[locofocos]

The death of Google Play Music sent me down a similar path. I fired up my old 3rd gen ipod touch and synced it up with my old iTunes collection. It was jarring missing out on a decade of UX development, but it's been a breath of fresh air being able to just.... manage your music collection and play the music you want to play. No ads, no playing something I didn't ask for. ITunes on windows is really nice today. Older CDs are super cheap, and my family is often happy to offload their old CDs to me.

It's also helped me rediscover a lot of old music from my formative years. If I had to choose between my old favorites and all the new neat stuff I've found on Spotify, I would choose the old stuff! And I can still pull out my phone for those occasions I want something on Spotify, but if that happens enough, I buy the CD and it gets loaded into the collection.

It even sent me down a rabbit hole of getting a home stereo again. It's so nice leaving music playing in our living room.

For music on the go, iTunes makes it dead simple to copy/paste playlists onto my android phone's storage.