Radiohead’s Album Covers

Streaming music might be easy, ethical and legal. But nothing beats the feeling of having your personal collection of offline music. Actual files that you can edit, share and own. In comparison, streaming has a few plus points. However, we can bridge this gap with the right set of tools and little effort. These tools are the focus of this post.

Having an audio library with properly tagged audio files makes organizing and managing your music and playlists a lot easier. If you are using free mp3 sites or YouTubeto to get your audio, they will most probably contain incorrect or no tags. A music tagger can be helpful in these situations.

Picard is a free and open-source cross-platform music tagger written in Python. It uses AcoustID audio fingerprints, allowing files to be identified by the actual music, even if they have no metadata. (Alternatives: manual tagging, Media Monkey, mp3tag, Foobar2000, MusicBee)

Spek (Acoustic Spectrum Analyzer)

You can use this tool to determine the quality of your audio files. It helps to analyze your audio files by showing their spectrograms. The bitrate/audio quality that shows up in your download doesn’t always tell the truth. Downloading mp3’s for free, ripping from YouTube or SoundCloud can never guarantee 320kbps in an mp3 file, even though it may say so in your downloader/file information. Using this simple tool, you can find out the actual quality of your audio files. Here are some rules of thumb…

Audio spectrums of a 256kbps mp3, a 320kbps mp3, and a FLAC file

When the high frequencies are cut to about 20khz , that means you’re dealing with a 320kbps mp3 audio file

, that means you’re dealing with a audio file High frequencies cut to 16khz equal to a bit rate of around 192kbps

equal to a bit rate of around High frequencies cut to 12khz tells you that the audio file has a bit rate of no more than 128 , the lowest possible bit rate for an mp3 music file

tells you that the audio file has a bit rate of no more than , the lowest possible bit rate for an mp3 music file In the spectrum of a FLAC (lossless audio) file, the high frequencies go well beyond 22khz.

So, for those of you who are serious about music, software like Spek can be a nifty little contribution to the state of your digital music collection. (Alternatives: Audacity, Adobe Audition)

If you are using devices or media players that do not support particular audio formats, an audio converter would come in handy. fre:ac is an audio converter and CD ripper with support for various popular formats and encoders. This free and open-source tool is better than most of the proprietary software out there.

This point is exclusive for Windows users. It is easy to ignore the default audio player that comes with your OS in favor of FOSS or other proprietary software. But Groove music is good. You can say it hits the sweet spot; not too feature-heavy and complex, yet having all the essential features. Plus, it integrates really well with Windows 10. iTunes (Windows) also comes close.

youtube-dl is a free and open-source command-line program you can use to download videos from YouTube and a few more sites. This is arguably the best tool for downloading audio from YouTube/Soundcloud. I say this because many of the other software out there will NOT give you the best quality and have a bloated file size. youtube-dl will always give you the best possible quality. You can verify this using Spek.