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Apple Music is the last library focused music service

erdaltoprak.com

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Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#161

Post by tshaddox »

erdaltoprak wrote: post #155
tshaddox wrote: post #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 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!

Oh, that’s super interesting! I see the setting and I’ll check if it solves my issue (it sounds like it does). I wonder if this setting got introduced or changed in the last year or two, because I don’t remember having the problem before that.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#162

Post by rsync »

jackson1442 wrote: post #156
rsync wrote: 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.

Yes, it's the title - but not the filename.

WAV/PCM files don't have metadata.

There is no id3/tag data. They do not have a "title" nor do they have anything else. That's a problem if your music library predates iTunes and iDevices.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#163

Post by rsync »

LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #82
rsync wrote: 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.

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

If your "music library" is post-iTunes then it isn't that useful - you have compressed media files with metadata embedded in them.

However if your music library is older than itunes and consists of lossless WAV/PCM files there is no metadata. There is only the filename.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#164

Post by mediocregopher »

deanCommie wrote: post #138
mediocregopher wrote: post #135

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…

I'm not sure what your link is supposed to demonstrate.

> I'm also not interested in hosting a music server for my friends, and dealing with all the tech support concerns that would come with it.

I didn't say _you_ are. I said someone you know is. We do exist, if you care to ask around.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#165

Post by newfonewhodis »

I run Plex (with plexamp) and buy music from:

- Basecamp

- Direct artist websites

- 7digital

- HDTracks

Almost everything I've bought (tens of albums) are FLAC and sound great. I also feel great supporting artists better than my Spotify subscription is able to.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#166

Post by movedx »

newfonewhodis wrote: post #165

I run Plex (with plexamp) and buy music from: - Basecamp - Direct artist websites - 7digital - HDTracks Almost everything I've bought (tens of albums) are FLAC and sound great. I also feel great supporting artists better than my Spotify subscription is able to.

I was tempted by this too, but the cost of buying everything I'd want would be in the thousands. If I only bought a core 20-30 albums then maybe a few hundred dollars.

Also I have Apple One for my wife and I, which comes with Apple Music, Fitness, 2TB iCloud, Apple TV, etc., for AUD$40/month (I think?) which is hard to ignore price wise.

I know that cancelling a subscription based music service and buying the albums would have a long term net saving of money, and I can easily afford to drop $4-5k on music right now, it seems counter intuitive.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#167

Post by rozab »

peatmoss wrote: post #150

Apple is also the only service to get gapless playback right, near as I can tell. Since adding lossless (I care less about "high-res" or "spatial"), they are far and away my favorite. EDIT: In case anyone is wondering why gapless playback is important, the entire genre of classical music pretty much demands it. Also, anyone who listens to popular music where one track seamlessly leads into another will know how frust…

Alas, it still fails to loop Nonagon Infinity seamlessly

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#168

Post by JeremyNT »

Thaxll wrote: post #37
andrewla wrote: post #16

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…

It's really a weird merge, I browse youtube and I see the music I like from Youtube Music there because musics are somehow fetched from YT and not from a different place ( like it was on Google music ). It seems that if the music is officialy available on Youtube, Youtube Music fetch the music from there, if not it's using an internal catalog.

I still pay for it... but only barely. It's a sad shadow of GPM, which was much more to my liking.

If you want to avoid their awful YTMusic web UI there are options. There's a decent, standalone, GUI YTM application for KDE [0] which I've used (sadly it doesn't support logins, but if you just want a player it works well enough).

There's also a plugin for Mopidy [1] that lets you listen through your MPD / snapcast [2] server, but that's more fiddly.

[0] https://apps.kde.org/audiotube/

[1] https://github.com/OzymandiasTheGreat/mopidy-ytmusic

[2] https://github.com/badaix/snapcast

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#169

Post by danaris »

loudtieblahblah wrote: post #106
danaris wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't do this on iOS I beg your pardon? First of all, a nitpick: > Even if you could get a phone with a large enough SDcard, natively ...iPhones don't use SD cards for storage. They never have. They have internal flash storage. - With that out of the way: I have a 10,000 song collection that I sync to my iPhone. It's only about 60GB of music. iPhones come with up to 512GB of internal storage, and there's an opt…

>512GB of internal storage That you have to share with photos/videos, apps, downloads, and everything else. >syncing your music to convert higher-bitrate music to 128kbps (or 192 or 256kbps, your preference) AAC files. Yeah, see - this isn't really your music collection then but reliance on Apple's Library and them "matching it" with what they have. I could never sync from their library b/c their library wouldn't hav…

> Yeah, see - this isn't really your music collection then but reliance on Apple's Library and them "matching it" with what they have. I could never sync from their library b/c their library wouldn't have huge chunks of my actual digital collection.

Nope. This is 100% false. You may be mixing up "sync your library from your computer to your iPhone" with "sync your library from your computer to iCloud," which are completely separate things.

I have a local music library the core of which goes back to about 1997. I have never subscribed to Apple Music, iTunes Match, or any of the other music subscription services. I synced portions of it to various iPods and early iPhones, and several years ago when iPhones with large enough internal storage to affordably sync the whole thing, I've kept it all on my iPhone as well.

> I typically stay away from Apple specific formats, lossless or not, regardless of their benefits.

AAC is not an Apple-specific format. It's an industry standard (MP4 audio); it just never gained quite as wide acceptance as MP3.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#170

Post by kall »

andrewla wrote: post #16

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…

This is what the article is about anyway but I suppose you don't use apple devices so you are not in a position to use Apple Music fully?

It sounds like you might like it, because it can do all that.

I'm not sure about your exact navigation idea but Apple Music has a JS api for web applications as well as "local" OS level API on iOS, so there are blessed third party interfaces. On iOS, there are really polished and customizable full alternative clients like Marvis Pro. On iOS and macOS, you can also "end user program" Apple Music via Shortcuts. I have accomplished a lot with that, building an interface for browsing playlists as album collections, grouping those playlists and workflows for moving stuff between them. On the web it looks more like some toy projects (still full clients tho).

There is the official web app and an android app, but I think you can only get to the full metadata management power on a Mac (because it still caries most of the iTunes legacy there).

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