besides that, my recent additions have been largely vocaloid and some older artists from my soundcloud days. some shoutouts:

• eye examination - 40mp : makes me feel like im tumbling and doomed by the narrative, anticipating i will have a cry to this one day
• revolution lover - left at london : had this on my dsi as a kid trying to figure out their gender from the funny vine lady who was actually an insanely powerful songwriter, this song gave me a lot of hope in a bad time
• green night parade - fu_mou ft. 星子 : joyous banger, 14 yr old me running into this randomly via soundcloud repost felt insane
• life as we know it - dj alex s ft. odyssey : fond memories of taking the long train across the bridge to school and watching the sun over the harbour, also man the mlp fandom had some crazy musicians
• lower - nulut : doomed yuri banger, i love vflower  dearly and im so glad nulut uses so much of her, i only found nulut after playing project sekai and im really glad i did

sorry for the mix of sources, platform fragmentation really gets bad if you try to listen to overseas music, all the more reason to keep building a local music library

ototoy

the main reason ive been able to add so much vocaloid music to my library lately has been ototoy , a japanese music storefront similar to bandcamp. they host audio in lossless and cd formats and give a decent cut of income to the artists (70% , comparable to bandcamp off bandcamp fridays). through this ive felt i can ethically purchase music from my favourite small japanese artists, and it feels like it bridges most of the gap that bandcamp misses for me

my brief experience with other services like amazon music and itunes has been frustrating, so things like the fact you dont even need to make an account, being able to use a range of international payment processors, and a rare and frankly weak region lock on certain tracks i can bypass with a vpn have been a nice change of pace

unlike bandcamp, it will only let you play a portion of tracks you dont own as a preview, frankly i prefer this to ads or play limits, this isnt a music streaming platform, its a storefront and thats all i need it to be

internet radio

this has only been a recent thing for me, but ive been messing with tauon's internet radio implementation and have been having a good time. a slight struggle with a local music library has been discoverability; you kind of need to escape your local ecosystem to find music. my existing methods included branching off individual tracks i enjoyed into the rest of the album or discography of an artist, but that is a relatively slow process.

internet radio has been a fun way to just throw discoverability to another persons taste, and ive been able to pull out a few new discoveries from my brief foray. it doesnt keep me trapped in a stale loop of tracks like youtube does and i certainly feel more comfortable with it than that or spotify. i hope to be able to expand my library of stations and pick up some new artists off it :)

its been about 3 months since i started building my local music library and ive only found more joy in the process and outcome since. in future im hoping to start looking at jellyfin  to create a library that i can access everywhere, but i do still enjoy being able to have my files offline. regardless, im looking forward to continuing using these new avenues of discoverability to enjoy and appreciate new music, and i hope you got something out of reading this :)