their music for free. The vaporwave community on here is pretty big.

    Freegal

    A streaming service you can use for free with a library card and allows you to download a few mp3s a week. I haven't used this. Reviews are mixed.


    ░ Other options ☠︎︎

    Soulseek

    a P2P file sharing software like Limewire. It's like torrenting but instead of downloading a file from many people you directly download from one person. It's good way to find music that not on streaming services. Also pretty fun to look at people's music libraries. My fave! (I reccommend using the Nicotine+ client!)

    Lucida

    Rips high quality music from streaming services. Very convenient because you can download whole albums or playlists at a time. Though, it's not always reliable, it can be slow or not even finish a download at all when servers are busy. Consider donating to them if you can!

    doubledouble

    Another browser-based music downloader like Lucida.

    KHInsider

    An archive of video game music ripped from game files or CDs.


    ░ Which format should I download?

    You can either go lossy or lossless. Lossy is compressed audio files that are smaller in size at the cost of quality. Lossless are audio files that are the same quality the source material, but because of this the file size is larger.

    320kbps MP3s are a good option for the lossy route and good for most people. Audio encoding has come a long way and the difference between this and lossless is pretty minimal! Each song is about 8mb and a library of 10,000 songs would take up 80gb.

    16 bit FLAC is the way to go for lossless. 24 bit is almost twice the size for diminishing returns. A FLAC song would be around 25mb and a library of 10,000 songs would be 250gb. I would personally go this route, storage is pretty cheap and getting cheaper. If you need to transfer it to a device with less storage you can always copy and compress your music for that device, but you can't upscale music once it's compressed.


    ░ File and Metadata Managment

    When you own your music you have to be prepared to manage it. The back-end stuff that streaming services handle for you is now your responsibility! It may be more work but it also comes with more freedom.

    The first thing to consider is how to organize your music files. What would be the easiest way for you to find what you're looking for?

    This is what my file structure/naming convention looks like:
    Artist / [Year] Album Title / [Track Number] Song Title

    For me, it's easiest to search by artist, and it's important their discography is in chronological order, so this is what works for me. Though other people have different priorities. Some people like looking at a giant list of albums in alphabetical order. It's up to you to decide. It's also worth noting this is not the primary way you'll interact with your music. It's just how you'll store it.

    Next is metadata, metadata is the identifying information in your music files. It's what tells your music player the song you're playing is by what artist or what album. You want to make sure these are consistent across files. For example, you don't want two different spellings for an artist name, or whatever music player you're using will split up their disography.

    If your library is large, this is a difficult task to do by hand. Here are some tools that automate the process:

    beets.io

    My beloved... does everything from getting metadata, lyrics, album covers, mananging your folder structure. It's a command line based program so if you're not familiar with that it takes some getting used to. but it's highly configurable and worth it if you're crazy about customization.

    Musicbrainz Picard

    I haven't used this but I've seen it reccommended a lot. It doesn't have everything beets has but it has an easy-to-use interface. If you have files with no metadata, it can identify it by listening to the file.


    ░ Desktop Music Players

    Now you have a library, here's what you can use to access it in an easy way! tbh this is one of the most fun parts for me... i love you customization. These two options both have metadata managment as well.

    MusicBee

    Highly configurable and customizable. There's a lot of skins and you can honestly sink a lot of time making everything to your exact preferences.

    foobar2000

    Another option I see highly recommended. I haven't used this but it's been around since 2002 and feature-loaded. Has a bunch of fun skins as well.


    ░ Taking your music with you

    Having a dedicated device just for music is great!! especially if you're also trying to put some distance between you and your smartphone.

    Things you may have already/Can get secondhand:

    Digital Audio Players

    The quality of your music and headphones are the first thing you should upgrade if you care about sound quality. (I cannot even begin to open the can of worms about headphones here) The gap between upgrading to a DAP (digital audio player) is quite minimal. You should only consider it if you're pretty neurotic about it. which I am. I reccommend doing your own research if you're interested. I'm just a hobbiest, though I'll still put my budget findings here :)

    In retrospect maybe this section is a little much for a little guide. But I've written it already so enjoy i guess LOL.


    ░ Self-hosted Streaming

    if you don't want to carry around a different device you can stream your own music library to your phone! You don't need to get a dedicated media server. You can use an old laptop or just leave your computer on when you want to use it (like I do lol).

    Jellyfin

    Free and open source. It's pretty finicky though. It's up to you whether the fact it's FOSS is worth the struggle to make it work. I have a pretty high tolerance but it was still a little too much for me.

    Plex

    Closed source and downloading for offline use is locked behind a paywall. But it's more convenient than Jellyfin. The app is snappier and I don't have any hassle using it remotely. My only major gripe is that I can't use m3u playlist files </3.


    I hope this post makes the jump seem less intimidating. or maybe it didn't because it's so text heavy? LOL. but i promise once you jump in it's very easy. Owning your music will change your relationship to it. It's interesting how my listening habits have changed since then ^^ I wish the same for you too! if you have any comments you can leave them on my guestbook or my straw.page