18 ms·

Apple Music is the last library focused music service

175 points by erdaltoprak 5y ago

cuddlybacon 5y ago
> This article explains how students do not follow the same organization paradigm based on folders and local file management. This could be, in part, attributed to the new ways young students learn, which is on online first operating systems or tablets, where by default, the local system is hidden and also where everything is done through applications. For me it was because I realized that the time I spent doing this had exactly zero benefit. At least to me. This quote comes off as somewhat elitist. If someone hasn't developed the same workflow as you, that doesn't mean they are less informed or skilled.
- neogodless 5y ago
  > This quote comes off as somewhat elitist. At least out of context, I don't see any judgement words in the quoted text to suggest one way is better than the other. It's a bit like saying "people put food in their fridge and take it out, without ever stopping to check if the refrigerant is still working. This might be because they didn't grow up with having to refill the ice box."
- pfortuny 5y ago
  It is not elitist. Really: it is just a guy trying to find an explanation to something that gets his attention. There is no adjective in it.
- beerandt 5y ago
  I was recently at an office where there were a dozen or so student workers studying for a test that required them to print out some things to bring. The buildings internet was out, and not a single one of them realized you could save a file (while connected to cellular data) and then connect to wifi and print it. They had only ever been taught to print directly from apps. Sometimes it does mean they're less informed and skilled.
- erdaltoprak 5y ago
  Hi, I’m sorry if it appeared that way, it was quite difficult for me to covey properly my thoughts on this subject. I wanted to portray that it just makes sense that music software isn’t made that way anymore since a lot of people do not follow that kind of paradigm anymore. I don’t think there is only one good answer about how to tackle music software. I hope my answer cleared this up!
  - cuddlybacon 5y ago
    Hi op, Based on some other comments I think the elitist remark is uncalled for in this situation. Looking again, you were neutral on it. I just assumed it was meant negatively.
lolsal 5y ago
The more I use a streaming music service like Spotify, the more new music I find, but the shorter my musical memory becomes.
- btown 5y ago
  If you consistently like/heart songs as you go along, put your Liked Songs list on shuffle sometime - you'll find great old gems!
  - lolsal 5y ago
    I do this! It's great, but discoverability/brows-ability is lost.
  - jdpedrie 5y ago
    This hardly works at all for me. Spotify will happily shuffle the most recent 75-100 songs on my Liked Songs list, but something from 2012? Forget about it.
    - lolsal 5y ago
      I thought I was just imagining this behavior. Humans are bad at 'random', but I swear when I randomly play my 300+ song playlist, I tend to hear the same 20-40 songs over a couple hours.
- jl6 5y ago
  I believe memory formation is aided by multi-sensory perceptions. The experience of going somewhere to buy a CD, unwrapping it, opening it, putting it in a specific player at a certain time of the day, getting up to hit the next track button… this is a much richer set of experiences that form a much tighter web of recollection than just the audio alone. These experiences may all be totally mundane or even tiresome, but they help cement the memory of the music. This is why you remember something more if you write it down - you get not just the memory of a fact but also the tactile experience of holding a pencil, feeling the paper, of an aching wrist… Passively streaming someone else’s (or an algorithm’s) choice of music in the background is probably the worst possible way to build music memory because you don’t even have the association of choosing or even reading the track title. Ritual serves a purpose.
shmerl 5y ago
I prefer to buy, not rent music. Bandcamp is good for it and they sell FLAC. This is also fitting comparison to cassettes library a lot more than Apple Music where it's not your library, but Apple's. Other stores like 7digital are also good.
- etchalon 5y ago
  You can buy DRM free files from Apple. So the file is yours, transferrable, but you also can always go back and get another copy from Apple. The combination of the iTunes Store, Apple Music, and iTunes Match is the most expansive music service offering I can think of.
  - grumpyprole 5y ago
    iTunes won't even play FLAC files, so it's rather inconvenient for people with existing libraries. Yes I know I could convert it all to some proprietary Apple format, but it's easier to just not buy an iPhone.
    - deleted 5y ago
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  - shmerl 5y ago
    Not from Apple Music though? I thought it's rent only. iTunes sells files, yes. I still prefer stores that sell FLAC. Apple's aversion to common open audio formats always irritated me.
    - jjcon 5y ago
      Apple Music is DRM yes (it can be de-DRMed though fairly easily), purchased music from iTunes is DRM free.
      - 5y ago
hammock 5y ago
Is there a library-focused video streaming service?
- zwily 5y ago
  Maybe Plex?
  - sumtechguy 5y ago
    Plex and its father KODI are very good for local. There are plugins for external stuff. But the quality is kind of random and subject to the whims of whatever SaaS they are scraping.
gglitch 5y ago
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.
- tptacek 5y ago
  Music is probably one of the only services where I get value out of being tracked and logged; I listen to enough different artists that it's very easy to lose track of something, and to find myself in a rut of listening to the same 10 artists for weeks on end. One thing Apple Music does pretty well is providing a bunch of different gradually-learning thingies that keep the rotation fresh.
- amelius 5y ago
  Minor conveniences will destroy the world.
- ghaff 5y ago
  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 all the organizational effort. And also TBH for files (and email) in general I used to spend a fair amount of effort filing into hierarchical structures. These days I do a bit of rudimentary sending to an archive folder or tag, delete older stuff (or not), and figure I can find something with search if I really need it. And, if I can't, it probably wasn't worth the effort to do the upfront librarian work anyway.
  - lloeki 5y ago
    > all the organizational effort. Musicbrainz Picard helps a lot with that.
- 5y ago
orobinson 5y ago
This is exactly why I started using Apple Music. Some of my music collection isn’t on streaming platforms but Apple Music let’s me host it and stream it in a library right alongside music I don’t “own”. I also generally like the paradigm of being able to collect streamed music into a library so I can come back to things again and again. Back when I last used Spotify around 2015 I used the starred playlist to do this but it was no substitute for just being able to see a collection of albums. I’m not sure if Spotify’s UX around having a “library” of music had improved since then.
- RileyJames 5y ago
  This is why I use Bandcamp. I don’t trust apple not to change the deal at some point. Where as with band camp I actually own things.
  - tempodox 5y ago
    What I love most about Bandcamp is that you can download your music in lossless compression (ALAC/FLAC). It beats lossy compressions every time with the headphones I use.
  - xoa 5y ago
    I mean, I'm 100% with you on Bandcamp being absolutely awesome. But I'm not sure what you mean by this?: >I don’t trust apple not to change the deal at some point. Where as with band camp I actually own things. The whole point here though is that the "deal" if you're just doing your own library sync is that it's your own library. Yeah you can listen to Apple Music's streaming stuff too and in that case it could indeed presumably vanish at some point (I don't think it'd be at all about Apple though, it'd be about the actual rights holders, Apple doesn't own the copyright on most[any?] of this stuff). But if one chooses to make their own library the core source of truth, the worst that could happen there would be Apple throwing in the towel on the cloud match stuff. There'd be no more seamless easy sync of libraries between devices in that case (unless they astonished by enabling a selfhost/LAN version of that again) but it's not like you'd lose anything at all. Everything you own you'd still own.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
The product referred to as "Apple Music" isn't library focused. The app now known as Music and the service known as "iTunes Match" is. Apple Music is the music as a service subscription that keeps pushing adverts in app and keeps turning itself back on even if you're not subscribed and have turned it off.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  All the features of "iTunes Match" are included in Apple Music as long as you have "Sync Library" turned on. For a while there was a subtle difference in that music uploaded to Apple Music would have DRM applied to it, and iTunes Match would not, but this is no longer the case.
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    Is DRM applied to iTunes Match too now? That's unfortunate.
    - ComputerGuru 5y ago
      I just checked - not so far as I can see.
    - kall 5y ago
      No. Just drag a matched track out of the music app or import it in various iOS apps, it's a DRM free AAC file.
    - ratww 5y ago
      Oh wow… If it is, I will probably rethink my subscription. I have uploaded a lot of music I bought in other services or ripped legally from CDs I physically own, adding DRM to things I own feels immoral to me. Wish there were more alternative mobile OSs and platforms. Apple is getting on my nerves too much lately.
      - jghn 5y ago
        Likewise. IIRC Apple Music is a lot more (3x?) expensive than iTunes Match so not sure if the price increase would be worth it to me. But my thinking it wouldn't track my library was what made Apple Music a nonstarter for me.
andrewla 5y ago
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 finally to reorganize my classical music so that the artist was the composer and the orchestra/performer name was just munged into the album title (obviously deeper nesting would have been better, but this worked well). Now with YTM even browsing by artist is nearly impossible, and when you do, it doesn't display the albums by that artist that you've added to your collection, it just displays everything, so there's no real way to avoid seeing 20 copies of the same album remastered at different times mixed in with "pop rock of the 90s" collections. It's just dreadful. All I want is a music service that lets me access an unlimited virtual store and bring whatever content I want and organize it recursively by tags (i.e. when I navigate to "artist" it presents me with the ability to narrow my search by "composer" or "album" or whatever). I stick with YTM mostly because it came with free ad-free YouTube. There is no public API to talk to the service, though, so I can't even build my own frontend (although there are numerous hacks, most of which involve checking your plaintext password into a git repository, which of course means compromising your gmail account which is essentially the end of the world).
- willis936 5y ago
  I've been on the same journey. My plan is to self host plex. Cache the music I want, VPN/stream when I want to add more to the cache.
  - kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
    I have Qobuz combined with mpd (there's a plugin). It's not the cheapest but it's decent for what you get and the UI is simple and doesn't get in your way. My only regret is that it doesn't have lyrics AFAIK.
- echelon 5y ago
  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 would be a game changer. Add in tags and multi-dimensional ranking, and I'd be in heaven. Add an API, and I'll gladly pay $50/mo. I want iTunes 1.0, but with the ability to sync between the cloud and all of my devices. With smart playlists that can operate over my tags and ratings. That's it. No music videos, no real need for album art or lyrics, but certainly no UI removed for simplicity or dumbing down the product. I want to index and traverse my music in my own way.
krrishd 5y ago
- 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, mixtapes/etc that never made it to streaming but that I have mp3s for, album art that I want to swap out, etc. I do fear that these might all be incidental features and they eventually re-orient to mimic Spotify's approach more closely.
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  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.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
I use Plex to stream my local music library. The "Plexamp" client player is, well, buggy as hell, but it mostly works, and will transcode on the fly if it needs to. As a bonus it works for videos too.
victorbstan 5y ago
This is why I find it extremely irritating when non apple users can’t understand why I use apple stuff. On many levels, not just music, they offer things others don’t.
achairapart 5y ago
Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Music or whatever now is called. I tried them all. They are all the same to me. There is one big thing that all these streaming services are missing: *METADATA* Give me all the album by this label, all the songs produced by X or all the songs where in Y plays drums. All the albums recorded at some studio in the year Z. With tools like this I will spend years (and whatever money) on your service. They will give me unexplored ways to find and listen to new music, totally new meaningful relationships! Heck, 9 times out of 10 even the album year is all wrong with these services! (I know, all these "remastered" editions from the labels don't help at all). And they don't even need to build those datasets, they are already there, just ask (or buy out) discogs.com!
- joshvm 5y ago
  I understand Spotify actually has an advanced search (including range queries, lyric match and metadata like labels) but it's not documented well and the app itself doesn't present any options to the user. https://support.spotify.com/us/article/search/ https://support.spotify.com/us/article/search/
  - achairapart 5y ago
    Interesting! I never heard about those advanced search tags, at least there's something. Thanks!
- conradev 5y ago
  Much of that data is in these services, in some form, for billing Too bad that exposing it is likely too “niche” for them to prioritize
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Musicbrainz has the most of this kind of information. I often use it to find out where/year the songs from a compilation came from. Wikipedia as well, though it is unstructured.
- isolli 5y ago
  There are such niche services for classical music. For instance, idagio.com is really excellent with metadata. You see e.g. all works by a performer or all performers of a work.
gonehome 5y ago
There's something sad to me about the verge article that's linked inside of the hn post (https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...) There's often a trope that young people are good with computers, but I think this is mostly false. Here some (maybe significant percentage) of college freshman don't know how to save a file?
- hateful 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28615884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28615884
jjcon 5y ago
I ripped my Apple Music library and switched to Plex (listening via plexamp - also looked at Jellyfin with finamp) because I thought Apple music was pushing music completely outside of my tastes (and particularly American centric) and was becoming too antagonistic to personalization and libraries. I think I prefer finding music and musicians 'the hard way'. When you have 'everything' the urge to find new things disappears at least in my opinion. I now buy a lot of music, mostly on bandcamp and I even subscribe to a few artists monthly. I find this experience far more rewarding but to each there own.
rsync 5y ago
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/itunes-view-options.png https://www.tech-recipes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/itun... ... and note all of the fine-grained ways to sort by ... but also note that the most basic attribute of all (filename) is missing. I am not sure for whom iTunes and its interface is optimized for but I do know that any sane way I could imagine of moving my music onto an iPhone is totally impossible.
- LgWoodenBadger 5y ago
  Help me understand how filename is useful in a way that other metadata doesn’t already cover, please.
  - littlecranky67 5y ago
    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 databases like Musicbrainz etc. are not a thing there, and sets are usually not commercially sold - so all metadata would also have to be manually entered. In case anybody wonders about the (legal) sourcing, in most parts of Europe it is still perfectly legal to record radio stations, locally download from Youtube/Soundcloud etc. and even share/copy with close friends and family. And the market for livemixes is huge in the youtube era, see productions from Cercle, Boiler Room etc.
    - bin_bash 5y ago
      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?
taylodl 5y ago
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 library. At least all the music is there and I can play everything. The frustrating thing is some of the album artwork has been lost - even though they're there in the library that was imported! On my iPhone I use a music player called Plum. I love it. I wish something similar existed for MacOS.
- kall 5y ago
  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!
  - iggldiggl 5y ago
    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…
tehnub 5y ago
>Uploading your music to the cloud and streaming them as any other song This is the reason I switched from Spotify to Apple Music. It’s just such a convenient feature.
hasbot 5y ago
I keep a copy of my entire music library on my phone and don't use any music service at all. I have over 13,000 songs across over 1200 albums and 500 artists. I don't need to find any more music; there's plenty of good songs in my library that I haven't fully absorbed yet.
- Gatsky 5y ago
  iOS or Android? What do you use to listen?
  - hasbot 5y ago
    Android. I use GoneMAD Music Player 2.3.2 (the rewritten 3.0.X version is a buggy mess with no new useful features), but really any music player will do.
  - loudtieblahblah 5y ago
    you can't do this on iOS. Even if you could get a phone with a large enough SDcard, natively ... transfering that much to the phone would be prohibitively painful. And one might be tempted to go through that once, but to go through it every time you get a new phone would drive you mad. I have a 500GB card in my android and have 70% of my digital collection on it. I, also, make the card the primary destination for my photo/videos from my camera. I have my own home-grown backup solution. A mix of my own backup solution combined with the SDcard means i never have to rely on cloud services to my music, nor to backup my valuable files. But this chapter in my life is coming to a close as phones increasingly take away sdcards. Eventually my phone will fall back to just being my phone again. Because i refuse to use their services to replace functionality they took away. I use PowerAmp music player. It's the most full features player out there that's got a good deal of polish to it, IMHO.
    - danaris 5y ago
      > 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 option when syncing your music to convert higher-bitrate music to 128kbps (or 192 or 256kbps, your preference) AAC files. I guarantee you, a library the size of hasbot's will fit on an iPhone with no problem. I have no idea where you get the idea that you can't fit a decent-sized music library on an iPhone. Maybe you're one of those who believes that only lossless audio is worth listening to, and didn't consider that that's a niche opinion...?
mixmastamyk 5y ago
I don't think any of these things play my flacs either. Never been enamored of monthly payments as well so am unsurprisingly not a fan.
daigoba66 5y ago
It was a sad day when Rdio was bought by Pandora and shutdown. They were the best.
burnte 5y ago
Amazon Music has a library too.
- notyourwork 5y ago
  It's an under represented service IMO and a top contender in the space of streaming. edit: spelling.
nixpulvis 5y ago
"Add to Library" is a joke, there's nothing stopping them from deleting things at will. Sometimes they stay around but wont play, other times the magically disappear forever. It's insanity producing.
- stillblue 5y ago
  I've had so many of my favorite tracks disabled/gone this way. :(
Demcox 5y ago
Had been a die-hard Spotify user since it launced but was so aggrevated with podcasts being presented using the same method behind foie gras. Apple Music stood out as the obvious choice (iPhone and OSX user) and I have not looked back since I migrated last summer. Their way of structuring also made more intuitive sense - can't really pin point why. Also, a really nice plus that AM offers true lossless for free (yes, I have proper external equipment for listning and not just AirPods Pro lol).
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alliao 5y ago
I'm in my late 30s and nostalgic listening have taken up most of my listening time. turning into my dad basically. zero regrets though.
Shadonototra 5y ago
no it's not, they are all the same is OP trying to pump his portfolio? that's what he meant by "library focused"?
mediocregopher 5y ago
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 aren't seeing stream money anyway. People will gripe and complain about how much "work" it is to maintain these things, but let's be real: every single person in here has at least one friend who'd be willing to host something like this for them. What it comes down to is that we're in the habit of relying on big tech companies rather than the folks around us. But habits can be broken.
- deanCommie 5y ago
  You're incredibly wrong, but in a very classic way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 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 reading? Sure. But the point is that these concepts are not nearly as ubiquitous as you might think. 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.
  - mediocregopher 5y ago
    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.
  - CSSer 5y ago
    What if you paid someone else to host the music server for you and all your friends? Oh... Wait.
- 5y ago
verisimilitude 5y ago
Since I don't listen to much music on my phone, I've actually taken in a step further: my Apple Music local library music files are stored in a .sparsebundle on my NAS. I wrote a little Obj-C app to automatically mount and unmount that sparsebundle when I open and close Apple Music (née iTunes) on MacOS. This prevents the sparsebundle from becoming corrupted, as they tend to do. Then, I use that same little Obj-C app to detect when I'm away from home and open a VPN connection to my NAS's network. So, wherever I am, I can stream music on my laptop from my local library. After doing this for a few years instead of paying for Apple Music, it has already saved the cost of the NAS and its hard drives.
supernovae 5y ago
I wish apple music would directly support Sonos Streaming, i'd switch over from Spotify in a heartbeat if they did Sonos direct like Spotify does. Not switching everything to apple play..
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peatmoss 5y ago
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 frustrating it is to not be able to stream an album as the artist intended it to be heard.
- rozab 5y ago
  Alas, it still fails to loop Nonagon Infinity seamlessly
  - peatmoss 5y ago
    Hadn’t heard of that, and I also didn’t know that CDs could reference back to a previous track that way. Also interesting music… cheers!
    - seba_dos1 5y ago
      They can't, it's the music that loops if you play it back with no gaps, which not all CD players will be able to do (it needs to be buffered because of seeking latency). Easy to achieve with local playback from files though.
- piva00 5y ago
  I get proper gapless playback in Spotify and have had it for years. To be honest I can't remember a time it didn't work. I listen to quite a lot of classical music and avant-garde music where albums are basically one song divided in multiple tracks, they work seamlessly.
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  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.
tshaddox 5y ago
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 that I've never heard of because they had a single track in some playlist that I added to my library. I can understand why it works this way, but boy is it frustrating. I would love to have a manually-curated set of albums (viewable by album name or by artist) totally separate from the ability to add playlists to my library.
- erdaltoprak 5y ago
  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!
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    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.
    - kall 5y ago
      This setting is going to change your life (maybe hyperbole...). It's one of the things that makes me really appreciate Apple Music. With this setting, and an interface that can group playlists by album and filter them by artist, you can get as many additional "virtual libraries" as you want, kinda like Twitter lists. Remember you can also put playlists themselves into folders and create dynamic playlists. You can assemble music for various situations or events, manage things like "planning to check out" etc without polluting your core library. If you want to go deep on this and use iOS, check out Marvis Pro also.
footlose_3815 5y ago
Plex is a great local service for a library focused approach.
jfrunyon 5y ago
As TFA mentions: Plex is a wonderful service, if obtaining your own music isn't a problem for you. It's actually gotten a lot better since the days when the UI would become unresponsive with a mere few thousand songs. And Plexamp's radio features are great, as is the Tidal integration for those songs that I don't yet have locally. I have mine configured to prefer local tags over Plex's data, and I tag/organize everything with MusicBrainz Picard to ensure accuracy.
newfonewhodis 5y ago
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.
- movedx 5y ago
  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.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  I can't praise Plex enough. Life changing. I've accumulated so much media over the years it was becoming a hassle to manage.
- anaganisk 5y ago
  Ah basecamp, I can collaborate with my team using music :p
blindmute 5y ago
Downloading flac audio files and syncing them to wherever has been working fine for the last 15+N years. I've never felt the need to subscribe to any music service. All the less so if you want a 'library-focused' experience. My method doesn't have shitty UI downgrades, it doesn't remove albums randomly, it doesn't play ads, it doesn't collect my data, it doesn't have compatibility issues, it doesn't have downtime, it doesn't require internet connection, you have full control over all aspects.
- baby 5y ago
  The game changer for me: at any point in time if I like the music I’m hearing I pull up my phone, launch shazam, get the music from apple music directly into my library. It’s seamless enough that I don’t see myself going back.
- AlfeG 5y ago
  I have used to download mp3s. But it so much easier now to upload my music to YandexMusic and able to listen offline not only uploaded, but any other also.
wanderer_ 5y ago
For me, having a local music library is doubly as important because I am often out of reliable cell service. I usually rip CDs to my iPhone, but as of yet I have avoided paying for any music services. I generally prefer to own my music rather than rely on pulling it down from somebody's server, not to mention that streaming audio uses significant battery on a mobile device. I use YT music when I have reliable internet and I want to listen to something I don't own.
baby 5y ago
I did some research a while ago, and there was basically only Apple Music combined with iTunes Match that could work for me: lots of music in my library already.
jimt1234 5y ago
Recently, I found a bunch of mp3 files on an old flash-drive. I copied them to my laptop and played them. After using music services (Pandora, Amazon, Spotify, Google Play, YT Music, etc.), I found the experience to be amazing. I forgot what responsiveness was like when listening to music. I pressed "Next" and, instantly, the next song started playing; no short, but annoying delay. I scrolled through songs to my favorite part, and once again, no delays. There were no commercials. No terrible "suggestions". I didn't feel like someone was watching my every click, every song choice. It was just music, like the good old days of 2009. :)
- justsomeuser 5y ago
  Reminds me of my WinAmp playlist
miiiiiike 5y ago
Apple Music is close to perfect. When you find the right Apple Music 1 show and show playlist for you it’s incredible. I wish there was an API so I could write a DJ bot that would allow my Discord to queue and play tracks in an audio channel.
- erdaltoprak 5y ago
  Hi, Maybe this MusicKit web api could help your Discord bot project! https://developer.apple.com/documentation/musickitjs https://developer.apple.com/documentation/musickitjs
oxplot 5y ago
I salute all companies/services that have made managing music a thing of the past (Apple is up there as the catalyst back in early 2000s). For next to nothing, I can listen to any song ever recorded without having to worry about where to keep them, back them up, etc. I used to have a 3K song collection in FLAC which I had curated and spent a gazzilion $$$ on. I `rm -Rf`ed it in a heartbeat when Apple introduced lossless streaming. I have learnt that maintaining a music library (even on a cloud service) is an absolute, utter waste of time. YMMV.

175 points by erdaltoprak 5y ago

> This article explains how students do not follow the same organization paradigm based on folders and local file management. This could be, in part, attributed to the new ways young students learn, which is on online first operating systems or tablets, where by default, the local system is hidden and also where everything is done through applications. For me it was because I realized that the time I spent doing this had exactly zero benefit. At least to me. This quote comes off as somewhat elitist. If someone hasn't developed the same workflow as you, that doesn't mean they are less informed or skilled.

neogodless 5y ago
> This quote comes off as somewhat elitist. At least out of context, I don't see any judgement words in the quoted text to suggest one way is better than the other. It's a bit like saying "people put food in their fridge and take it out, without ever stopping to check if the refrigerant is still working. This might be because they didn't grow up with having to refill the ice box."
pfortuny 5y ago
It is not elitist. Really: it is just a guy trying to find an explanation to something that gets his attention. There is no adjective in it.
beerandt 5y ago
I was recently at an office where there were a dozen or so student workers studying for a test that required them to print out some things to bring. The buildings internet was out, and not a single one of them realized you could save a file (while connected to cellular data) and then connect to wifi and print it. They had only ever been taught to print directly from apps. Sometimes it does mean they're less informed and skilled.
erdaltoprak 5y ago
Hi, I’m sorry if it appeared that way, it was quite difficult for me to covey properly my thoughts on this subject. I wanted to portray that it just makes sense that music software isn’t made that way anymore since a lot of people do not follow that kind of paradigm anymore. I don’t think there is only one good answer about how to tackle music software. I hope my answer cleared this up!
- cuddlybacon 5y ago
  Hi op, Based on some other comments I think the elitist remark is uncalled for in this situation. Looking again, you were neutral on it. I just assumed it was meant negatively.

lolsal 5y ago

The more I use a streaming music service like Spotify, the more new music I find, but the shorter my musical memory becomes.

btown 5y ago
If you consistently like/heart songs as you go along, put your Liked Songs list on shuffle sometime - you'll find great old gems!
- lolsal 5y ago
  I do this! It's great, but discoverability/brows-ability is lost.
- jdpedrie 5y ago
  This hardly works at all for me. Spotify will happily shuffle the most recent 75-100 songs on my Liked Songs list, but something from 2012? Forget about it.
  - lolsal 5y ago
    I thought I was just imagining this behavior. Humans are bad at 'random', but I swear when I randomly play my 300+ song playlist, I tend to hear the same 20-40 songs over a couple hours.
jl6 5y ago
I believe memory formation is aided by multi-sensory perceptions. The experience of going somewhere to buy a CD, unwrapping it, opening it, putting it in a specific player at a certain time of the day, getting up to hit the next track button… this is a much richer set of experiences that form a much tighter web of recollection than just the audio alone. These experiences may all be totally mundane or even tiresome, but they help cement the memory of the music. This is why you remember something more if you write it down - you get not just the memory of a fact but also the tactile experience of holding a pencil, feeling the paper, of an aching wrist… Passively streaming someone else’s (or an algorithm’s) choice of music in the background is probably the worst possible way to build music memory because you don’t even have the association of choosing or even reading the track title. Ritual serves a purpose.

shmerl 5y ago

I prefer to buy, not rent music. Bandcamp is good for it and they sell FLAC. This is also fitting comparison to cassettes library a lot more than Apple Music where it's not your library, but Apple's. Other stores like 7digital are also good.

etchalon 5y ago
You can buy DRM free files from Apple. So the file is yours, transferrable, but you also can always go back and get another copy from Apple. The combination of the iTunes Store, Apple Music, and iTunes Match is the most expansive music service offering I can think of.
- grumpyprole 5y ago
  iTunes won't even play FLAC files, so it's rather inconvenient for people with existing libraries. Yes I know I could convert it all to some proprietary Apple format, but it's easier to just not buy an iPhone.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - deleted 5y ago
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- shmerl 5y ago
  Not from Apple Music though? I thought it's rent only. iTunes sells files, yes. I still prefer stores that sell FLAC. Apple's aversion to common open audio formats always irritated me.
  - jjcon 5y ago
    Apple Music is DRM yes (it can be de-DRMed though fairly easily), purchased music from iTunes is DRM free.
    - 5y ago

hammock 5y ago

Is there a library-focused video streaming service?

zwily 5y ago
Maybe Plex?
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  Plex and its father KODI are very good for local. There are plugins for external stuff. But the quality is kind of random and subject to the whims of whatever SaaS they are scraping.

gglitch 5y ago

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.

tptacek 5y ago
Music is probably one of the only services where I get value out of being tracked and logged; I listen to enough different artists that it's very easy to lose track of something, and to find myself in a rut of listening to the same 10 artists for weeks on end. One thing Apple Music does pretty well is providing a bunch of different gradually-learning thingies that keep the rotation fresh.
amelius 5y ago
Minor conveniences will destroy the world.
ghaff 5y ago
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 all the organizational effort. And also TBH for files (and email) in general I used to spend a fair amount of effort filing into hierarchical structures. These days I do a bit of rudimentary sending to an archive folder or tag, delete older stuff (or not), and figure I can find something with search if I really need it. And, if I can't, it probably wasn't worth the effort to do the upfront librarian work anyway.
- lloeki 5y ago
  > all the organizational effort. Musicbrainz Picard helps a lot with that.
5y ago

orobinson 5y ago

This is exactly why I started using Apple Music. Some of my music collection isn’t on streaming platforms but Apple Music let’s me host it and stream it in a library right alongside music I don’t “own”. I also generally like the paradigm of being able to collect streamed music into a library so I can come back to things again and again. Back when I last used Spotify around 2015 I used the starred playlist to do this but it was no substitute for just being able to see a collection of albums. I’m not sure if Spotify’s UX around having a “library” of music had improved since then.

RileyJames 5y ago
This is why I use Bandcamp. I don’t trust apple not to change the deal at some point. Where as with band camp I actually own things.
- tempodox 5y ago
  What I love most about Bandcamp is that you can download your music in lossless compression (ALAC/FLAC). It beats lossy compressions every time with the headphones I use.
- xoa 5y ago
  I mean, I'm 100% with you on Bandcamp being absolutely awesome. But I'm not sure what you mean by this?: >I don’t trust apple not to change the deal at some point. Where as with band camp I actually own things. The whole point here though is that the "deal" if you're just doing your own library sync is that it's your own library. Yeah you can listen to Apple Music's streaming stuff too and in that case it could indeed presumably vanish at some point (I don't think it'd be at all about Apple though, it'd be about the actual rights holders, Apple doesn't own the copyright on most[any?] of this stuff). But if one chooses to make their own library the core source of truth, the worst that could happen there would be Apple throwing in the towel on the cloud match stuff. There'd be no more seamless easy sync of libraries between devices in that case (unless they astonished by enabling a selfhost/LAN version of that again) but it's not like you'd lose anything at all. Everything you own you'd still own.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

The product referred to as "Apple Music" isn't library focused. The app now known as Music and the service known as "iTunes Match" is. Apple Music is the music as a service subscription that keeps pushing adverts in app and keeps turning itself back on even if you're not subscribed and have turned it off.

LeoPanthera 5y ago
All the features of "iTunes Match" are included in Apple Music as long as you have "Sync Library" turned on. For a while there was a subtle difference in that music uploaded to Apple Music would have DRM applied to it, and iTunes Match would not, but this is no longer the case.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  Is DRM applied to iTunes Match too now? That's unfortunate.
  - ComputerGuru 5y ago
    I just checked - not so far as I can see.
  - kall 5y ago
    No. Just drag a matched track out of the music app or import it in various iOS apps, it's a DRM free AAC file.
  - ratww 5y ago
    Oh wow… If it is, I will probably rethink my subscription. I have uploaded a lot of music I bought in other services or ripped legally from CDs I physically own, adding DRM to things I own feels immoral to me. Wish there were more alternative mobile OSs and platforms. Apple is getting on my nerves too much lately.
    - jghn 5y ago
      Likewise. IIRC Apple Music is a lot more (3x?) expensive than iTunes Match so not sure if the price increase would be worth it to me. But my thinking it wouldn't track my library was what made Apple Music a nonstarter for me.

andrewla 5y ago

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 finally to reorganize my classical music so that the artist was the composer and the orchestra/performer name was just munged into the album title (obviously deeper nesting would have been better, but this worked well). Now with YTM even browsing by artist is nearly impossible, and when you do, it doesn't display the albums by that artist that you've added to your collection, it just displays everything, so there's no real way to avoid seeing 20 copies of the same album remastered at different times mixed in with "pop rock of the 90s" collections. It's just dreadful. All I want is a music service that lets me access an unlimited virtual store and bring whatever content I want and organize it recursively by tags (i.e. when I navigate to "artist" it presents me with the ability to narrow my search by "composer" or "album" or whatever). I stick with YTM mostly because it came with free ad-free YouTube. There is no public API to talk to the service, though, so I can't even build my own frontend (although there are numerous hacks, most of which involve checking your plaintext password into a git repository, which of course means compromising your gmail account which is essentially the end of the world).

willis936 5y ago
I've been on the same journey. My plan is to self host plex. Cache the music I want, VPN/stream when I want to add more to the cache.
- kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
  I have Qobuz combined with mpd (there's a plugin). It's not the cheapest but it's decent for what you get and the UI is simple and doesn't get in your way. My only regret is that it doesn't have lyrics AFAIK.
echelon 5y ago
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 would be a game changer. Add in tags and multi-dimensional ranking, and I'd be in heaven. Add an API, and I'll gladly pay $50/mo. I want iTunes 1.0, but with the ability to sync between the cloud and all of my devices. With smart playlists that can operate over my tags and ratings. That's it. No music videos, no real need for album art or lyrics, but certainly no UI removed for simplicity or dumbing down the product. I want to index and traverse my music in my own way.

krrishd 5y ago

- 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, mixtapes/etc that never made it to streaming but that I have mp3s for, album art that I want to swap out, etc. I do fear that these might all be incidental features and they eventually re-orient to mimic Spotify's approach more closely.

iggldiggl 5y ago
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.

LeoPanthera 5y ago

I use Plex to stream my local music library. The "Plexamp" client player is, well, buggy as hell, but it mostly works, and will transcode on the fly if it needs to. As a bonus it works for videos too.

victorbstan 5y ago

This is why I find it extremely irritating when non apple users can’t understand why I use apple stuff. On many levels, not just music, they offer things others don’t.

achairapart 5y ago

Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Music or whatever now is called. I tried them all. They are all the same to me. There is one big thing that all these streaming services are missing: *METADATA* Give me all the album by this label, all the songs produced by X or all the songs where in Y plays drums. All the albums recorded at some studio in the year Z. With tools like this I will spend years (and whatever money) on your service. They will give me unexplored ways to find and listen to new music, totally new meaningful relationships! Heck, 9 times out of 10 even the album year is all wrong with these services! (I know, all these "remastered" editions from the labels don't help at all). And they don't even need to build those datasets, they are already there, just ask (or buy out) discogs.com!

joshvm 5y ago
I understand Spotify actually has an advanced search (including range queries, lyric match and metadata like labels) but it's not documented well and the app itself doesn't present any options to the user. https://support.spotify.com/us/article/search/ https://support.spotify.com/us/article/search/
- achairapart 5y ago
  Interesting! I never heard about those advanced search tags, at least there's something. Thanks!
conradev 5y ago
Much of that data is in these services, in some form, for billing Too bad that exposing it is likely too “niche” for them to prioritize
mixmastamyk 5y ago
Musicbrainz has the most of this kind of information. I often use it to find out where/year the songs from a compilation came from. Wikipedia as well, though it is unstructured.
isolli 5y ago
There are such niche services for classical music. For instance, idagio.com is really excellent with metadata. You see e.g. all works by a performer or all performers of a work.

gonehome 5y ago

There's something sad to me about the verge article that's linked inside of the hn post (https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...) There's often a trope that young people are good with computers, but I think this is mostly false. Here some (maybe significant percentage) of college freshman don't know how to save a file?

hateful 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28615884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28615884

jjcon 5y ago

I ripped my Apple Music library and switched to Plex (listening via plexamp - also looked at Jellyfin with finamp) because I thought Apple music was pushing music completely outside of my tastes (and particularly American centric) and was becoming too antagonistic to personalization and libraries. I think I prefer finding music and musicians 'the hard way'. When you have 'everything' the urge to find new things disappears at least in my opinion. I now buy a lot of music, mostly on bandcamp and I even subscribe to a few artists monthly. I find this experience far more rewarding but to each there own.

rsync 5y ago

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/itunes-view-options.png https://www.tech-recipes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/itun... ... and note all of the fine-grained ways to sort by ... but also note that the most basic attribute of all (filename) is missing. I am not sure for whom iTunes and its interface is optimized for but I do know that any sane way I could imagine of moving my music onto an iPhone is totally impossible.

LgWoodenBadger 5y ago
Help me understand how filename is useful in a way that other metadata doesn’t already cover, please.
- littlecranky67 5y ago
  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 databases like Musicbrainz etc. are not a thing there, and sets are usually not commercially sold - so all metadata would also have to be manually entered. In case anybody wonders about the (legal) sourcing, in most parts of Europe it is still perfectly legal to record radio stations, locally download from Youtube/Soundcloud etc. and even share/copy with close friends and family. And the market for livemixes is huge in the youtube era, see productions from Cercle, Boiler Room etc.
  - bin_bash 5y ago
    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?

taylodl 5y ago

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 library. At least all the music is there and I can play everything. The frustrating thing is some of the album artwork has been lost - even though they're there in the library that was imported! On my iPhone I use a music player called Plum. I love it. I wish something similar existed for MacOS.

kall 5y ago
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!
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  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…

tehnub 5y ago

>Uploading your music to the cloud and streaming them as any other song This is the reason I switched from Spotify to Apple Music. It’s just such a convenient feature.

hasbot 5y ago

I keep a copy of my entire music library on my phone and don't use any music service at all. I have over 13,000 songs across over 1200 albums and 500 artists. I don't need to find any more music; there's plenty of good songs in my library that I haven't fully absorbed yet.

Gatsky 5y ago
iOS or Android? What do you use to listen?
- hasbot 5y ago
  Android. I use GoneMAD Music Player 2.3.2 (the rewritten 3.0.X version is a buggy mess with no new useful features), but really any music player will do.
- loudtieblahblah 5y ago
  you can't do this on iOS. Even if you could get a phone with a large enough SDcard, natively ... transfering that much to the phone would be prohibitively painful. And one might be tempted to go through that once, but to go through it every time you get a new phone would drive you mad. I have a 500GB card in my android and have 70% of my digital collection on it. I, also, make the card the primary destination for my photo/videos from my camera. I have my own home-grown backup solution. A mix of my own backup solution combined with the SDcard means i never have to rely on cloud services to my music, nor to backup my valuable files. But this chapter in my life is coming to a close as phones increasingly take away sdcards. Eventually my phone will fall back to just being my phone again. Because i refuse to use their services to replace functionality they took away. I use PowerAmp music player. It's the most full features player out there that's got a good deal of polish to it, IMHO.
  - danaris 5y ago
    > 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 option when syncing your music to convert higher-bitrate music to 128kbps (or 192 or 256kbps, your preference) AAC files. I guarantee you, a library the size of hasbot's will fit on an iPhone with no problem. I have no idea where you get the idea that you can't fit a decent-sized music library on an iPhone. Maybe you're one of those who believes that only lossless audio is worth listening to, and didn't consider that that's a niche opinion...?

mixmastamyk 5y ago

I don't think any of these things play my flacs either. Never been enamored of monthly payments as well so am unsurprisingly not a fan.

daigoba66 5y ago

It was a sad day when Rdio was bought by Pandora and shutdown. They were the best.

burnte 5y ago

Amazon Music has a library too.

notyourwork 5y ago
It's an under represented service IMO and a top contender in the space of streaming. edit: spelling.

nixpulvis 5y ago

"Add to Library" is a joke, there's nothing stopping them from deleting things at will. Sometimes they stay around but wont play, other times the magically disappear forever. It's insanity producing.

stillblue 5y ago
I've had so many of my favorite tracks disabled/gone this way. :(

Demcox 5y ago

Had been a die-hard Spotify user since it launced but was so aggrevated with podcasts being presented using the same method behind foie gras. Apple Music stood out as the obvious choice (iPhone and OSX user) and I have not looked back since I migrated last summer. Their way of structuring also made more intuitive sense - can't really pin point why. Also, a really nice plus that AM offers true lossless for free (yes, I have proper external equipment for listning and not just AirPods Pro lol).

deleted 5y ago

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alliao 5y ago

I'm in my late 30s and nostalgic listening have taken up most of my listening time. turning into my dad basically. zero regrets though.

Shadonototra 5y ago

no it's not, they are all the same is OP trying to pump his portfolio? that's what he meant by "library focused"?

mediocregopher 5y ago

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 aren't seeing stream money anyway. People will gripe and complain about how much "work" it is to maintain these things, but let's be real: every single person in here has at least one friend who'd be willing to host something like this for them. What it comes down to is that we're in the habit of relying on big tech companies rather than the folks around us. But habits can be broken.

deanCommie 5y ago
You're incredibly wrong, but in a very classic way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 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 reading? Sure. But the point is that these concepts are not nearly as ubiquitous as you might think. 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.
- mediocregopher 5y ago
  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.
- CSSer 5y ago
  What if you paid someone else to host the music server for you and all your friends? Oh... Wait.
5y ago

verisimilitude 5y ago

Since I don't listen to much music on my phone, I've actually taken in a step further: my Apple Music local library music files are stored in a .sparsebundle on my NAS. I wrote a little Obj-C app to automatically mount and unmount that sparsebundle when I open and close Apple Music (née iTunes) on MacOS. This prevents the sparsebundle from becoming corrupted, as they tend to do. Then, I use that same little Obj-C app to detect when I'm away from home and open a VPN connection to my NAS's network. So, wherever I am, I can stream music on my laptop from my local library. After doing this for a few years instead of paying for Apple Music, it has already saved the cost of the NAS and its hard drives.

supernovae 5y ago

I wish apple music would directly support Sonos Streaming, i'd switch over from Spotify in a heartbeat if they did Sonos direct like Spotify does. Not switching everything to apple play..

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

peatmoss 5y ago

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 frustrating it is to not be able to stream an album as the artist intended it to be heard.

rozab 5y ago
Alas, it still fails to loop Nonagon Infinity seamlessly
- peatmoss 5y ago
  Hadn’t heard of that, and I also didn’t know that CDs could reference back to a previous track that way. Also interesting music… cheers!
  - seba_dos1 5y ago
    They can't, it's the music that loops if you play it back with no gaps, which not all CD players will be able to do (it needs to be buffered because of seeking latency). Easy to achieve with local playback from files though.
piva00 5y ago
I get proper gapless playback in Spotify and have had it for years. To be honest I can't remember a time it didn't work. I listen to quite a lot of classical music and avant-garde music where albums are basically one song divided in multiple tracks, they work seamlessly.
iggldiggl 5y ago
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.

tshaddox 5y ago

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 that I've never heard of because they had a single track in some playlist that I added to my library. I can understand why it works this way, but boy is it frustrating. I would love to have a manually-curated set of albums (viewable by album name or by artist) totally separate from the ability to add playlists to my library.

erdaltoprak 5y ago
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!
- tshaddox 5y ago
  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.
  - kall 5y ago
    This setting is going to change your life (maybe hyperbole...). It's one of the things that makes me really appreciate Apple Music. With this setting, and an interface that can group playlists by album and filter them by artist, you can get as many additional "virtual libraries" as you want, kinda like Twitter lists. Remember you can also put playlists themselves into folders and create dynamic playlists. You can assemble music for various situations or events, manage things like "planning to check out" etc without polluting your core library. If you want to go deep on this and use iOS, check out Marvis Pro also.

footlose_3815 5y ago

Plex is a great local service for a library focused approach.

jfrunyon 5y ago

As TFA mentions: Plex is a wonderful service, if obtaining your own music isn't a problem for you. It's actually gotten a lot better since the days when the UI would become unresponsive with a mere few thousand songs. And Plexamp's radio features are great, as is the Tidal integration for those songs that I don't yet have locally. I have mine configured to prefer local tags over Plex's data, and I tag/organize everything with MusicBrainz Picard to ensure accuracy.

newfonewhodis 5y ago

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.

movedx 5y ago
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.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
I can't praise Plex enough. Life changing. I've accumulated so much media over the years it was becoming a hassle to manage.
anaganisk 5y ago
Ah basecamp, I can collaborate with my team using music :p

blindmute 5y ago

Downloading flac audio files and syncing them to wherever has been working fine for the last 15+N years. I've never felt the need to subscribe to any music service. All the less so if you want a 'library-focused' experience. My method doesn't have shitty UI downgrades, it doesn't remove albums randomly, it doesn't play ads, it doesn't collect my data, it doesn't have compatibility issues, it doesn't have downtime, it doesn't require internet connection, you have full control over all aspects.

baby 5y ago
The game changer for me: at any point in time if I like the music I’m hearing I pull up my phone, launch shazam, get the music from apple music directly into my library. It’s seamless enough that I don’t see myself going back.
AlfeG 5y ago
I have used to download mp3s. But it so much easier now to upload my music to YandexMusic and able to listen offline not only uploaded, but any other also.

wanderer_ 5y ago

For me, having a local music library is doubly as important because I am often out of reliable cell service. I usually rip CDs to my iPhone, but as of yet I have avoided paying for any music services. I generally prefer to own my music rather than rely on pulling it down from somebody's server, not to mention that streaming audio uses significant battery on a mobile device. I use YT music when I have reliable internet and I want to listen to something I don't own.

baby 5y ago

I did some research a while ago, and there was basically only Apple Music combined with iTunes Match that could work for me: lots of music in my library already.

jimt1234 5y ago

Recently, I found a bunch of mp3 files on an old flash-drive. I copied them to my laptop and played them. After using music services (Pandora, Amazon, Spotify, Google Play, YT Music, etc.), I found the experience to be amazing. I forgot what responsiveness was like when listening to music. I pressed "Next" and, instantly, the next song started playing; no short, but annoying delay. I scrolled through songs to my favorite part, and once again, no delays. There were no commercials. No terrible "suggestions". I didn't feel like someone was watching my every click, every song choice. It was just music, like the good old days of 2009. :)

justsomeuser 5y ago
Reminds me of my WinAmp playlist

miiiiiike 5y ago

Apple Music is close to perfect. When you find the right Apple Music 1 show and show playlist for you it’s incredible. I wish there was an API so I could write a DJ bot that would allow my Discord to queue and play tracks in an audio channel.

erdaltoprak 5y ago
Hi, Maybe this MusicKit web api could help your Discord bot project! https://developer.apple.com/documentation/musickitjs https://developer.apple.com/documentation/musickitjs

oxplot 5y ago

I salute all companies/services that have made managing music a thing of the past (Apple is up there as the catalyst back in early 2000s). For next to nothing, I can listen to any song ever recorded without having to worry about where to keep them, back them up, etc. I used to have a 3K song collection in FLAC which I had curated and spent a gazzilion $$$ on. I `rm -Rf`ed it in a heartbeat when Apple introduced lossless streaming. I have learnt that maintaining a music library (even on a cloud service) is an absolute, utter waste of time. YMMV.