Power Metal

While I’m not usually listening to metal, this is still something I know about.

When you buy music, what format it’s in depends on where you bought it.

If you buy from the iTunes Store, you get .m4a files encoded in AAC (most devices and also computers running Windows 7 or newer should handle this)

If you buy from Amazon digitally, you’ll get MP3 files (pretty much everything you touch nowadays should handle this)

If it’s from another source, it depends on what they offer, or if you bought CDs it depends on what format you selected in your media player when copying the CD to your computer.

Listening to music I just do in a media player of choice (I use either Windows Media Player or iTunes on desktop, and the Music app on iPhone)

Managing I usually do in iTunes, since I have an iPhone and have to use that software to put the music on the phone. (if you have an Android phone you can just copy the music onto the phone directly, or use Windows Media Player to do it)

Hopefully this helped you

I usually just listen through Spotify, but for the albums I have bought physically, I usually rip them into FLAC files using fre:ac. Once I have the files, I place them in a cloud synced folder for backup, and in the Music folder on my desktop. I then use Clementine to play them, which gives a nice GUI from the metadata of the FLAC files. I also have a copy of all the albums on my phone, which I usually listen to through either VLC or "USB Audio Player Pro" (which, despite the name, is actually a good app).

I buy most of my stuff via Bandcamp or Amazon Music. They're just mp3s and I use foobar2000 to listen/manage them on the computer, but in the past I also used MusicBee and it's just as good. I don't really have any good recommendations for mobile apps, because I listen to my stuff on an old iPod classic that I refurbished a few years ago.

I listen through Tidal, but buy from Bandcamp. Bandcamp have an Android app that lets you play your music from them, either via streaming or offline. It's not great but does the job. I also use Shuttle+ on my phone. On PC I use MusicBee.