MP3s only. I made the switch back from Spotify earlier last year. Maintaining a music library is a hobby of mine from when I was young, so I didn't mind the effort of finding, downloading, and organizing a few thousand songs.
Discussion
Right! This is my plan as well. Recently cancelled my apple music subscription, wrote down all my artists. Will slowly restart my collection. Did you mostly torrent?
I use soulseek mostly. As well as these if I can't find it on soulseek:
https://free-mp3-download.net/
When all else fails, yt-dlp. I don't torrent much music because they're mostly private trackers nowadays.
I download flacs and reencode them myself to 320 mp3. I don't have hi-fi equipment, so mp3 is just fine for me.