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Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

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Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#252
post #227

I have tried every music playing option under the sun for the last 15 years and am now happily back to creating playlists on my computer and periodically dragging them to my phone's local storage. There is still no better overall experience.

Same! I use syncthing-fork to automate the process: https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android

Storage costs being what they are now, I'm just syncthing'ing my entire mp3 collection to my phone now. According to syncthing it's 27.9GB, and while I'm sure there are people out there with another factor of magnitude more, a 512GB SD micro card, where the value sweet spot appears to currently reside, is ~$38 now. You can stick a lot of music on your phone now. At 256kb/s or so that's roughly half-a-year straight of music [1]; if you really just can't cut your collection down to that, well, I mean, you can nearly get the full year straight for $90 or so now, and I'm sure 2TB will be along shortly. We're not that many exponential doublings away from you being able to store enough music to last your entire life on your phone.

Assuming your phone still takes an SD card, of course. I get the whole "push into the cloud" thing but SD card prices have been consistently running ahead of cloud storage options and bandwidth plans for a while now; it's kind of amusing that it's the high end phones that lack this option. It's nice to be able to slam music, movies, entire seasons of TV on to my phone without it interfering with the main OS space.

[1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=512GB+%2F+256kilobits%2...

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#253
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same! I use syncthing-fork to automate the process: https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android

Storage costs being what they are now, I'm just syncthing'ing my entire mp3 collection to my phone now. According to syncthing it's 27.9GB, and while I'm sure there are people out there with another factor of magnitude more, a 512GB SD micro card, where the value sweet spot appears to currently reside, is ~$38 now. You can stick a lot of music on your phone now. At 256kb/s or so that's roughly half-a-year straight of…

In hindsight it is crazy that tiny iPods from the early-mid 00s had 120-160 GB storage, more than what a flagship $1000 iPhone starts with twenty years later. Yes they used HDDs, but for media consumption it didn't really matter. And then when Apple switched to flash storage we took a massive step back to 1/2/4 GB with outrageous premiums for extra capacity.

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#254
post #253
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage costs being what they are now, I'm just syncthing'ing my entire mp3 collection to my phone now. According to syncthing it's 27.9GB, and while I'm sure there are people out there with another factor of magnitude more, a 512GB SD micro card, where the value sweet spot appears to currently reside, is ~$38 now. You can stick a lot of music on your phone now. At 256kb/s or so that's roughly half-a-year straight of…

In hindsight it is crazy that tiny iPods from the early-mid 00s had 120-160 GB storage, more than what a flagship $1000 iPhone starts with twenty years later . Yes they used HDDs, but for media consumption it didn't really matter. And then when Apple switched to flash storage we took a massive step back to 1/2/4 GB with outrageous premiums for extra capacity.

I remember reading articles at the time running the numbers on what it would cost to legally fill an OG iPod with mp3s at $0.99 a song or $9.99 an album. My memory is fuzzy but I remember it being something like $15,000 to fill an iPod legally with music from iTunes. Many articles concluded that the device was speced for piracy.

I don’t think the storage size was reduced for technical reasons. I suspect a lot of back and forth with the music industry happened to constrain the device to a “practical” size for legally licensed music.

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because: * You don't have any control, if some paperwork fucks up you can lose access (rarer with music but very common with video services) * They don't have a lot of rare stuff, demos, EPs, singles, dubplates, etc. * You can't choose which version of an album you want. * If you run out of money for whatever reason you can't listen to music. * Offline is unreliable. * Screw having my taste and discovery defined by a…

You forgot disappearing music. Add a song to a playlist, switch countries (or who knows what), it becomes greyed out, or perhaps simply removed. Annoying. Their tendency to add random music to my playlists is annoying. I think there's some control over it, but I'm too old to follow up on how it works this week. I'm on the most expensive family plan they have, but would pay more to get those two fixed properly. I do s…

Regarding your second paragraph talking about Spotify adding random songs... It's a feature I absolutely hate, but I believe what you might be referring to are "smart suggestions" and/or the "smart shuffle" features. They annoy the hell out of me but can be disabled.

For smart suggestions, I haven't seen them in a while, but there was a toggle for it.

For smart shuffle, just hit the shuffle button again to turn it off.

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#256
post #236
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now a podcast too!

My favorite podcast in this topic is from Jupiter Broadcasting : https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/show/self-hosted/

+1 for all the Jupiter Broadcasting shows. I have my career in IT because I found the network in elementary.

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#257

I'm currently using icecast and ices to host a music stream. It'll effectively stream music to a port, and multiple clients can enjoy. Anyone doing something similar, I'd like to migrate to something more modern.

Snapcast is similar, but will keep all the clients in sync for multi-room audio https://github.com/badaix/snapcast

Snapcast is nice because if you have an existing setup it can just use stdin as the audio source.

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#258
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the days, there was a service called what.cd, which was really nice for music discovery. You had very dedicated music fans, great forums and a daily top 10 of most downloaded music. For many it was the fastest way of finding new interesting stuff. I've heard rumors this kind of services still exist, but we never know if it's just an urban legend.

RED and OPS are sadly not even a faint and distant shadow of WCD.

Only one way to fix that!

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#259
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self hosted music service doesn't necessarily imply new music discovery problems, because a lot of people still discover music the old non-algorithmic way, by being interested in certain genres, studying labels and artists and going through their albums, adding to their collection what they would love to hear again. Buying and owning the song/album somehow brings me more satisfaction than paying a monthly fee for a s…

The algorithms have never introduced me to a new song. They always try to mash up things I've heard before, which is disappointing because I can often go to "similar artists" in Spotify and after drilling down a couple of levels, find new artists. But Spotify will never suggest it until I listen to a song at least once and even then it will only recommended that one song. I still do most of my discovery by looking at…

Maybe it's rose colored glasses, but I recall finding new songs and even occasionally new artists on Pandora maybe 15ish years ago. It does seem like the last time I tried Spotify it was working really hard to make sure it didn't play me anything I hadn't heard before.

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#260

I’ve been searching for services that host personal music collections, but there doesn’t seem to be much available. I came across a product called Vox [1], which I might try. There are also plenty of self-hosted projects of varying quality (but I hadn’t seen Black Candy before). I'd like a service where I can upload a large folder of MP3s, and it would help organize them into albums, perform useful processing like Re…

All you need is this: 1. Self-hosted web server with local file system access to your media. 2. One HTML page that I will generate for you. This page will contain a media player and a play list of your media files. With this approach the solution is ridiculously simple, but you are at the mercy of the client device web browser for media codec/container support. For audio this is not so restricting but for video this…

Not a bad idea! Maybe you could create a GH page with some public domain music for a demo.
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