Hard Drive Music Solutions: Best Way to Store Your Jams
aaamusic | On 01, Oct 2019
Music is everything. It moves us, inspires us, and we associate it with some incredible events in our lives.
We’ve come a long way from having music collections on CDs, vinyl, and 8-track tapes. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, MP3s and music downloads (legal and illegal) took centre stage.
Even though more people are using streaming subscription services today, a lot of people have impressive music collections that they don’t want to get rid of, so they turn to hard drive music solutions to store their music.
It’s even more important to find storage solutions if you’re a musician and you’re recording new material.
Want to know how you can store your music collection? Read on to discover some of the top hard drive music solutions.
Store Music on Your Computer
The first option is to store music on your computer’s hard drive. These hard drives have plenty of room, usually about 1 TB or more. That’s enough for about 200,000 songs or 500 hours of video.
Of course, you have to share your hard drive with everything else. If you use your computer mostly for work, you will have to share resources with things like internet browsers, games, and so on.
These programs can eat up a lot of memory when they’re all running at once. A computer with little RAM will create a frustrating experience. It can cause delays and
Not only that, computers are more vulnerable to hackers than ever. One wrong click on a website or email can wipe away your entire collection.
Use an External Hard Drive
More computers are coming out with SSD hard drives. These drives are incredibly fast, with the ability to boot your computer in just seconds.
On the downside, they’re expensive to have and they’re smaller in size. Computers with SSD drives are often 256 GB. That’s way too small for your computer programs and your music collection.
An alternative is to have an external hard drive for your music collection. This is a great way to have access to your music and maintain a fast computer. It will help you keep your music secure, too.
Store Your Music in the Cloud
There are a few ways that you can store music in the cloud. You can use a service like Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. The problem with that is that while they are convenient and affordable, they are frequent targets of hackers.
Another option is to store your music in a separate data centre. With this option, your music is secure and you have full control over the storage space. In a lot of cases, you’re not sharing cloud resources with other accounts, which could put your data at risk.
Music Services
Google, Apple, and Amazon all have music services that allow you to upload your library to their servers and stream it from any device that’s connected to the service.
That allows you to have your music collection accessible on your smart home if you have one set up. In this scenario, you have an Amazon Echo (or Google Home, etc.) connected to your music collection uploaded to Amazon’s servers.
You can then say the magic words, “Alexa, play Stereophonics.” You’ll have music playing through the Echo throughout your home.
These services vary in terms of how they work, so here’s a quick breakdown between them.
Google Play Music
This service allows you to upload about 50,000 songs for free. You just need to download and install the Google Music Manager and upload your music. If you want to access more songs, you can pay $9.99 a month for the Unlimited service.
Apple Music
Apple made waves recently when the company announced that it was no longer supporting iTunes and it’s going away.
Right now, Apple has two products for your music library. The first is iTunes match, where you can upload your library and Apple matches it so you can play the music from anywhere. You can upload 100,000 songs for $25 a year.
The separate service is a streaming service, similar to Spotify which is called Apple Music. This costs $10 a month. If you get Apple Music, iTunes match is included for free.
Amazon Music
This service is very similar to Google and Apple’s offerings. The big differentiator is that Amazon Music recently shifted to a streaming-only service. It no longer supports the ability to upload your music library.
Instead, the company offers two streaming services: Amazon music unlimited and Amazon Prime.
Organizing Your Music Collection
After plenty of years of recording and collecting music, you probably have your music all over the place. There may be some files here and some files there.
The best thing you can do before you get a new hard drive music storage solution is to organize your files.
You’ll want to go through your music library to determine if there are old files that you no longer need. There are also plenty of free music tools that will help you keep your library organized.
Hard Drive Music Solutions for Your Collection
For many musicians and music listeners, a music collection is a prized possession that took years to build up. You don’t want to lose all of that wonderful sound, so you need to find hard drive music storage solutions that make sense.
Fortunately, you have plenty of options from HDD drives, cloud storage, music services, and external hard drives.
Before you decide which one is right for you, take a look at the size of your collection and how you plan to access your music. If you need music while you’re working on your computer,
If you want your music available at anyplace or anytime, you are better off looking at a cloud solution or music service.
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