I have a folder of MP3s, some of which date back to 1999, just a few years after the format was popularised. Most of them have utterly terrible names (think RIDEONAM.MP3). I think at this point they might even survive the heat death of the universe. And they’ll still be terribly-organised.
I really want to go this route. Had Spotify, tempted to get Tidal but I don’t want to deal with content coming and going anymore. I have about 300 gigs of random MP3s, and Flac files. I want to obtain more and move over fully to flac. Any recommendations on making the transition back to locally stored music.
I’m currently making the move myself and I’ve had a really easy time with soundiiz.com and YouTube-dl with a Linux GUI. Basically soundiiz takes your playlist from one service and makes an identical one on another service. You move all your jams to YouTube and rip the audio out of them with youtube-dl. Here’s a wikihow with the deets
I gave up on trying to sort my initial batch and just started replacing.
First I try to find a full discography of an artist by a solid release group (for example "PEMEDIA or “88”). With those you can just copy the entire folder into the artist directory and plex/jellyfin etc will perfectly detect it. Then just add new albums as they are released.
You can probably find a converter that will rip those files from Youtube for you. I did mine a year and a half ago. If I open Spotify it’s just to see the playlists they made for me, because those are actually pretty good, but I rip those files and store them too.