Physical Media

CDs

CDs are great for making physical playlists and collecting music. I'm biased because I love picking up cheap CDs from charity shops & other secondhand stores. It's a good idea to buy music from artists you really like in order to support them! However, be sure to rip your CDs as they are prone to damage and decay. The same goes for DVDs.

Windows should allow you to rip CDs using Windows Media Player, and information about the disc is obtained from it's online database.

On Linux, I use Asunder.

Hard drives & Backups

The size of the external drive you require is going to vary depending on how much you like to hoard large files (or not). I don't have anything specific to recommend, however I personally use solid state for the speed and physical durability.

On Linux, rsync is a nifty tool that allows you to copy the contents of a folder to another folder (or in this case, drive to another drive), and sync the differences between the two. When I have the dough to fork out for another drive (which I 100% recommend anyone to do) I will be using this to keep an exact copy of my data. If one drive fails, I want to be sure that I lose as little as possible. It's even better if you can securely store this backup drive in another physical location, in the unfortunate event that a fire should occur it would only destroy one of the drives.

Music Players

There are a lot out there. I like my music to sound good, so I look for Digital Audio Players (DAP) as opposed to mp3 players, which are generally of a lesser quality although also much cheaper.

Up until recently, I used an iBasso DX90 which was ~£90 from eBay (Feb 2023), though it was released in 2014. It had some QoL bugs, like music sometimes starting halfway through the track, and input lag from the three control buttons. I had found it a really good budget option though, except that mine has now finally bitten the dust and won't turn on... Looks like I will need to look for another option.