loading . . . Buying out my music library: how’s that going? There has been something of an escalation in the MacDonald household.
As you may remember, this time last year I told you that I’m trying to buy all of the music I regularly listen to because I think that’s _probably_ the right thing to do, for a number of reasons.
I had, of course, failed to consider that what I had done here is invent a game. A game of which I was the only player, and could win by _also_ harnessing my innate desire to catch ‘em all. Essentially, I’d set up the perfect circumstances to ruin my own life.1
Anyway, to cut a long story short, in one single month I bought something like 35 CDs.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
## I’m still buying out music I actually listen to
The good news is, the smart playlist approach is working. I haven’t changed anything about my music listening habits, so it’s still clocking up the play count every time I listen to something in Apple Music. I’m then diligently referring back to this to decide what I need to buy next. So I think we’ve pretty definitively proven that this approach works very well.
## iTunes is good, but CDs are better
As discussed previously, I’ve mostly been achieving this goal through purchasing individual tracks from the iTunes Store for 99p a go. This gives me a perfectly serviceable 256 kbps AAC audio file that is mine to keep — they don’t DRM purchases any more, and I was able to strip the DRM from some _very_ old iTunes purchases by simply deleting my local files and redownloading them from my iTunes account. Never again will I be disappointed by an `m4p` file!
The thing is, though: that’s a super cheap way to get individual tracks, but not so great when it comes to albums.
iTunes albums are all priced as ‘new’. Which is fair enough, I suppose — it’s not a used music retailer.2 But if I want to buy a whole album, these days it is not at all difficult to find that album on (used) CD on a website like musicMagpie for as low as a couple of quid. It’s exactly the same album, only this time it’s on a thin plastic wafer instead.
This massively changes the maths. If it’s £1.99(!) to buy the used album, suddenly it makes more sense to do _that_ than buy more than two tracks from it. It’s all digital, so it’s just as good, quality-wise, as a brand new CD (or download). And this, readers, is how I ended up buying 35 CDs in November.
Plus, there’s the quality argument. I’m not an audiophile; I mostly listen to music through a pair of AirPods Pro, which are pretty good but hardly the most impressive equipment on the planet. I have _access_ to lossless audio as a result of my Apple Music subscription, but I’d be hard pressed to tell you the difference between that and ‘standard’ quality. But I like that I now have the _option_ to import all the CDs I’ve bought at silly quality,3 even though I am almost definitely going to rip them in iTunes Plus format (i.e. 256 kbps AAC).
## Some strange stuff happens, particularly on Atmos songs
Previously, I’d downloaded a lot of my library from Apple Music for offline listening (obviously caked in its own DRM). Unfortunately, a bug in the Music app on macOS means that when you then go to buy such a song from iTunes, it won’t let you, because it thinks you already own it. After all, it can see the file on your computer! So you have to go through and click “Remove Download” on these songs before it will let you buy them.
Some songs were also downloading as `movpkg` files instead of `m4a`, which initially I found very strange. That, it would seem, is how songs in Dolby Atmos get downloaded onto your local machine. This is peculiar because I didn’t think the iTunes purchased versions of songs would be in Atmos — but I guess Apple Music is matching my purchases to its own library, so I still get to benefit from Atmos on songs I’ve bought (where available). You can turn this off in the Music app’s settings — untick “Download Dolby Atmos” and you should get the `m4a` files you’re expecting. (I _think_ the `movpkg` files have DRM; even if not, they’re not in a format that anything else understands.)
## It helps when you have iTunes credit to burn
I will also admit that this process was massively helped along by a friend giving me an iTunes gift card that a family member was unable to use. That, I think, is what made it feel the most like a game to me.
## I bought an iPod
This wasn’t part of the plan, I’ll concede. But because loads of my music is locally stored now, I figured, why not? It would be nice to be able to listen to my music in circumstances where it’s not possible or appropriate for me to have my phone on me. It turns out that syncing iPods very much still works as you would expect in modern macOS, except you manage it through Finder now instead of iTunes/Music. I gather there are also apps you can download on Windows to do it.
I bought a 3rd generation iPod Nano, because that’s the best one they made.
_I think you’re legally required to have this music video on this style of iPod._
## I’m definitely going to keep doing this
I’ve started now, so I definitely feel the urge to complete it, and I’m slowly changing the criteria of my “To buy” playlist to show me more and more songs. I suspect I’m probably not far off having bought the lot, or amassed it over the years on my various CDs and previous purchases.
I think I will still keep Apple Music the streaming service, as I suspected in my previous post that I would — although I’m also planning on reviewing that decision every so often.
If I _do_ decide to get rid of Apple Music one day, I think I will subscribe to iTunes Match instead. You may remember that this was something of a precursor to Apple Music; it would ‘match’ any songs you imported from elsewhere (like CDs or other stores) to the iTunes catalogue, and basically either give you the iTunes version for free or upload it to the cloud for you (to allow you to sync your library between devices). They do still sell it, and at time of writing it’s £21.99 a _year_ (versus Apple Music’s standard price of £10.99 a _month_), so would be a saving of over £100 a year if I chose to do that. I hope they keep selling it. There are limits to it that I would have to check I didn’t fall foul of, but I think the limit on songs that aren’t in the iTunes catalogue is 100,000, so I’m not too worried.
## In summary, then…
This has been an interesting experiment and I’ve learned a lot about both my listening habits, and how susceptible I am to gamification.4 I’m looking forward to seeing how much further through this I’ve progressed this time next year. I’m particularly interested in whether I’ve spent all of that gift card yet, or whether I’ve actually got rid of Apple Music by then.
I am also wondering if I will have some sort of new way of managing all these music files, like storing them on a NAS or self-hosting some kind of player. Both interest me, but I’ve not had the opportunity to do so before. But first, I’ll continue buying the music — let’s not run before we can walk!
1. This is exaggerated for comic effect. Everything is actually fine. ↩
2. How on Earth you would run a used digital music retailer is left as a thought experiment for the reader. ↩
3. “Silly quality” is how I’m describing FLAC/ALAC from now on. ↩
4. I must absolutely never start playing any mobile game with microtransactions. ↩
https://skye.fyi/2025/12/buying-music-update
