You Got An MP3 Player..... Now What?

Complete 2025 MP3 Player/ Audio Player Tutorial

So let's start off with my credentials. I have been building my Music Library since about 2017. and have revised my methods many many times since. This will be starting From Zero so those more familiar with audio processing, audio file types, and Bit rates may just want to skip the beginning.

Audio Files

So First off we will start with the MP3 file. The First thing to take note of is the audio quality. that is measured in Kilobits per second. just like images or videos take up more space and have higher pixel counts and frame rates. audio files have the same with Kbps and sample rate. sample rate is how often the audio is rendered. just like frame rate. this is normally 44100 Khz since it is said humans cannot distinguish this from higher sample rates.

Examples of Different audio qualities are Spotifiies average quality for free users will be 180-150 kbps. Video game chats are 12 to 24. and a very high quality flac or Wav file will be 800-1,000 

 

What your aiming for. 

    The gold standard for MP3 is 320kbps. and its sorta the limit of mp3. but as mentioned earlier this is higher quality than spotify. But just like low quality images can be scaled. low quality audio or corrupted codecs can ruin stink up your library. so where you source your music from makes a huge difference. so lets talk about that.

Music Downloading Sources

yt2mp3 sites are the most primitive form of Music Source. I only Recommend using this for you tube
Exclusive things. I DO NOT. recommend yt2mp3 sites. These are super sketchy and unreliable. I recommend applications for this. These are far more feature rich and support batch downloading. ClipGrab is my favorite

Another Music Source is BandCamp. Especially for independent artists and its often that things are listed as name your price. but even at that it's still pretty cheap. Individual Track buying for as low as a dollar and entire albums for less than 10.

 this ensures that what you are downloading are the highest quality and directly supporting the artist. this is why I reccomend it alot more for smaller artists rather than yt2mp3 or other options.

"DO NOT USE SOULSEEK"

 For the sake of Stopping Piracy and illegal downloading of music I must say to """avoid""" Soulseek. soulseek is a peer2peer music sharing service THOUGH IT MAY SAY. but in the words of lars ulrich. Sharing is only cool when its not your stuff. But I will say every artist you can think of is available on soulseek and unique variations like demos and leaks from artists. "I DO NOT RECCOMEND" Nicotine Plus for linux users. please do not use Soulseek I really wanna stop piracy im doing it for lars. 

File Management

This is the most important thing to get right. and is gonna be the thing you spend the most time on other than listening to music. I start with a file holding everything. This is my COMPUTER MUZAK file. from here the hierarchy is COMPUTERMUZAK/Artist/Album/Musicfile.mp3 and sometimes the album image is contained within the album file. So its gonna look something like /home/frankie/Music/COMPUTER MUZAK/Grausamkeit/Dreams From The Old Northern Forest/05 - Jesu Aske (Outro).mp3. this will be important to know later. and this is the preferred file Hierachy for music players and PC media players. but to automate this I use MusicBee. which has an organize files feature.

 

Next thing that is important is Metadata. This is the information the file holds about the music. the most basic form would be Artist, Album, Year and the Album Cover. These can get very oddly detailed but these are the most important. for this I use Mp3tag. this has all the right features for getting the simple details right. and has Discogs support for getting all the album details.

 

BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP!!!! As I once heard. If you have one. you have none. right now i have about 3 backups of my library. one on my personal computer. one on my Plex Server. and one on my MP3 player. and one on an external SSD. I would not depend on one thing to hold all of your music. do not make this mistake. even making 2 spoof google accounts is enough to host my current music library. so there is no excuse.

Okay MP3 player time.

If you don't have an MP3 Player yet but are planning to make the trendy choice to get an ipod.... Don't. While its a nice project to learn alot of things from like hardware and software mods. these are quite the workload to get up to modern standards and considering the ipods 30pin and still massively slow data transfer time due to that outdated cable. There are new MP3 players using USBC and bluetooth without needing mods. this pool of new players is so large that I would say research on your own since you may be looking for certain features and certain form factors. But my recommendations are the hyby R1 Hifi walker H2 and the Xduoo X2s.

You Don't "Need" an MP3 PLayer! 

For my first 5 years of making my music library. I just used an old phone as my music player. this worked very well and i could say could be endgame for certain people. this does the same job of a MP3 player since it separates the music experience from your phone.I used Nyx which is a very nice looking Media player for Android.

Playlists!!!

This is One thing I struggled with alot. making playlists externally is very hard. it might make sense that its all the same files so it should work. Right??? No.

as programmers know. computers are only as smart as your code. so lets break down how Playlist files work. M3u. and M3u8 Files are one of the most compatible playlist files. these work with most mp3 players and most media players. you will NEED M3u8 if you have foreign music since m3u does not support unicode letters like Japanese or like that O with the 2 dots on it.

But to make it simple. M3u8 Files contain a road map to each song. this road map is specialized to your computer or whatever you make the playlist on. so moving this playlist to an mp3 player will not work at all since the directions to the music files are different. 

1.To edit the road map. Right click on the playlist file and select open with notepad or text editor on linux.

2.with your mp3 player plugged in. copy the file path that leads to your main music file. 

3. Use the Find and replace function to switch the file path. so since the music file is on the root of the player this will switch the directions from the one in the computer to the one needed for the MP3 player.

4. Make sure to just save. and not save as

Overall

I hope this has helped I'm glad to see people are starting to use mp3 players and all. I've been doing this for years and i can see how daunting it can look just starting out. but to really own your music. this is the way. cool.