i realized i’m a big local music enjoyer, all the music i listen to is stored in files and i even have vlc on my phone to listen to it. (all of them are legally downloaded of course!!) sadly yesterday i moved all those files to my chromebook and it really slowed it down, (the files total 1gigabyte, woa). so why not get an mp3 player?? that can save storage on my phone and chromebook.
by the way i did try youtube music one time but i realized, what if youtube music disappeared?? all the music would be gone! so yea that’s why i prefer local files
You could go all out fancypants and set up your own streaming service. The advantage is that you can set it all up on an old pc or even a raspberry pi with an external hdd. You can than stream all your music to your phone and chromebook via some app like plex or jellyfin. It’s super convenient. The disadvantage is that it’s a bit technical to set up. It takes some research and some tweaking. But there’s no hurry, so you could look it up some time, see if it’s something your willing to reasearch and if it is, you can go further from there. It eventually took me a full weekend to set up my whole streaming suite (not just music), but I spent dozens of evenings researching it before. Only setting up a plex server should take too long.
I did this with Plex. And it’s really not that difficult. I found setting up the server pretty quick. The biggest disadvantages I found are/were:
The Plex music cataloguer can be a pain to with with because it doesn’t find matches to your media more often than you’d think. So that required quite a lot of time of manual intervention.
I sometimes run into excessive buffering, even though my media server (which is just a little i5 PC) is just in the next room. I think that’s more an issue with Wi-Fi in my house. But I’ve found myself falling back to using my mp3s on my phone out of impatience.
Overall I’ve been happy with this setup though.