The beginning of a post series? Could be interesting. De-Cloud is a great term for what you’re doing.

I did this by making my own cloud. Simply run a mod server that uses icecast as its audio backend. Then just like that you can listen to streaming audio from anywhere.

For me Foobar2000 just works on macos

I did the same like 2 years ago, but I am using Plex on my NAS. That gives me both, flexibility and owning my music. Only downside is that I don’t want to open ports to the outside, so I use WireGuard on my router.

I have a 512gb s22 ultra wifi only that was a handle down, the carrier radio was fried and they just sent a replacement... It's an amazing offline mp3 player loaded up with my 45k song Library. Using auxio from f-droid which handles it fine. Couldn't be happier. Also have the full library loaded onto my nextcloud (selfhosted, behind wireguard) and my laptop. I try to avoid the streaming side of things because camping and road trips happen.

obligatory plug for Navidrome [0], a "personal spotify server" which is simple to set up and allows playback + offline caching on any desktop/mobile device. it's a really polished piece of self-hosted software.

although there is something refreshing about the simplicity and resiliency of OP's setup.

[0] https://www.navidrome.org/

This is definitely admirable, for lack of a better word. It's frustrating how having been in the "streaming world" for a decade now, it put a stop to me getting music that I can own DRM-free which puts a pretty big wall in front of this optin for me.

It's kind of like we've been incurring debt all that time, and the "payments" are all deferred as long as you keep the subscription. But if I drop the subscription, suddenly I don't own any music newer than 2015, despite having paid $1200 -- it was just to rent music from Apple all that time.

Which kinda would be fine since I can afford it and it allowed me to get more music than I probably would have bought with a $1200 iTunes gift card.

But as you pointed out, Apple Music (and in my humble opinion Spotify and YouTube Music) both have modern-day UIs that are a horror show, only getting worse with each passing release. But the only choice is to keep subscribing to one, or rebuild your library at great money or time expense. :(

In my teens I started collecting CDs instead of tapes even though I didn't have a CD player, because I record them to tape on someone's player. So when I got my first PC and shitty little modem, I had a nice little stack of CDs to rip, as soon as that because feasible. (Actually, I remember ripping Rage Against The Machine's "Bullet in the head" to .wav in 1994, I think, and then deleting it because it took up most of the hard drive space). I've used audiograbber, EAC, Nero and a whole bunch of encoders. I must go back and find my earliest surviving rip and see what I used to encode it.

Anyway, none of what the author is doing is novelty to me, I stuck to my guns this past 30 years. I buy on Bandcamp or 7digital, or I rip charity store CDs. Occasionally, for really hard to find stuff, I download from YouTube or get a torrent, but only if I can't find it legally.

I've been running Musicbee on Linux/wine for a decade (I think). My last two DAPs were tiny, light-weight Hiby models.

I have had happily never actually paid for any music streaming service.

I was also frustrated with some aspects of streaming services so I wrote my own offline alternatives: Tiny Player for Mac and for iOS a similar solution to Doppler: app + companion uploader app for the Mac. All free: https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player-for-mac/ and https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player/

Petrichor is indeed a fabulous name, Ross. Love for that smell is the mark of a true Briton.