Ask Engadget: What's the best way to unify my music collection?

The support shared between readers in the comments section is one of the things we love most about the Engadget community. Over the years, we've known you to offer sage advice on everything from Chromecasts and cameras to drones and smartphones. In fact, our community's knowledge and insights are a reason why many of you participate in the comments.

We truly value the time and detail you all spend in responding to questions from your fellow tech-obsessed commenters, which is why we've decided to bring back the much-missed "Ask Engadget" column. This week's question revolves around creating a master music collection from a variety of sources. Weigh in with your advice in the comments -- and feel free to send your own questions along to ask@engadget.com!

Regardless of format, I have long been a music collector. In the 80's I had a cassette collection in the hundreds, and in the 2000s my CD collection amounted to thousands of discs. Currently, my listening habits are split between iTunes (where I have roughly 80GB of my CD collection) and Spotify (where I have over 100 playlists); iTunes has all my older music, while the Spotify playlists contain all the newer stuff I've been checking out. Obviously, I don't own those songs on Spotify and therefore, they're not backed up anywhere.

I hate the idea of "losing'" all my music on Spotify. Ideally, I'd like to have everything in one place, but I'm unsure of the best way to do that. So, my question is two-fold: One, is there a way to have my digital collection in the same place I stream from? And two, how does one consolidate and back up their collection in the era of streaming services?

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