three months off streaming

28 Jul, 2026

I left streaming a few months ago because I didn’t want to keep renting music I already had on CD. I didn’t want music I liked becoming unavailable overnight, tracks changing without my consent because someone decided they didn’t want their sample used on a track after its release, or lyrics changing because of some sort of backlash. Music usually takes a long time to make and if something „slipped“ through the cracks after all that time, it must be who the creators behind it simply are and no amount of saving face is going to change that. If an artist cares about political correctness, they’ll make sure their music is politically correct before release, not wait for the backlash to „learn.“ You did and said what you did and said, now stand behind it! They got too used to the ability to edit after hitting post that now they put little thought into the final product before shipping it. Applies to so much these days, right?

Since my post explaining how I did the switch and what I use, little has changed. I still use the stock music app on macOS to manage my library and Marvis Pro on my phone to play my music. I was worried that I’d spend a lot of time maintaining my library and discover new music less often, both of which turned out to be less of a problem than anticipated. I’ve never been the kind of person who discovered music through algorithms. There are rare circumstances in which I did that, but typically my music discovery was limited to recommendations I’d find online for similar projects to an album I like, exploring more projects by one artist/band, exploring one „legend’s“ discography, or receiving recommendations from friends. 70% of my music discovery happens because a friend recommended a project to me; 25% is through my own research and the last 5% is algorithms.

Sometimes when I needed noise to tune out speech that ANC can’t block, I would use Apple’s focus playlists which play ambient music. I substituted that with LoFi music on YouTube and now with game soundtracks that I really dig. As for new music I’d like to listen to, I have my sources that grab the files straight from Apple Music with all the metadata and lyrics embedded in the file. I usually correct/specify the genre and add a user grouping (like album, mixtape, etc.). If I like what I hear and the artist(s) deserves it, I go and buy the CD to support them. Now I have about half of my library’s albums on CD. There are albums I’d like to buy that are grossly expensive or simply unavailable so I haven’t bought them yet. Hopefully I’ll find them used at a thrift store around town.

The biggest annoyance is having to sync my library by cable, but it’s better to sync with Finder than use a filesystem library, since I don’t have to remember my changes (changed metadata,¹ new additions) and just do what I need to on my Mac, trusting that it would make its way to my phone eventually. Most changes are unidirectional (so Mac to iPhone) except for like status, ratings, and play counts which are bidirectional. I’ve had instances of sync conflicts that were handled badly such as changes to the file metadata on macOS overwriting my like status and ratings of that same track on iOS, but as long as I keep my changes to a track confined to one device, sync, then change stuff on another device, this doesn’t happen. Fine by me.

I could use iTunes Match, a service that matches a local library with iTunes tracks and uploads the rest, but I don’t like that service for many reasons. I have specific versions of tracks in my library that aren’t available over legal digital means. I was lucky to get an early „pressing“ of RENAISSANCE by Beyoncé which contains all the samples some of which were later removed because of a stupid licensing dispute. Having that album matched with iTunes tracks would ruin that album for me. Another thing is that iTunes Match doesn’t sync music videos so if I wanted to put those on my phone, something would break. I’d need to use two syncing mechanisms to write the same data and that can’t end well. And the last reason against that more-than-syncing service is that it’s as reliable as Apple Music syncing was. Which was shit, by the way. I frequently needed to restart my phone for changes from my Mac to sync to my phone and vice versa.² So syncing by cable it is.

I’ve tried other apps and ways of syncing my data between devices, but I always returned to this setup in the end. I only sync my phone with my Mac to keep things simple. Unfortunately, there’s no way to sync my watch with my phone. So that’s one feature I’ve lost with this move. I don’t know why it worked initially and doesn’t work now, just that it doesn’t no matter what I try. It’s a shame because I liked going to the gym with only my watch and AirPods. I also don’t use the stock music app on my phone,³ and stick to Marvis Pro as my player (not just frontend). This comes with the advantage of having full queue control in one app, but with the stock app uninstalled, I can’t delete songs, albums, or playlists. I just delete everything from my phone and sync again when that becomes necessary which isn’t that often. Since my library is not that big, it doesn’t take long for a full sync.

If you are afraid to switch because of a loss in convenience, but have the same hardware as me, I’d recommend you give switching to a local library a shot because you’d be surprised how convenient it can still be, especially if you didn’t rely on algorithms for music discovery or any other social features built into some services (that pretty much only Spotify has, seriously dump that shit). Buy music, merch or tickets to live shows if you can; and if you can’t, whether you stream or pirate, it doesn’t make a dent for smaller artists anyway. The only winners in the streaming economy are the big players, meaning a minority.