Apple Music is the last library focused music service • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#231

Post by lloeki » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 11:47 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #44

gglitch wrote: 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.

I had a large enough digital music library pre-streaming services that I've elected to (mostly) keep maintaining my own library/playlists/etc. But I'm honestly not sure what I'd do if I were starting from Square 1. Would I really spend thousands of dollars to purchase songs/albums? Well I'd almost certainly pirate a lot--and TBH a fair bit of my library is Napster copies of previously owned vinyl--but there's still a…

> all the organizational effort.

Musicbrainz Picard helps a lot with that.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#232

Post by iggldiggl » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 11:56 AM UTC

ryanobjc wrote: post #123

echelon wrote: 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…

itunes match is what you want. You can upload your own music to the cloud, and whatever matches existing ones just matches to the itunes store so you dont actually have to upload everything - this is the 'match' in the 'itunes match'. And it's $25/year.

With the caveat that matching process might mis-match things when the same song exists in subtly different versions and there isn't a good way to manually override it when that happens.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#233

Post by iggldiggl » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 12:07 PM UTC

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…

I've stumbled across some instances where the tracks as uploaded by the recording company had been improperly cut, though, so you can't get the correct playback no matter which service you use or even if you'd actually buy and download the tracks outright.

E.g. the between-tracks material on quite a number of live tracks of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series (which on the physical CDs is part of the pregap, so it's skipped if you directly navigate to a track, but it's definitively played if you just listen to the album straight through) is currently missing from all official digital releases, even though those bits are definitively part of the appeal of those albums.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#234

Post by iggldiggl » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 12:19 PM UTC

krrishd wrote: post #18

- Custom Music Artworks - Custom Artists / Producer / Lyrics description - Custom rules to ignore songs on random selection - Custom rules to select equalizer per song - Folder based navigation - Smart Folder based playlists - Uploading your music to the cloud and streaming them as any other song Nails my reasoning for having stuck to it all this time as well. way easier to include my own (un-published) music, mixtap…

I'm also glad that on Windows I haven't (yet?) been subjected to the splitting up of iTunes into separate music and podcast apps, because I've manually reclassified my collection of various radio comedy show episodes as podcasts in iTunes in order to get the listened/not listened and listening position tracking [1], and from a quick search it seems that on a Mac this is no longer as easily possible with the new Podcast app.

[1] Yes, the latter can be enabled for any track in iTunes, but unfortunately it doesn't work with the solution I'm using for syncing my library to an Android phone, plus I also want the listened/not listened display, which is definitively a Podcast-only feature anyway.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#235

Post by iggldiggl » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 12:31 PM UTC

kall wrote: post #193

taylodl wrote: post #62

Having recently upgraded to Catalina (I've been running Mojave for quite some time now!) I somehow completely missed the boat that iTunes is gone and has been replaced with Music. Apparently the functionality of iTunes has been split between Finder (sync iPhone, rip CDs) and Music. Music had all my iTunes purchases (good), but none of my albums I'd legally ripped from my CDs. Long story short, I had to import the lib…

Wow, that sounds super annoying. What version of macOS did you upgrade from? As long as Music remains the only Mac app with "OK" and "Cancel" buttons on the Preferences window, iTunes lives!

And Podcasts have been split off into a different app, too, which no longer allows manually adding files as "podcasts", even though I find that very useful when adding episodes of radio shows in order to get the nice visual listened/not listened tracking of episodes. (Plus due to the way I'm syncing iTunes with my Android phone, classifying a track as a podcast is the only way the get the music player on my phone to remember the listening position for that track).

At least on Windows we've been spared this splitting up of iTunes so far, though I wonder for how much longer…

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#236

Post by littlecranky67 » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 12:39 PM UTC

bin_bash wrote: post #202

littlecranky67 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat niche, but in the electronic music genre (house, techno, trance etc.) albums and single tracks are a rare thing. People mostly listen and consume DJ livesets/-mixes, and using filenames & folders to organize is basically the way to go. It is very difficult to come up with any sane metadata system, let alone that all music players are unable to cope with that kind of music collection. Public metadata database…

I don't understand, why can't the DJ be the artist and the filename be the track title? Isn't that roughly how SoundCloud works?

Well as said, you mostly will have to do the metadata assignments - and what is it good for, if DJ name + title are already in the filename? If you do exactly as you suggest, Apple Music i.e. would always show a single album for the same DJ, even if you have 50+ sets. Also way more important is the year of the set, often you want them ordered by date of recording.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#237

Post by iggldiggl » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 12:40 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #75

etchalon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Music is the streaming service. The iTunes Store is the "purchase the file" store. The iTunes Store sells M4A, which is a common open audio format. The iTunes Store does not, however, sell lossless files, as far as I know. Apple Lossless (ALAC) is only available when streaming from Apple Music.

I prefer to buy lossless formats. For playback I can encode them in Opus. M4A is not a proper open format, it's patent encumbered.

The patents on AAC-LC (which is all that really matters when encoding at medium to high bitrates, and that very much applies to the files sold by the iTunes store, too) should have expired by now, given that it dates from 1997, and indeed Fedora has been including an AAC-LC encoder since late 2017.

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#238

Post by 29083011397778 » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 12:56 PM UTC

standardUser wrote: post #103

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…

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.

Why not just run your own streaming service? You're here on hn, so standing up a webserver (or even a Raspberry Pi) is hardly beyond your means presumably. Subsonic [0] appears to be well polished. I've used a FOSS fork called Airsonic [1] previously, though I've played with (and liked) Polaris [2] in the past.

All three would meet your (possibly only) requirement of using your own music, and I wouldn't consider any too difficult to set up.

[0] http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp

[1] https://airsonic.github.io/

[2] https://github.com/agersant/polaris

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#239

Post by loudtieblahblah » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

TillE wrote: post #146

loudtieblahblah wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. What? You just transfer your files directly, exactly as you could with an ancient iPod or whatever.

if i bought files from 7Digital or HDTracks - then how do i sync FLAC files to devices?

If there's no "file matching" service - how does the OP i'm responding to "upgrade" the sound quality of the files on the device?

Re: Apple Music is the last library focused music service

#240

Post by loudtieblahblah » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 1:59 PM UTC

geenew wrote: post #216

arepublicadoceu wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a 10,000 song collection that I sync to my iPhone. It's only about 60GB of music. How exactly do you sync to your phone? I've been using an iPhone for the last 3 or 4 years and I entirely gave up on the concept of having my own music on my iPhone as I used to do on Android. First issue: I have to deal with iTunes to sync and organize my music on my iPhone. I still haven't drink the full kool-aid of apple and…

There’s an option in iTunes to sync entire library, in the phone music page. It takes a while to tx 100+ gb, sure, but you do it once when you get the phone and after that you just move diffs. It’s not perfect - I get errors from time to time saying music I have isn’t available in my region. Fix is a resync of those songs that got lost. This is one of those go with the flow situations… the cost is dealing with iTunes…

>and after that you just move diffs.

Until you get a new phone.

>the cost is dealing with iTunes, the benefit is carrying around all the music you’ve collected over the years in your pocket.

I have this benefit without iTunes. I get to keep the 30% or so of my collection that is in FLAC, don't have to use 3rd party software for transfer (as any OS's file manager will do) and when i get a new phone i merely swap the SDcard.