[Nick Zwar]

Collection Size/Acquisition Habits:
When I started to seriously buy music some decades ago, I hoped that one day I’d have a satisfying library of music that means something to me, a representative selection of great classical music from every epoch as well as all the interesting important film scores. Some years ago I looked at my collection and thought: wow, well done. You got there. Not sure how much larger this will grow, but it’s pretty sufficient should I ever be cut off from new music to still bring me enjoyment for the rest of my life I guess. 🙂

My buying habits of course changed over the years: originally, I searched the record stores and sometimes mail ordered a few albums. One didn’t even know what was out there. As far as film music was concerned, it was best to pick up new film scores when they were released, because re-releases of classic film scores weren’t a thing back then. I mostly missed the first batch of Varèse Club titles, so for me the real turning point was when FSM released STAGECOACH and FANTASTIC VOYAGE… from that point on, I would order often new expanded and remastered/restored releases of film scores via the Internet.

Classical music is different, that was usually still available in the better selected record stores. In recent years I picked up a lot of great deals, because many labels released “boxed sets”, so that’s a lot of music. I still do buy CDs and digital downloads, though I have slowed down a bit nowadays. Not so much because of a lack of interest, but because I have a lot of music. I did pick up the Andris Nelson’s Shostakovich Cycle on Deutsche Grammophon, because Qobuz had a great deal really (around €11.- for ALL of Shostakovich’s symphonies and concertos in — as far as I can tell so far — excellent performances in high-res format).

All my CDs are ripped lossless, for legacy reasons to ALAC format. So all my digital high-res downloads are ALAC as well (except for a few multichannel albums, which are in FLAC format, and five albums in MP3 format that are just available only in that format (like the music for the first Monkey Island games… I guess “high-res” makes not sense for that music anyway. 🙂 ).
In any case, it’s by now clearly over 100,000 lossless/high-res ALAC tracks, mostly classical music and film music, but also of course some pop/jazz/ambient/electronic/lounge music.
The music is on external hard drives and my NAS, I don’t have any music on my actual laptop. I currently use MinimServer for music.

Listening Habits:
While I use iTunes to maintain and curate my collection, I don’t use it to play music. My laptop is in a docking station in my home office and is not directly hooked up to my music system. So it’s just build in speakers, not suitable for music listening.

At home, I usually listen to music on my stereo system in the living room, where I access the music via tablet or smartphone; I listen to my own music or Qobuz. Since all my CDs are ripped lossless anyway, there isn’t really any point in putting in the actual CDs anymore, so I hardly ever do that. I do have a few playlists, mostly for “occasions” though (like sometimes, when we have guests over, play cards, or something like that), with music that is suited for that kind of thing (so it’s not necessarily “THE OMEN”, though I remember one evening where we had neighbors over who suddenly asked for “Le Sacre du Printemps”… I was happy to oblige and we heard the whole thing at rather decent volume.)

In my car, I have a USB stick with around 350 albums in 256/320 AAC format; these tend to be selected according to what I might enjoy while driving.

On the go or on vacation, I usually listen to music via my phone. I used to have music in AAC format on my phone, but nowadays I tend to use Qobuz with noise cancelling headphones if I listen to music, or I listen to podcasts. I tried Roon and Roon ARC for three months, which worked for me and was great, as my entire experience with Roon was quite satisfactory, but for my own use, Roon is just too expensive, so I did not continue my subscription nor bought a lifetime pass. Roon ARC was neat though, as it enabled me to listen to my entire music collection from anywhere in the world.