How to Curate a Playlist
There are two supreme listening experiences. 1) In your car. 2) In your living room. Headphones optional.
To achieve these experiences, you need to ditch your streaming service. I know you hate it when your ads are interrupted by music, and I know you hate having a couple of extra bucks in your bank account (when you want those ads to go away), but hear me out. These streaming services keep you listening to a similar sound. By analyzing just a handful of the songs you like, their algorithms can recommend you more songs you'd like. (Oh no!) My brother the streamer said he only has a couple hundred songs all broadly in the same genre; I have a couple thousand across genres. Look, the difference between art and content is this: art is supposed to elevate your senses, content is supposed to deaden your senses. Give yourself a process to find music, more than a click. You'll earn your taste, and hear beauty in all sorts of music. That's a promise.
Go to bandcamp.com . Find music you like. Pay for their albums. Get CDs. Eagerly wait for them to come in the mail. Reward the little guys, that's where the passion is at. Passion is the single most important quality of art.
Meanwhile, you can download music off of YouTube.com, if you can't find a .flac file elsewhere. YouTube has good quality music, only some compression.
You can download YouTube videos using yt-dlp. Don't use online url/.mp4 to .mp3 services unless you really trust your adblockers and antivirus software.
Step 1. Download yt-dlp. Make sure to download it to an external drive, like a USB. It's a command line program.
Step 2. Make a shortcut for your command prompt. I use Windows, so this tutorial will be Windows-centric. Right click and open Properties. Change the "Start In:" to the appropriate drive. Check where you've stuck your flash drive (D:, E:, F:, etc.). That's where you want the command prompt to look for the yt-dlp program. For me, my path is F:\youtubedl . "youtubedl" is the name of the folder where I keep the yt-dlp executable file.
Step 3. When you have that set up, click your command prompt shortcut. It shouldn't open up in your C:\ drive. It should say (for example) F:\youtubedl> . Write yt-dlp.exe [url]. There should be a space between yt-dlp.exe and the url. Hit enter. It should start downloading.
Step 4. There are tons of commands to learn to specify what you want downloaded. You can find lists online. Off the top of my head, yt-dlp.exe -U is important. It updates the program in case things don't work.
Step 5. Although there are ways to do so within yt-dlp, I prefer using VLC to convert the .mp4 files to .mp3 files. To do that, open VLC, click Media, then Convert/Save. The process is very similar to converting batches of images in Irfanviewer.
Step 6. Now you have the .mp3 files. Put them into folders according to whatever you prefer. Make sure to have backups of your folders, especially if you anticipate getting a hoard of music.
Step 7. Get that music on your phone. Apple is mostly useless for this. Plug your Android in to your laptop and drag n' drop your .mp3 files into the music folder. I have an old Android I use exclusively to connect to my car's bluetooth radio. It's never connected to the internet.
Enjoy! Also: don't just download music. You can save old documentaries, lectures, interviews, fan creations, car repair how-tos, you name it. Archive what you like.