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Apple Music is the last library focused music service

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151–160 of 246 posts

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#151
Apple Music isn't as library-focused as I would like it to be. Or perhaps the better term for what I'm talking about is "album-focused." I hate that when I add a playlist to my library, every single track in that playlist causes its album to show up in the Albums list and that artist to show up in the Artists list. This makes the Artists list essentially useless for browsing, because there are hundreds of artists that I've never heard of because they had a single track in some playlist that I added to my library. I can understand why it works this way, but boy is it frustrating. I would love to have a manually-curated set of albums (viewable by album name or by artist) totally separate from the ability to add playlists to my library.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#152
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.

I have started switching away from streaming services as well. Thanks for recommending Plexamp. It's awesome.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#153
post #28

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…

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 really loved GPM too and them merging it with YouTube Music pushed me to Spotify

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#154

Until they're not anymore. Let's get off this stupid ride, we don't need big centralized services to tell us how to consume the content we're ostensibly paying for. Navidrome on a home server, hooked up to a big ol hardrive, ultrasonic on your phone connected to navidrome (offlining supported), support artists you really like by buying their shit off bandcamp, rip everything else cause let's be honest these artists a…

You're incredibly wrong, but in a very classic way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 I'm a senior engineer, and a pretty technical geek. I'm also plenty social, and am that one techie friend for a lot of non-technical people and field regular "Hey what kind of should I buy", or "Can you help me configure ". I've never heard of Navidrome or Ultrasonic. Could I figure it out in 30 minutes of googling or readin…

What if you paid someone else to host the music server for you and all your friends? Oh... Wait.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#155

Apple Music isn't as library-focused as I would like it to be. Or perhaps the better term for what I'm talking about is "album-focused." I hate that when I add a playlist to my library, every single track in that playlist causes its album to show up in the Albums list and that artist to show up in the Artists list. This makes the Artists list essentially useless for browsing, because there are hundreds of artists tha…

Hi,

I’m not sure if this solves your issue but you can uncheck ‘add songs to library’ then only songs/albums that you actually add to your library show up and others only live in playlists!

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#156
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…

isn't "sort name" exactly what you're looking for? I would assume it's the title of the track (or file) but with "the" and the like stripped out.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#157
post #58
post #3

The more I use a streaming music service like Spotify, the more new music I find, but the shorter my musical memory becomes.

I put music I like in playlists that I listen to in reverse order by date added. As a result, I form pretty strong associations between my playlist songs and times in my life, down to about the week. It’s pretty cool being able to scroll through my playlists and essentially have a journal of memories. I assume no one else does this, because relatively few services consistently enable that kind of sort, and none that…

that's exactly how I used "Liked Songs" on Spotify, unfortunately Apple Music doesn't do this and I've had to create a playlist to achieve this.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#159
As TFA mentions: Plex is a wonderful service, if obtaining your own music isn't a problem for you. It's actually gotten a lot better since the days when the UI would become unresponsive with a mere few thousand songs. And Plexamp's radio features are great, as is the Tidal integration for those songs that I don't yet have locally. I have mine configured to prefer local tags over Plex's data, and I tag/organize everything with MusicBrainz Picard to ensure accuracy.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#160
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Play was ideal because I could upload any of my own music and it was part of my library, accessible anywhere in the world. Does any service like that still exist? I'm stuck with Spotify, which lacks dozens and dozens of albums that are important to me, and it won't let me upload them myself.

Spotify actually lets you do that, so you're in luck. Add local files on your desktop to a playlist, download the playlist on your mobile device, done. I'm using the feature, it works. Though it does not work with my "Spotify remote play" (or whatever they're calling it) kitchen radio. The feature is so niche, I half expect them to drop it without a word in any given update. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/P…

I believe this also only works if your devices are on the same LAN at some point in time to sync locally.
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