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Apple Music is the last library focused music service

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Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#81
post #79
post #67

I keep a copy of my entire music library on my phone and don't use any music service at all. I have over 13,000 songs across over 1200 albums and 500 artists. I don't need to find any more music; there's plenty of good songs in my library that I haven't fully absorbed yet.

iOS or Android? What do you use to listen?

Android. I use GoneMAD Music Player 2.3.2 (the rewritten 3.0.X version is a buggy mess with no new useful features), but really any music player will do.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#82
post #56

Apple Music is library focused if you have very simple requirements and if your "library" was created, or coincident with, the iTunes ecosystem. The OP notes "Folder based navigation" and "... Folder based playlists" but note the use of the word "folder" and not "directory". Take a look at this dialog box: https://www.tech-recipes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/itun... ... and note all of the fine-grained ways to sor…

Help me understand how filename is useful in a way that other metadata doesn’t already cover, please.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#83
post #78

Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Music or whatever now is called. I tried them all. They are all the same to me. There is one big thing that all these streaming services are missing: *METADATA* Give me all the album by this label, all the songs produced by X or all the songs where in Y plays drums. All the albums recorded at some studio in the year Z. With tools like this I will spend years (and whatever money) on…

There are such niche services for classical music. For instance, idagio.com is really excellent with metadata. You see e.g. all works by a performer or all performers of a work.

Idagio is so good. I sub even though I'm not on it a lot to keep it afloat.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#84

Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Music or whatever now is called. I tried them all. They are all the same to me. There is one big thing that all these streaming services are missing: *METADATA* Give me all the album by this label, all the songs produced by X or all the songs where in Y plays drums. All the albums recorded at some studio in the year Z. With tools like this I will spend years (and whatever money) on…

please god, do not buy out discogs and leave it the hell alone.

i already stopped last.fm after CBS ruined it.

I've used every music service and quit for a multitude of reasons. Libraries that "have everything" but manage to be missing albums or have albums takne down all the time, "shuffle" functions that don't work (Spotify), apps that prioritize and shove music in your face that you have no interest in (Tidal), or just being unlucky enough to be owned by some of the shittiest corporations the world has seen since the robber barons (Apple/Google).

The more they get rid of digital music stores, the more i fall back to vinyl.

Streaming sucks.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#85
post #79
post #67

I keep a copy of my entire music library on my phone and don't use any music service at all. I have over 13,000 songs across over 1200 albums and 500 artists. I don't need to find any more music; there's plenty of good songs in my library that I haven't fully absorbed yet.

iOS or Android? What do you use to listen?

you can't do this on iOS. Even if you could get a phone with a large enough SDcard, natively ... transfering that much to the phone would be prohibitively painful. And one might be tempted to go through that once, but to go through it every time you get a new phone would drive you mad.

I have a 500GB card in my android and have 70% of my digital collection on it. I, also, make the card the primary destination for my photo/videos from my camera. I have my own home-grown backup solution. A mix of my own backup solution combined with the SDcard means i never have to rely on cloud services to my music, nor to backup my valuable files.

But this chapter in my life is coming to a close as phones increasingly take away sdcards.

Eventually my phone will fall back to just being my phone again. Because i refuse to use their services to replace functionality they took away.

I use PowerAmp music player. It's the most full features player out there that's got a good deal of polish to it, IMHO.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#86
post #50
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The degradation of Google Play Music into YouTube Music has to be one of the most disappointing product merges in history. All of the power functionality disappeared. I can't even find the music I want anymore without great effort. As a consequence, I'm listening to my favorite artists less frequently, and haven't even thought about concerts, festivals, albums, etc. A dumb but rich tabular music + metadata store woul…

I miss GPM so much. No one I know in person knew it existed, yet they still get to listen to my rants about Google killing the one true music service. I too have been finding music discovery difficult since GPM shutdown. YouTube Music is getting better at discovery fortunately, but I'm not finding multiple new albums/artists per week, more like 1-2 new albums or artists every couple weeks. One of my favorite GPM feat…

> One of my favorite GPM features was the "concerts in your area", that is the only way I knew that some artists were coming through my city.

SongKick and Last.fm have solved this problem for me for years. I haven't used them for concerts since before COVID, so I don't know if they're still good for shows.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#87
post #6

I prefer to buy, not rent music. Bandcamp is good for it and they sell FLAC. This is also fitting comparison to cassettes library a lot more than Apple Music where it's not your library, but Apple's. Other stores like 7digital are also good.

I'm considering taking a break from spotify premium and I'm wondering what the cheapest way to buy music is these days. It seems like buying and ripping used cd's might actually be the way to go. Of course you don't get FLAC that way.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#88
post #4

Music-as-a-Service is fantastic as a convenience, and I too have discovered a lot of great music this way, but (a) I all the time want to listen to a record and find it missing from their catalogs; and (b) as with so much else on the web, I'm so over the constant minor psychological drag of knowing that my interactions are being tracked, logged, and gamed.

(a) was the breaking point for me. I pirated my entire Apple Music library from Soulseek and switched to Plex + Plexamp. Not as convenient for discovery but otherwise superior for me in every way.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#89
post #87
post #6

I prefer to buy, not rent music. Bandcamp is good for it and they sell FLAC. This is also fitting comparison to cassettes library a lot more than Apple Music where it's not your library, but Apple's. Other stores like 7digital are also good.

I'm considering taking a break from spotify premium and I'm wondering what the cheapest way to buy music is these days. It seems like buying and ripping used cd's might actually be the way to go. Of course you don't get FLAC that way.

Ripping audio CDs would be equivalent to FLAC quality. Make sure to rip them to FLAC or any other lossless format of course.

There are a bunch of stores that sell FLAC that I use:

* https://bandcamp.com

* https://us.7digital.com

* https://store.tidal.com

* https://www.junodownload.com

* https://www.prestomusic.com

* https://www.prostudiomasters.com

Can't comment on prices, I didn't really do a comprehensive analysis.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#90

Google Play Music was extremely album-focused, but their move over to YouTube Music has basically scrapped that. GPM even let you modify the metadata for albums; I had used this to strip out things like "(2020 Remaster Special Gold Edition)" from album names, and to cut "bonus" tracks off of albums (nothing as fun as playing an album and then getting a two hour long spoken word interview with Quincy Jones), and final…

YouTube Music is the reason I moved over to self-hosted Jellyfin to host my music collection.

Where do you source your originals? Bandcamp is my go to, but not all artists publish there. Amazon often has physical CDs and MP3s for artists, but I have not patronized them for such goods (yet).

My process for downloading from Bandcamp, extracting the files, and syncing them to the storage could be automated a bit more I think.

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