~izzy

playlist 2026

Published on Sunday, March 29, 2026

I've listened to music through a lot of different means throughout my life - the iPod in middle school and high school, syncing my iPhone 5 to iTunes in college, streaming from Apple Music and Spotify after graduating, picking up vinyl for a more intentional experience... But I've got to say, streaming wasn't working for me. Since mid 2021, I’ve been back to maintaining my own digital library and syncing it to my phone and an iPod Classic. The modern Music.app on the mac isn’t great, but it still works surprisingly well as a media manager. I’m going to call it iTunes for the rest of this post, because it basically is, and to make it less ambiguous with Apple’s streaming service of the same name.

The vinyl stuck around, too.

Listening wise, I mostly put on whole albums start to finish. This is what has always killed Spotify for me, with it being one of the apps that’s fought my workflow the hardest of any I’ve tried. Their CEO investing in genocide definitely killed any remaining desire to go back to them. Apple Music handles albums better, but just lacks sufficient control over metadata among other reasons.

Music discovery is the main thing that the algorithm promises, but I can’t say that music I’m the most likely to like is always what I want recommended. I’m out here asking friends to recommend albums, following artists I like on Muspy to stay up on new releases, and seeing who inspired artists I already like. At work we spin vinyl all day, and it’s been a treat as a way to start a conversation about music with the folks who are coming through. There’s a record store up the street, and people stopping in with their new finds for a bite to eat are almost always happy to pitch you on the artists they’re seeking out. Acquisition has been a lot of ripping CDs, and purchases on Bandcamp. I do like to have the physical media if I can.

My workflow is probably more complicated than it needs to be. My source-of-truth library is actually a Beets library, with everything as close to 16/44 FLAC as I can get it. I sure can’t tell the difference between 16 and 24 bit FLAC files, so why waste the space?

I’m really particular about tagging genre. I have Beets set to tag anything I don’t specify a genre for as ‘New’, which nicely creates a section on the iPod for music I’m evaluating until I decide if I’m keeping it and where it lives. If someone recommends me something, I’ll set the genre to their name. Everything else, I use my own small list of genres I can give things. My genres don’t always overlap with how most people might name them. They’re really just how I categorize and group my music, so boygenius lives in the sadgirl genre and John Prine is in Country but Good. Other highlights include beeps’n’boops and SampleThat (where Us3 and Digable Planets live). When I’m categorizing by genre, I’m basically trying to create a pile that if shuffled together will maintain a vibe. Beets gets the album art and uses musicbrainz to help ensure the metadata is correct, formatted consistently, and of high quality. musicbrains I’d say hits 95% of the things I throw at it, which feels pretty good for my mix of small, local artists and bandcamp finds.

I use the Beets Convert plugin to handle my various portable MP3 player compatibilities. I mostly use my iPod Classic, but I’ve also picked up a Tangara. Under the hood, it’s using ffmpeg to make m4as for my iTunes library, which I then import the music into. I have wrapper scripts, ipod-convert and tangara-convert, which both grab the right config for the respective device and write the files to the right location. If anyone wants my config files or scripts for beets, reach out and I can package those up and post them.

Maybe I’m weird, but I like the list of artists in my music library to be sorted alphabetically by first name. It’s how I sort my vinyl, too. No need to make a choice between charli xcx and xcx, charli. It just matches how I try to find artists when I go to put something on, and you’ll be happy to know that my contacts remain sorted by surname. Unfortunately, there’s no way I’ve found to clear the various artist-sort id3 tags (a total of 4, which different softwares choose from: artist-sort, artists-sort, albumartist-sort, and albumartists_sort) during the import to my Beets library, and iTunes doesn’t have any general setting to ignore the sort field. The solution is a bit brute force: when I import, I select the album(s), “Get Info”, and clear the field on the Sorting page. ‌(Suggestions to improve this workflow are welcome at izzy at stardust.fm. I’m considering writing a beets plugin for it.)

From there I sync iTunes to both my iPod and my iPhone mini. I’d been using a 3rd gen blue nano, but it doesn’t fit the whole library. I’m surprised at how often I grab the iPod. It lives in a dock by the amp in the living room, so it’s always fully charged and ready to go. I would probably just use the Music app on the phone except for how much Apple’s hobbled it over the years to push their streaming service. You used to be able to set every tab in the tab bar to whatever page you wanted, and none of the options were ads. The iPod doesn’t randomly stop playing because a web page loaded an audio clip, it doesn’t have any notifications waiting for you while you go to change the music, and it doesn’t have any illegible “glass” putting white text on a blurred white background. Do I recommend it? Probably not, due to cost, but mp3 players as a whole are a quite uninspired category of late and iPods are surprisingly maintainable.

Recommendations

Some albums you should check out, if your taste is similar to mine:

The Heavy Rotation