Trying to ditch Apple Music made me love it again

I miss those days of the iPod. It was a simple device that played music and doesn’t do anything else. No interruptions, no subscriptions, no nonsense. We now live in a world where we subscribe to music and own nothing. A few months ago I asked myself if it was possible to go back to a pure “own my music / listen to my own library” music methodology. I could rediscover songs I owned but were buried so deep in “unplayed land” I forgot about them. I could go back to embracing my own playlists I made and the “smart” ones I spent hours creating back before algorithms did it for us. And luckily, I already had the tools at my disposal.

To get a better picture of what I wanted, let’s rewind back to November of 2001 when Apple released the iPod. For a company that stuck to computers, this was a break from the norm. A small white box about the size of a deck of cards, the iPod was an odd duck. It only connected via FireWire: a Mac-Only port that PC companies didn’t include in their products. It was expensive at $399, which is $709 in today’s money. It was cool but very niche.

But then Apple opened it up to Windows machines, lowered the price, and refined it annually. And those iconic white headphones that came in the box became a status symbol. The iPod was everywhere. And for good reason. It was dead-simple to use. Rip your CD’s into iTunes…