No algorithmic suggestions and therefore, no curated daily taste playlists, no sorting your library by genre (at least not as granular and specific as Spotify unless you put in as much work as they do at tagging your music), finding new music manually takes at least 10x more effort and you’re limited to the taste you already know you have

I haven’t used Spotify much, but I found Google Music and Pandora to be very shallow with regards to discovery. There’s not really much to them other than “people who liked X tend to like Y” or “here’s something that sounds similar to an artist you like”. It’s discovery sure, but it’s discovery on autopilot. It’ll keep you treading water in the same shallow area of the ocean forever unless you make a concerted effort outside of its algorithms to listen to something new.

I usually don’t want something “similar to…X” when finding new music. I usually want things that are completely different. I subscribed to Google Music for around a year and found maybe two new artists I liked to listen to. I switched back to a manual discovery process around five years ago and this year alone I’ve found probably a dozen.

All valid points, and I’m glad Spotify works for you. For me though, the tedium isn’t nearly as bad as it seems to be for you. I’m fine with my methods since they’ve never truly failed me Even with my relatively disorganized collection, I can find what I’m looking for pretty quickly even without metadata (Lots of my oldest stuff is also from Limewire, and even Kazaa. Let’s just not mention the bitrate of some of it lol).

I’m fine with gradually expanding my tastes too, so I don’t need Spotify for finding new things. To be fair though, I have found some truly great stuff through the site that I feel I would have never heard, so it’s not without its merits. Though if you’re ever bored and you want to do some manual discovery, Every Noise at Once is a bizarrely cool place and might lead to some interesting finds. But YMMV. And if I don’t feel like picking anything I’ll just throw on whatever internet radio station suits my fancy.

I get you on the storage space as well. Luckily for me, a lot of what I listen to (don’t make fun please) is chiptunes, and I found a kickass app for my phone that reads the same files that the real consoles read so I can enjoy them in truly perfect quality, plus I have actual weeks of music in this format for less than 300 megs.

I admit my tastes are highly eclectic - to say the least - but I’m perfectly content with that. It’s great that you, along with the majority of other people, have an option that best suits your needs. May we both be able to access our music solutions as long as possible.

Um, .wav is a lossless format. It’s just raw PCM with no compression. An upscaled FLAC from a lossy source is not lossless, even though it’s stored in a lossless compatible format (FLAC). A properly encoded and compressed MP3 file will sound very close to the lossless source, but when procuring those lossy files from third parties, you rely on whoever compressed them doing it properly. I prefer to store my music repository in a lossless format, and stream/sync in lossy.

FLAC Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the “lossless” versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.

Yeah, this isn’t how that works.

“Lossless” refers to a mathematical property of the type of compression. If the data can be decompressed to exactly the same bits that went into the compressor then it’s lossless.

You can’t “synthetically upscale” to lossless. You can make a fake lossless file (lossy data converted into a lossless file format) but that serves zero purpose and is more of an issue with shady pirate uploaders.

Lossless means it sounds exactly like the CD copy, should it exist. That’s really all. And you want lossless for any situation where you’ll be converting again before playback. Like, for example, Bluetooth transmission.