To many of humans, listening to music is a daily occurance. We all have our favorite tunes, ranging from the trendy pop hits to the obscure cover that only has 100 views on YouTube. Something we don’t often think about is the permanence of our favorite music.
In the current era, we often listen to music that is sourced digitally on servers that we do not own. Common music services include Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, and YouTube Music. These services have the capability to (and often do) remove tracks from their catalog at the whim of countless organizations. For one moment, your favorite song with 100 million plays is there as always, then the next day the record label decides to remove that track from all services. What do you do then?
This fleeting nature of music will only hit some people after it bears its fangs. But there are solutions.
With the massive storage quantities avaliable to the masses, the door is opened to storing your favorite music digitally. In addition, you can ditch the compressed, imperfect MP3 files of old and resource those tracks with permanently perfect FLAC files. FLAC (Free & Lossless Audio Codec) is a file type that is capable of storing music exactly as it was etched onto a CD or as an uncompressed WAV/AIFF file. It can later be decompressed and written back exactly as it was obtained.
This flexibility lets you store and play your music exactly as you wish with as much fidelity as you need at the moment, in consideration to bandwidth and storage limitations. It is trivial with modern software to extract the music from a CD onto a machine as individual tracks encoded as FLACs. In addition, some services such as Qobuz allow you to buy digital music downloads as FLACs.
Once you have your FLAC collection, it’s entirely on you to preserve and extend your music library. While it may seem limiting at first, in reality it opens the door to complete freedom that isn’t encumbered by copyright or companies. You are provided the freedom to listen to your music without internet service, or any subscription service at all.
If you are serious about collecting, listening, and/or preserving music, now is the time to begin your fruitful FLAC journey.