3 ms·

> They still sell CDs and I really doubt that individual track/album sales, in some format or another, are going anywhere for quite some time. Buy your music an

> They still sell CDs and I really doubt that individual track/album sales, in some format or another, are going anywhere for quite some time. Buy your music and micromanage your library and tags to your hearts content. That is getting harder and harder by the year. Both Apple and the music companies go out of their way to make it incredibly difficult to manage my library. It took two days and third-party tools to move my library from one iPhone to another. In the end I had to resort to manually copying down the name of every single track on my current phone to make sure it gets moved over onto the other phone. This is because the tools couldn't get everything. Getting all the metadata over still hasn't been 100% completed. The problem is that I don't have a static, well-defined music taste. It changes all the freaking time. My music library needs to be able to keep up with what I want out of it. As it's virtually impossible to easily get tracks in and out of an iPhone, the single source of truth for my music library has become the tracks on the phone itself. If I don't take painstaking care to ensure that every last file is moved, then some tracks which I really really love to hear, that I can listen to on repeat for hours, can completely fall off my radar and I won't hear them again for months / years. Managing music files manually is something I absolutely must have. But there's nothing those goddamn assholes want more than to push me onto their shit fucking subscription services where my music life becomes accountable to their greedy whims.

detaro 9y ago
Sounds like your issue is primarily with Apple not providing proper access to your iPhone? Tons of music is available as non-DRMed files, or CDs, and I can move those files around however I want on my devices. I suppose some really popular stuff might be exclusive to streaming or DRMed channels, but I can't say I could name any right now.
- vinceguidry 9y ago
  Yes. Fucking Apple. I don't care where I get my music from. Honestly I just get most of it from the iTunes store. I just need to be able to manage it once I get it. I tried using iTunes manual management. It's awful. Unless all your music comes from iTunes, then you're back to manual file management. Now I don't even sync my phone to my laptop anymore, I just don't trust it to not fuck with my music collection. iTunes touches the phone only when I have music that I can't buy through the iTunes Store or I'm switching phones. I am not willing to carry around a third device just for music. I am not willing to devote space in my apartment to CD storage. I'd love to be able to store my music in the cloud, but the difficulties Apple has placed on music file transfers mean that the phone itself has to be the repository for the state of my music library. Even if I do that, I still have to be extremely careful when moving devices, it's not a magic bullet. If Apple makes this any worse then I will be forced to migrate to Android. I tried it once a few years ago but was burned really badly by the LG Nexus 5, a truly horrid device that could not stream Bluetooth music properly. I was actually happy when that thing took a 5 foot dive onto a tiled floor so I could run back to the Apple Store and beg the ghost of Steve Jobs for forgiveness and absolution.
  - EADGBE 9y ago
    > I am not willing to carry around a third device just for music. I am not willing to devote space in my apartment to CD storage. You'll have to play by their rules then, unfortunately.
extr 9y ago
Did you read the rest of my post? Streaming services solve a lot of the problems you're having, the same ones I had before I switched over. I remember the same thing, days of trying to extract raw MP3 files from my iPhone in some obfuscated format. Using third party tools that promised to make it easy but really just fucked up my library worse. Streaming gets rid of all of that. All of your music (well, most), available wherever you are, no hassle. There are real, tangible reasons that the subscription model has taken off other than the greed of corporations. Sign up for a free trial and give it a chance man. And for the record, Spotify is bleeding money, hardly a bunch of greedy assholes. Maybe I should write a blog post, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Subscription Music Services"?
- vinceguidry 9y ago
  > All of your music (well, most), That's the problem. If it's not well and truly all of my music, then it's worthless. I will take the pain of manual library file management over not having every last one of my tracks available in one big library that I can shuffle. You can generalize this to, I will never put my music lifestyle in the hands of your company's relationship with the music labels.

detaro 9y ago

Sounds like your issue is primarily with Apple not providing proper access to your iPhone? Tons of music is available as non-DRMed files, or CDs, and I can move those files around however I want on my devices. I suppose some really popular stuff might be exclusive to streaming or DRMed channels, but I can't say I could name any right now.

vinceguidry 9y ago
Yes. Fucking Apple. I don't care where I get my music from. Honestly I just get most of it from the iTunes store. I just need to be able to manage it once I get it. I tried using iTunes manual management. It's awful. Unless all your music comes from iTunes, then you're back to manual file management. Now I don't even sync my phone to my laptop anymore, I just don't trust it to not fuck with my music collection. iTunes touches the phone only when I have music that I can't buy through the iTunes Store or I'm switching phones. I am not willing to carry around a third device just for music. I am not willing to devote space in my apartment to CD storage. I'd love to be able to store my music in the cloud, but the difficulties Apple has placed on music file transfers mean that the phone itself has to be the repository for the state of my music library. Even if I do that, I still have to be extremely careful when moving devices, it's not a magic bullet. If Apple makes this any worse then I will be forced to migrate to Android. I tried it once a few years ago but was burned really badly by the LG Nexus 5, a truly horrid device that could not stream Bluetooth music properly. I was actually happy when that thing took a 5 foot dive onto a tiled floor so I could run back to the Apple Store and beg the ghost of Steve Jobs for forgiveness and absolution.
- EADGBE 9y ago
  > I am not willing to carry around a third device just for music. I am not willing to devote space in my apartment to CD storage. You'll have to play by their rules then, unfortunately.

extr 9y ago

Did you read the rest of my post? Streaming services solve a lot of the problems you're having, the same ones I had before I switched over. I remember the same thing, days of trying to extract raw MP3 files from my iPhone in some obfuscated format. Using third party tools that promised to make it easy but really just fucked up my library worse. Streaming gets rid of all of that. All of your music (well, most), available wherever you are, no hassle. There are real, tangible reasons that the subscription model has taken off other than the greed of corporations. Sign up for a free trial and give it a chance man. And for the record, Spotify is bleeding money, hardly a bunch of greedy assholes. Maybe I should write a blog post, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Subscription Music Services"?

vinceguidry 9y ago
> All of your music (well, most), That's the problem. If it's not well and truly all of my music, then it's worthless. I will take the pain of manual library file management over not having every last one of my tracks available in one big library that I can shuffle. You can generalize this to, I will never put my music lifestyle in the hands of your company's relationship with the music labels.