How to play your own music files: MP3, FLAC and whole albums, offline

Organise your files first

Any player is only as tidy as the files you give it. Ten minutes of sorting saves a lot of scrolling:

• One music folder, with a sub-folder for each album: Music/Artist/Album/ is the common layout.
• Tags matter more than file names. Players read the artist, album, title, track number and year stored inside each file. If track numbers are missing, an album plays in alphabetical order instead of the order the band chose.
• Cover art. Either embed it in the files or put an image called cover.jpg or folder.jpg in each album folder.
• Album artist for compilations. Set it to "Various Artists" so a soundtrack stays as one album instead of splitting into twenty.

Free tag editors such as Mp3tag (Windows) or the tag fields in many desktop players can fix tags in bulk.

Which formats play where

Modern browsers and phones play MP3, AAC and FLAC. Support for Ogg and Opus varies a little by device, so check one file before converting a whole collection.

Playing a whole album, the way it was made

1. Open the album, not a playlist of everything. Starting from the first track keeps the running order, the segues and the quiet bits.
2. Turn track shuffle off. If you want variety, shuffle albums instead of songs.
3. Leave crossfade off for live and concept albums, where tracks run into each other.
4. Set a sleep timer for bedtime listening, ideally "end of this album" so it doesn't stop mid-song.

Playing them in Side A

Side A is a music player for your own files that puts albums first. It runs in your browser, reads tags and cover art on your device and uploads nothing. Tap + Add music to begin:

• Choose a music folder, choose individual audio files, or drop files and folders onto the page. Folder picking works best in desktop browsers; on a phone, choose the audio files instead.
• Your shelf shows every album by its cover. Sort by recently added or played, album or artist A to Z, year, or most finished, and use Shuffle albums to pick a record at random.
• Now Playing has a queue, a sleep timer (from 15 minutes to the end of the track or album), playback speed and lock-screen controls.
• The listening diary records each album you play start to finish, with a 20-week calendar and share cards for your top nine.
• Turn on Copy audio into this browser in Settings to keep the files playable offline and after a reload, at the cost of browser storage. Otherwise Side A can reconnect to the folder you chose.

The player, library and diary are free, with no ads and no account. Side A Pro ($2.99 once) adds an equaliser, crossfade, ReplayGain volume normalisation and synced lyrics from .lrc files. Back up saves your diary, notes and settings, not the audio, so keep your music folder backed up separately.

Tips

• Rip CDs to FLAC once, then make smaller MP3 or AAC copies if you need space on a phone.
• Keep a backup of the music folder on another drive or cloud storage. Players come and go; the files are what matter.
• Use album-level volume normalisation rather than per-track, so quiet intros stay quiet.
• Give every album a cover. Browsing by artwork is much quicker than reading names.

Common mistakes

• Missing track numbers, so albums play alphabetically.
• Different spellings of the same artist ("The Beatles" and "Beatles"), which split one shelf into two.
• Converting MP3 to FLAC expecting better sound. It only makes the file bigger; quality can't be added back.
• Keeping the only copy of your music in one place.