Audio Players

A Table of Contents of Sorts

1. A totally superfluous manifesto
2. Spotify
   • Configuration
3. Apple Music
   Configuration

Anti-streaming Manifesto

Streaming has sort of made us forget the weight of music.

Sandinista! is the Clash's fourth album. It has thirty-six songs altogether, across three records; its runtime is 144 minutes and nine seconds, and every instant is good. From three pieces of vinyl, two compact cassettes were distilled; fuck, even the compact disc could not defeat Sandinista! and contain its goodness in one monolithic container, for CD-DA limits a CD to seventy-four minutes of gloriously clean 44.1kHz, 16-bit audio. Sandinista! is a heavy record; you're supposed to feel its physical weight, and bear witness to the weight of the two hour and twenty-four minute commitment you've signed up for.

But, with streaming, Sandinista! is no more than another record. Nothing really has to distinguish it. You don't have to get up to flip and change a record six whole times, flip or switch a cassette four times, or switch out a CD twice. Press play once, and you're done.

I mean, I'm a hypocrite. I listened to this album on Apple Music… but man, it's a metaphor to fit a real problem! That is, if you think de-valuing music is a problem; if not, get off my page!

See, today, you unlearn all that bullshit. You'll do the labor of finding your files; you'll feel their weight on your hard drive; and bear witness to the gigabytes of immaculate music pile up.

The age of streaming sort of allows to preview any album before we get them. In our broke-ass case, we'll preview records to see if we want to download them and allow them to take up some of our precious storage; for any you allow, it's easy as 1, 2, 3:

1. Find them on Soulseek (we covered this),
2. organize the filez (we'll cover this soon),
3. and add them to your preferred audio player (this is what we'll cover right now).
4. Optional: if you're a sweetheart who can afford it, buy the music on Bandcamp; better yet, do so from the label, for Bandcamp skims away more than 15% of your purchase,¹ further reducing what the artist actually receives. Bandcamp does enable streaming whatever tracks you buy, though, so do consider that!

Audio files are junk if not for something to play them. These are that something.

As I outlined in the preceding entry, Spotify can serve as an adequate music player. It doesn't have any additional features, though: It lacks the ability to edit a file's metadata, so info like song title and album artist are immutable (tagging); it also doesn't automatically organize local files into albums, therefore they must be informally created through playlists. It does not even automatically sync your collection between devices. The labor of storing and syncing your collection is up to you. Bullshit. But what else can you expect from Spotify?

Configuration

This isn't where configuration ends, though.

To maximize quality—both for streaming and local files—do as follows:

• Change your streaming quality to be the highest possible—for free plans, this will be the "High" setting, which is Equivalent to approximately 160kbit/s; for Spotify Premium, the maximum quality level is the "Very High" setting, Equivalent to approximately 320kbit/s. Honestly, if you're not rocking a million-dollar setup, 320kbps AAC ("Very High") should be good enough for you; but I personally like the placebo that lossless gives me.
• Turn on volume normalization, and set your volume level to the "Normal" setting, which corresponds to -14dB LUFS². Just enough above Apple Music's -16dB LUFS to get that extra bit of loudness I covet. Note: I know, you might miss your loud music, but man, your ears are important, too; and, now, overly quiet mixes (Jawbox, I'm looking at you) are going to be boosted up to the right level. Never, ever set it to the "Loud" setting. This setting can cause clipping, which will distort the sound.
• Don't use the equalizer. Ever. A music player's signal path should be as direct as possible, with only the minimal adjustments made to ensure consistency and quality. Volume normalization is a lossless ordeal which can actually prevent clipping; EQ is just about the opposite, for boosted frequencies can easily clip and distort. If a song sounds bad on your headphones, get better headphones. If it still sounds bad, find a better song. Signal processing won't enhance music; it's much more likely you're acting to its detriment. Turn off that EQ!
• Turn off the stupid dynamic normalizer. What it claims to do should already give you goosebumps: "Actively adjust the volume by leveling out the difference between quiet and loud parts of the audio." Oh god. Ugh. Songs are meant to have dynamics!

I use Apple Music, and I love it.

One of my favorite features is how I can have the exact same audio library across all of my devices, actively synced via iCloud. Adding local albums is effortless, and only needs to be done once on either a PC or Mac.

Configuration

Adding music to your Apple Music library is so easy that you'll wonder how Spotify could make it so hard. Once you have the files, somewhere within your OS Music folder will be an Apple Music folder. Therein lies a "Media" folder, and within that one is an "Automatically Add to Music" folder. Drag and drop your folder of music into that one… and voila.

It also automatically organizes your music for you! This can be your Soulseek share folder, and your downloads folder can live on another hard drive and completely unorganized. I'll go into this setup a bit more in the next article.

For optimal quality, simply enable Sound Check (volume normalization) in its settings and set up lossless audio. Voila. Nothing else to be done.

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