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I Built My Own Audio Player

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Re: I Built My Own Audio Player

#161
post #125

I've been building a music collection in FLAC format for 25 years, and last year I bought an (Android) phone and a MicroSD card of 1TB that fits all of my music. It's been a long project for technology to catch up, but now that it's possible to have all of it in my pocket, I'm pretty happy with it. I'm sure I can't be the only one that doesn't want to be a renter, give up control and stream anything the industry want…

You are very good collection curator! Only ~25% of my collection is FLAC/APE/ALAC/WavePack and still I have more than 3TB. It is what stops me from listening music on the go — I cannot choose what to put in mobile device in advance :-)

I have a Pi in my kitchen that I use as a Navidrome server. Of course, this only works so long as my phone has data reception.

Re: I Built My Own Audio Player

#162
post #125

I've been building a music collection in FLAC format for 25 years, and last year I bought an (Android) phone and a MicroSD card of 1TB that fits all of my music. It's been a long project for technology to catch up, but now that it's possible to have all of it in my pocket, I'm pretty happy with it. I'm sure I can't be the only one that doesn't want to be a renter, give up control and stream anything the industry want…

I have also been building a personal collection of exclusively FLACs, be it for a lot less than 25 years. It's past 1TB but https://www.navidrome.org as the server and https://symfonium.app as the client has been great.

Granted, 2TB sd cards are now a thing so once they come down in price, I'll probably get one.

Re: I Built My Own Audio Player

#163
post #125

I've been building a music collection in FLAC format for 25 years, and last year I bought an (Android) phone and a MicroSD card of 1TB that fits all of my music. It's been a long project for technology to catch up, but now that it's possible to have all of it in my pocket, I'm pretty happy with it. I'm sure I can't be the only one that doesn't want to be a renter, give up control and stream anything the industry want…

You are very good collection curator! Only ~25% of my collection is FLAC/APE/ALAC/WavePack and still I have more than 3TB. It is what stops me from listening music on the go — I cannot choose what to put in mobile device in advance :-)

There are DAPs with two SD card slots such as [1]. There's now also 2TB sd cards, be it they're not cheap yet.

[1] - https://hifigo.com/products/hiby-rs2?variant=43134031167727

Re: I Built My Own Audio Player

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are very good collection curator! Only ~25% of my collection is FLAC/APE/ALAC/WavePack and still I have more than 3TB. It is what stops me from listening music on the go — I cannot choose what to put in mobile device in advance :-)

I have a Pi in my kitchen that I use as a Navidrome server. Of course, this only works so long as my phone has data reception.

I've tried many media servers (but not Navidrome, though, I'll try it too!) and all for them mangle my collection. Albums shown twice (because there is FLAC and CUE files, for example), albums splitted into to tracks (each track seen as its own album, I don't know why), problems with non-unicode tags in old files, 6 ways to spell "Bjork", some don't understand FLAC with embedded CUE (and don't show tracks in such files at all), and, as a cherry on the top, none of them understand such abomination as ISO image with WavePack and CUE files inside (format which was popular on one big tracker some time ago). Files without tags are also a problem. So, each of these servers show 75% of collection Ok and 25% as hot mess. Each software has its own 25%, of course.

And I don't have any willpower to fix all tags and formats in 3.5TB collection (for example, to re-code all lossless zoo to FLAC and fix all MP3 tags for IDv2.4 format and Unicode).

Re: I Built My Own Audio Player

#165
> This makes ultimately no sense. An innovative technology company actively puts roadblocks into democratized application development.

Makes sense to me. See this quote from erstwhile Disney CEO Michael Eisner:

> We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement. But to make money, it is often important to make history, to make art, or to make some significant statement.

Apple is not innovative by nature, and it is certainly not democratic. It is profit-seeking by nature, and will innovate and democratize when it thinks that is the best way to make money. However, letting the riff-raff into your App Store without paying the entrance fee is not a good way to make money. That fee is where the money comes from. You're letting the public abscond with your golden goose.

Re: I Built My Own Audio Player

#166
I thought about doing that as well. Currently I use Doppler but I wanted to add meta data from Wikipedia to create an experience similar to what Roon offers. It should also have more automation like auto-generated daily playlists and the like so your local library feels more alive and let's you rediscover things.

Re: I Built My Own Audio Player

#167
post #162
post #125

I've been building a music collection in FLAC format for 25 years, and last year I bought an (Android) phone and a MicroSD card of 1TB that fits all of my music. It's been a long project for technology to catch up, but now that it's possible to have all of it in my pocket, I'm pretty happy with it. I'm sure I can't be the only one that doesn't want to be a renter, give up control and stream anything the industry want…

I have also been building a personal collection of exclusively FLACs, be it for a lot less than 25 years. It's past 1TB but https://www.navidrome.org as the server and https://symfonium.app as the client has been great. Granted, 2TB sd cards are now a thing so once they come down in price, I'll probably get one.

Never seen Symfonium before going to have to give that a try looks great!.

I've been using Plex+PlexAmp for a while but have been really wanting to move to something outside of that.

Re: I Built My Own Audio Player

#168

It's interesting that most/all of the available tools for playing digital music, a well-known and very popular activity... suck. Do we think that's enshittification or product managers misunderstanding the market? In a normal universe one might otherwise expect it to be saturated with options.

Most of the market of actual paying customers don't really care to have directories of FLAC files and terabytes of local data. And most of the people who have large collections of FLAC files probably didn't spend much to get those collections and aren't likely to bother paying for an app to be developed and supported. Most people I know with a local music library of thousands of FLACs spent $0 on that content.

And then there's a massive chunk of the market that finds the tradeoff of ads for "free" access to music an acceptable tradeoff. A few dollars a month in cost for access to music is way more than they're interested in spending, even $10 for a CD is more than they're usually looking to spend to acquire content. They're the kind of people who maybe only bought a handful of CDs or cassette tapes back int the day total and got a lot of their content from the radio.

Most of the paying customers for digital music tend to be generally OK or even prefer streaming services. And generally speaking, those streaming apps work pretty OK. Most work better than the early streaming/subscription apps back in the day (like old Rhapsody and Zune Music and non-pirating Napster). I still remember how long it would take to go from clicking Play on Zune to the time it would actually start playing the song compared to Spotify which felt nearly instant in comparison. Not having to reconnect my Creative Zen every few weeks refresh the DRM from Napster. Having all that content on demand from my wireless portable device. Practically all of what is available today is quite a bit better than what was, in terms of "I don't want to bother buying all of this content, I'm OK with renting a lot of it" standpoint.

I've got a collection of music I own, things I really care about. Mostly physical formats, a few hundred songs exclusively digital files. But for a lot of music I consume, I don't really care if I have it locally or have it forever. Its like listening to the radio, that song may never play again, that's OK. Buying all that content legitimately costs considerably more than what I pay for a streaming service, so the streaming service makes a ton of economic sense for what I'm looking for. I'm mostly looking for something in between a radio and a privately curated music collection, which is exactly what streaming is.

Re: I Built My Own Audio Player

#169
post #131

Tangentially, I really recommend https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.krosbits.mu... if you have your collection of music offline. Works flawlessly.

Symfomium is also excellent (supports Plex, Jellyfin, WebDAV, SMB etc too)

Re: I Built My Own Audio Player

#170

I feel like developing an app for iOS is harder than developing one for Android. Everything from writing code to building and publishing is overcomplicated.

I've done both, and this was not my experience. Nowadays, they're much more similar than different, but 10 years or so ago, "easy" was defined by if you knew Java or Objective-C. Android, like most Java, required a lot of code to do simple things (public static void main...), and tons of XML to make the app support so many devices. Objective-C had good boiler plate thanks to Apple and NeXT before it using the framewo…

Thanks for sharing. I agree in general,

But for me language is not a problem at all. I mean that you have a lot of pre-requirements to start developing for iOS.

And the stuff, except writing code feels much more restricted. AppStore is a walled garden itself.

But yeah, Objective-C was something...

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