7 ms·

Building a digital music collection in 2023

90 points by ingve 3y ago

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
This guy overthought it... use Plex, so you can stream it. Don't be syncing large folders of files everywhere with git. And if you don't like Plex, there's a half dozen other comparable software titles that will stream audio. As for "smaller files" fuck that shit. For the longest time, I went with 320kbps mp3s. I was limited in the space I could dedicate to music (a few hundred gigabytes). But now? Storage is only cheaper. Get FLAC for everything. And the cloud? I think that's called "someone else's computer" or so I've heard. Stream/sync it from home.
- baal80spam 3y ago
  You won't hear a difference between FLAC and 320kbps encoded MP3 99% of the time, so why waste 10x more space for a FLAC?
  - mr_sturd 3y ago
    Storage is cheap. Plus you might want/need to re-encode to another format down the line and any lossless format is better as the master copy.
    - grumpyprole 3y ago
      Don't forget also that re-encoding often happens with wireless streaming technologies such as Bluetooth. The effects of this are much less well studied. Bluetooth has more chance of sounding fine with a lossless source like FLAC.
      - mr_sturd 3y ago
        Agreed - I have my collection encoded in Opus on my phone's SD card. Tempted to do the same for my in-home setup to lock the sample rate at 48KHz - my tired old home server struggles to down-sample the higher resolution FLACs that I have before throwing it to SnapCast.
  - doublepg23 3y ago
    I’ve gone back and forth on the question but with storage costs as they are I always have a Source of Truth in FLAC. For listening I figure I’ve spent so much $$ on my setup I’d be dumb not to ensure the source is not perfect too - for free.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    While true... I figured out how little I was saving by not doing FLAC. And there wasn't a point in saving that storage. I've got plenty, and that's with 5 bays still empty in the Synology. I only wish I could do the same with video.
  - zh3 3y ago
    One day you might want to transcode - compression artifacts may well not be audible in normal use, different compression algorithms drop different bits though and so the result of transcoding between compressed formats is quite often an audible (even to my distinctly non-golden ears) loss of quality. Thus FLAC (as a reliable lossless format) - or even WAV (I chose to take the 2:1, 3:1 compression of FLAC over WAV personally).
  - danbee 3y ago
    10x? More like 2-3x
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    Besides the fact that storage is cheap, FLAC has a more ample metadata model than MP3 and I'm already used to working with the toolchain for that metadata.
- doublepg23 3y ago
  Yup. I use beets.io to push downloaded, tagged FLACs to my NAS and then Plexamp for music streaming.
  - flir 3y ago
    What's that got over MusicBrainz Picard, out of curiosity?
    - rpearl 3y ago
      it can detect duplicates in your collection because it maintains a small database of what it's seen. Great for ingesting the big pile and cleaning up
    - doublepg23 3y ago
      I was just on a CLI kick when I discovered it. At this point it’s inertia and knowing the quirks quite well.
Gualdrapo 3y ago
It's more interesting to me the fact they tried to recreate a LaTeX article design in their website. But without hyphenation... Though about the subject of the post I too am still kind of a retro-grouch regarding the music I listen to. Everything is stored in my computer and I listen to it with ncmpc - even did a little dumb patch to change that horrible progress bar with a straight thin line, but I like it more than ncmpcpp that feels kind of bloated. I got a bluetooth speaker so I can "stream" to it when don't feel like playing it from my computer for whatever reason, and with KDEConnect can control it with my phone. I'm using mpdbus[0] to bridge mpd to mpris and kid3 to tag songs. No longer carry around music in my phone but when I did everything was in a micro SD card. I got an USB adaptor for it just in case, so I guess that makes it for the "streaming" capability. [0] https://github.com/mpostaire/mpdbus https://github.com/mpostaire/mpdbus
- zh3 3y ago
  ncmpc used to be this simple little thing, now it seems to be a C++ mess that doesn't even have backward compatibility (so here sticking with an old version thats works with MPD). Ref. patches, I use a cheap Amazon RF remote to control MPD - essentially a bit of code that receives button clicks and controls volume. forward/back etc. Low tech FTW :)
zh3 3y ago
Having built a rather large CD collection (over the decades since there were like 5 albums available on CD), eventually I used a rack of old computers to rip them all to FLAC - storage cost is way less than the original CD cost. Nowadays I tend to buy music on either CD or FLAC (from Bandcamp etc.). Storage keeps getting cheaper, bandwidth is cheap, and my bet was always the price of both will keep decreasing to where it's not worth the quality/transcoding issues of using any lossy format. It's now pretty much at the point where it's possible to stream lossless audio from the home server to whereever I happen to be (with a backup of an MP3 player with a big SD card whenever there isn't bandwidth).
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Nowadays I tend to buy music on either CD or FLAC Yes! I only buy music on CD or FLAC. Nothing else is good in the long term. Sadly, when I first digitized my music collection around 1995, I didn't have that foresight and encoded pretty much everything as MP3s, mostly at 192kbps. And they sound poor enough to irritate me now. My collection was large then (and is even larger now), and I still haven't finished the project of digging those old CDs out to encode them as FLAC.
- __david__ 3y ago
  That's kind of where I am as well. I initially ripped my CD collection to flac in around 1999 or 2000ish. Since then I've only added CDs I've bought or flacs I've purchased to this "main" archive (I have side areas where things got acquired through less than legal ways). My main archive is roughly 500 GB. Since I use Apple stuff, I have a script that will transcode it to AAC and copy it to my laptop where I have keep this (annoying) duplicate copy (80GB). Apple Music then syncs that stuff to its cloud. I used to use Subsonic on my phone to listen to my music directly, but Apple Music is so nice since it seamlessly merges my main library with its streaming stuff. Nowadays I seem to use Apple Music for like 90% of my "discovery". And I still slowly buy up songs that end up making the cut. I'd like to transcode to Apple Lossless and have _that_ in the Apple Music cloud instead of AACs but I don't want 500 GB of music on my laptop. Somehow I can forgive 80 GB, but 6x that crosses my line… Perhaps I could use a mounted network share as my iTunes library, but I suspect iTunes won't be happy when part of the backing store constantly goes away and comes back later.
qbasic_forever 3y ago
git-annex is something to consider too. It's kind of like git LFS in that it doesn't directly store files in the git repo (so the files can be enormous or change frequently without all the overhead of commits in git), but it's more flexible and allows you to direct the files to be stored and retrieved from many different types of file stores (network drives, piles of discs/burned CDs/USB drives, S3 storage, etc.). Basically throw all your music files wherever you want, tell git-annex where they live, and then ask it what music you want on what machines and it will do the rest to go figure out what needs to happen to materialize those files in the right locations. I'd be leery of storing the music files in a git repo directly as MP3 tags and metadata are a wild west and some music players do wacky things like update ID3 tags with play counts, etc. on every listen (which would require committing and pushing music on every listen!).
- _dain_ 3y ago
  anecdote but last year I sunk three solid weekends into trying to make git-annex work to sync my files between devices, and was defeated. it is such a fucking incomprehensible buggy pain in the ass. I settled on syncthing instead. it has given me few troubles.
  - yepguy 3y ago
    If SyncThing works for your use case, I agree that you should choose it over git-annex. However, git-annex is also much more flexible than SyncThing. For example, if you want to protect your music collection from accidental changes and are willing to use it manually from the command line, git-annex will work better. Or when I used it for my music, I had a branch for all my lossless files, and then a separate branch for curated and transcoded files that I used for syncing to devices with less disc space. (Perhaps not the most useful example, but the point is that there are a bunch of git-annex workflows that have no parallel in SyncThing or similar tools.)
    - _dain_ 3y ago
      >if you want to protect your music collection from accidental changes and are willing to use it manually from the command line, git-annex will work better. that's what plain old backups are for, surely? if I screw something up I can just restore from backup. and anyway this is just not something that has ever caused me a problem in the first place. how often do you even do something that has a chance of fucking up your music collection in particular?
apt-get 3y ago
Please don't reencode your entire collection to "save space", or use git for version control. Put your lossless files on a server as a source-of-truth (with a regular cold backup somewhere else) and install a streaming server, like Navidrome[1], which will allow you to transcode on-the-fly to all of your devices. This is how you build a true "digital music collection": so that you won't regret it 5 years from now, when the site you bought your flac's from closes down/erases your files (as has happened before on Bandcamp when an artist account gets deleted!), leaving you solely with the reencoded mp3/opus files you kept, unable to move to better formats as they progress. [1] https://www.navidrome.org/ https://www.navidrome.org/
- sphars 3y ago
  Another vote for navidrome. Easily self-hostable, and since it uses the Subsonic APIs, there's plenty of client apps to choose from (I personally like Symfonium[0] for Android). If you're already using them, both Plex and Jellyfin also serve as music streaming servers (Symfonium will also work with these) [0]: https://symfonium.app/ https://symfonium.app/
  - loughnane 3y ago
    I love Jellyfin and tried it with music but it felt too clunky at the time.
  - jhvkjhk 3y ago
    I personally use Ultrasonic. It doesn't look as good as Symfonium, but it's usable and open source: https://gitlab.com/ultrasonic/ultrasonic https://gitlab.com/ultrasonic/ultrasonic
    - sphars 3y ago
      I use Ultrasonic as well, but I've found Symfonium to be much more stable, especially wrt Android Auto and Chromecasts. There's several other open source Android apps as well. I've been testing out as many apps as I can find and documenting the features of each in this spreadsheet[0]. It's a bit out of date, and there's one or two more apps to add, but you get the gist [0]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Lr788M1pM3AFOpjR8CRA0_SPIApbMUGlBQY3pxrcrkY/edit?usp=drivesdk https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Lr788M1pM3AFOpjR8CRA...
gizajob 3y ago
Don't stream, pirate: Soulseek - slsk.org Information wants to be free. The artists get almost nothing from sales anyway and would like you to listen and enjoy regardless.
- HumblyTossed 3y ago
  Domain is for sale.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- joemi 3y ago
  > The artists get almost nothing from sales anyway and would like you to listen and enjoy regardless. What you wrote may apply to huge artists like Beyonce or Taylor Swift (although even then they make a non-negligible amount of money off of sales since they do it in such huge volume). And it's true that artists make very little from _streaming_. But sales can be a large portion of income for smaller-than-Beyonce artists, especially if you buy physical media direct from them or digital media from places like Bandcamp. Especially if you buy digital from places like Bandcamp, artists can actually get a significant portion of what you paid. I think when you break it down, buying digital from Bandcamp nets the artists just as much (if not a little more) than buying a CD off their merch table at a show. Finally I assure you, most artists would prefer to get paid AND have you to listen and enjoy at the same time, instead of not getting paid and having you listen and enjoy.
  - euroderf 3y ago
    Merch table !
- creatonez 3y ago
  It's a decent filesharing program, but one thing I find annoying about Soulseek is how the biggest users engage in actual piracy, that is, "paypal me if you want access to my collection". It's a really gross thing to do. Thankfully most users on the platform don't do it, just a few assholes. I wish soulseek-qt just let you hide all locked content from showing in the UI, so I'm not worrying about what I'm missing out on by not interacting with rude bitter assholes who want payment or trade. Anyways, your link is a 404, the correct domain name is https://slsknet.org https://slsknet.org
mr_sturd 3y ago
MPD + SnapCast = the poor man's Sonos.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  I love the Mopidy and Snapcast combo. Add iris plugin [1] for good UI and a openvpn server on your home router and you can stream to your phone anywhere. [1] https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/ https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/
bdavbdav 3y ago
I’m not sure I agree with any of this. Space is cheap - don’t transcode, let something like Plex deal with it for you. Git seems like an odd choice too.
jimt1234 3y ago
Here's a related question that I should be embarrassed to ask: How do I actually purchase my own copy of music these days? I mean, my own file that I can store on whatever file system I choose. I honestly don't know if it's even possible these days. Do I need to purchase a CD, then rip it myself? If so, are artists generally still pressing and distributing CDs? I recall Amazon Music used to have a "Download mp3" feature, but not sure if they still offer that. I apologize if this is a stupid question, but I really don't know. I've just been pressing "play" on my streaming service for so long, I forgot all about actually "owning" music.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > How do I actually purchase my own copy of music these days? I buy my music on CDs or through a service like Bandcamp that lets me purchase music directly in a non-DRM lossless format. I've also had some good luck buying music directly from the websites of the musicians that made it. > Do I need to purchase a CD, then rip it myself? That's what I do if I can't find a good encoding for purchase. > If so, are artists generally still pressing and distributing CDs? A lot are, yes, but it depends on what sort of music you're into. Another great source, if you like small indie bands, is to go to their concerts and buy the CDs they always have for sale there. > I recall Amazon Music used to have a "Download mp3" feature, but not sure if they still offer that. They do, but don't do that. Their MP3s are poor quality (and you don't want MP3s anyway. Look for something lossless like FLAC).
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > Do I need to purchase a CD, then rip it myself? If so, are artists generally still pressing and distributing CDs? Ideally, yes and yes unless you can find it in a lossless, DRM-free format. For best accuracy, use something like EAC or dbPowerAmp to rip.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- basisword 3y ago
  If you don’t need high quality files I’m 99% iTunes dropped DRM 15 years ago and you can do what you want with those files.
thcipriani 3y ago
You should avoid using git for storing music unless you use git-annex or git-lfs. Git is storing at least two copies of files: one in your working tree and one as a zlib compressed blob in the object store. It may also store more copies if, for example, you updated embedded metadata and then have to recommit the file.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
  Git seems like the wrong tool for this. He appears to be using it for backups and syncing. There are better tools for that when you don't need version control.
AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
> I delete things that no longer spark joy. Deleting things is an important part of curation, even if my general inclination is to keep things forever. I used to think this way, but I had one too many things I acquired, then deleted because I wasn't really listening to it, then years later suddenly wanting to try it again because something just clicked and spending many, many hours having to re-acquire it. Storage is cheap. I just keep everything and buy a bigger hard-drive. Most of my headaches these days are around whether I correctly tagged something the first go-round and now having to sync all my backups when I decide I want to reorganize some of my albums.
- biogene 3y ago
  How many songs do you have in your collection?
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    How is that relevant in 2023? IANP, but my flash thumb drive in a car has 3500 songs on it, representing a small fraction of the total.
  - AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
    The last time I tried to count, it crashed Kodi. :) Let's just say 1.5 TB worth. Mostly 192kbps mp3s and higher, but maybe 10% or more FLAC.
    - biogene 3y ago
      Wow! I can't imagine how I would ever do justice to a 1.5TB collection. My own collection is only 100GB or so (I regularly prune).
    - thakoppno 3y ago
      Your collection crashing Kodi is one of those signals your behavior is far outside the norms, nearly technically infeasible given current system . One idea that keeps me up at night is a collection that expires itself. It’s probably like an LRU cache for music, reflecting a life-cycle that’s self-contained.
ssalka 3y ago
While streaming services offer a lot of convenience to listeners, I still prefer to download my music for offline listening - most important is that I retain ownership of the file; with streaming services, you pay only for access, and access can be revoked. Already, a handful of songs I have downloaded are no longer available online. Unfortunately it's become harder and harder to find high-quality music releases that are readily available for download. More often than not, I have to resort to sites that will rip audio from Spotify/YouTube/SoundCloud, because that's the only place I can find the given piece, and typically that'll come as 128kbps which can be pretty easily noticed. I hope more people push back on the streaming model and encourage artists to sell their music direct. I'll gladly pay an artist for their work but I'd rather not have a middleman (Spotify) involved. --- Interesting to see OP use git as a storage mechanism, I can see it may have some version control benefits, but what about actually playing the music? Do you just click through the file explorer to find the song you want? What about playlists, and other means of categorization?
tech_ken 3y ago
Tangentially related to OP but has anyone found a smooth way to move purchased music from Bandcamp to a private storage location somewhere? Currently I'm downloading music manually and dropping it into a sync location, which is kind of a hassle. PS- beets (beets.io) is an incredible tool for ingesting music in a standard way. My typical workflow is to dump albums into an inbox and ingest them further using beets. beets maintains a library db which I could see managing with Git, but idk why you’d track the raw files when you could use something simple like rsync to backup to a coldstorage location (either NAS or cloud).
- __david__ 3y ago
  I think I'm basically doing what you are doing. I have a 2 step process for this. The first is an Automator script that lets me transfer files from my Mac to my Debian server very easily—right click a file (or group of selected files) in Finder and my script shows up under 'Quick Actions' "Copy to <my-server>::tmp". [1] The second step is an "import" script on my server that unpacks the zip, grabs the meta data from the songs (including the cover art which Bandcamp provides), and shoves it all into the correct place. There's not much to share here because it pretty bespoke (and also kind of ugly internally since I wrote the first version almost 20 years ago--though the years of debugging have made most of the end-user experience pretty smooth). It sounds a lot like what beets does. [1] https://porkrind.org/missives/automator-is-pretty-sweet/ https://porkrind.org/missives/automator-is-pretty-sweet/
  - tech_ken 3y ago
    Oh that's quite slick, I don't use a Mac currently but plan to switch over in the nearish future, I'll check out automations. Semi-relatedly I really like the CD collection portion of your website! Makes me want to implement something similar. With that said, I'm a little concerned that your Aphex Twin selection doesn't include Drukqs or SAW85-92, and that your Paul Oakenfold selection doesn't include Bunkka....
    - __david__ 3y ago
      I almost don't want to say it because if there's a place to look for RCEs on my site, that's the place. It's Apache::MP3 [1], a circa 2001 mod-perl (!!!) application. The one on my site is heavily modified—I added transcoding and later the read-only view that appears on my site now. At some point I stuck it into a container so that it at least has a slightly smaller blast radius. For a long time that was my main way of listening to my music. I was able to load .m3us into iTunes where all the songs were remote (over http using http auth with the 'http://username@password:example.com/blahblah-192.mp3 http://username@password:example.com/blahblah-192.mp3' style url). That worked for years and years until iTunes suddenly stopped supporting that. > I'm a little concerned that your Aphex Twin selection doesn't include Drukqs or SAW85-92 :-). My Aphex Twin phase was pretty short (I bought the 2 albums on 2003-01-03 and 2003-07-05, both from Fry's, according to my metadata :-)), it ended up with me deciding it was a little experimental for me so I never pushed too much further into the discography. It was kinda hard back then—it was committing to buy a CD usually sight unseen or listen to 30 second preview on iTunes (which is hit or miss depending on which 30 seconds of the song you hear). I'll check them out now with our modern streaming services :-). > your Paul Oakenfold selection doesn't include Bunkka.... That's one of the few albums where I bought just a couple tracks on iTunes. I didn't like the idea of a non-complete album in the collection so I stuck those all into 'Various Artists/iTunes Store' [2] (there's also a similar "album" from another somewhat sketchy store that doesn't exist anymore [3]). [1] https://metacpan.org/pod/Apache::MP3 https://metacpan.org/pod/Apache::MP3 [2] https://music.porkrind.org/Various%20Artists/iTunes%20Store/ https://music.porkrind.org/Various%20Artists/iTunes%20Store/ [3] https://music.porkrind.org/Various%20Artists/All%20Of%20MP3%20dot%20com/ https://music.porkrind.org/Various%20Artists/All%20Of%20MP3%...
siquick 3y ago
What would be the best way to put a streaming UI in front of Dropbox folder full of my music?
- leokennis 3y ago
  I can recommend https://asti.ga https://asti.ga
  - dangravell 3y ago
    Thanks! I'm the operator. With regards to Dropbox, there's a simple free tool we've put up here: https://asti.ga/dropbox-music-player https://asti.ga/dropbox-music-player . It's useful in the sense you can playlist, loop, shuffle etc although you don't have the full library browsing experience Astiga offers.
Modified3019 3y ago
To be honest, song file sizes are of least concern in the age of hdd drives that are multi-TB for $100. I can easily store lossless formats and then use playlists to convert to a more portable format. What I really need is a way to be notified of releases from bands I want to track, and rate songs that I both do and do not own so I know what to ignore or investigate further. Of course this needs to be via something I myself can optionally own/manage, not just through a third party that will enshittify.
- chuchurocka 3y ago
  Headphones is a pretty good self hosted app that lets you know when artists in your library have something new coming out . It’s made for snagging music but I use it for discovery mostly
- noman-land 3y ago
  There exist the *arr series of apps that allow for subscriptions. Lidarr is the music one. https://wiki.servarr.com/ https://wiki.servarr.com/
- l72 3y ago
  I mostly just listen to small independent bands, so I typically follow bands (or even better, labels) directly on Bandcamp. I’m not a huge fan of e-mail so I convert all my Bandcamp emails to RSS[1] which I self host with fresh RSS. I have found that my wishlist on Bandcamp has grown to over 500 albums as I mostly use it as a “to listen to” list. But I find I need a place to rate and comment privately on my wishlist. I recently wrote an app called camp counselor[2] to help me manage my wishlist. [1] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email-updates-to-an-rss-feed/ https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email... [2] https://line72.net/software/camp-counselor/ https://line72.net/software/camp-counselor/
dreamcompiler 3y ago
Storing a music library in git? No, no, no. A thousand times no. The tool for this is rsync, or something similar with a friendlier UI like syncthing or Carbon Copy Cloner (Mac only). Git is a terrible solution for big binary files that never change.
- minho-comcom-ai 3y ago
  +1 to no. git-lfs is also no.
dankwizard 3y ago
My relatively default Chrome install for work renders this site quite unreadable: https://i.imgur.com/MrktdbW.png https://i.imgur.com/MrktdbW.png The font is fuzzy and it isn't a strong black font colour.
snvzz 3y ago
The lossy-to-lossy transcode script triggers me. Don't transcode. Please.
- zzo38computer 3y ago
  Well, you shouldn't transcode lossy to lossy anyways. (Transcoding lossless to lossless (with the same sample rate and same bits, although signedness and endianness may be different) is OK, though.)
  - snvzz 3y ago
    Their example is: # find ./ -name "*.mp3" -exec ./to-opus.sh "{}" \; Which is lossy to lossy. Very unhappy. Even more so as the script doesn't even add a metadata tag to document that it is transcoded from mp3, as other scripts do.
joemi 3y ago
Music is very important to me, I listen to a ton of it, and I build up quite a collection. But then I get rid of the collection periodically. I don't want permanence anymore. Tried it for decades, and I'm over it. There are drawbacks to any collection method, physical or digital, and at some point those drawbacks start to wear on me and I start to loathe the collection process. After enough loathing, I get rid of it. Or if transferring it between computers or apartments is more work than I'm willing to put in, I get rid of it. Sure I've had to buy the same album two or three times on occasion, but not nearly as often as you might suspect (especially now that streaming services are a part of my listening habits). I'm much happier now that I'm not meticulously collecting and worrying about backups and such. I have an ever growing MP3 collection which is mostly stuff from bandcamp (and other artist-friendly digital sellers) and some ripped CDs. But I don't back it up, and I won't transfer it to my next computer (though most of the digital purchases are re-downloadable, at least for now). I stopped completely with physical media after living in a few very small apartments, and since I no longer have a turntable or CD player (or a CD drive, for that matter). So I just do streaming services or local MP3s (not meticulously organized -- I can just search the HD). It's not perfect, but neither were all the other methods I've tried (which include many of the systems people have suggested in the comments here), and this is far less work for effectively the same result. If anyone's feeling collector-burnout, I highly recommend just getting rid of your collection (throw or give away, don't try to sell the sell-able stuff) and starting again simply.
- jcpst 3y ago
  This is worth it. I purged my collection years ago. All I kept were my top 3 or so favorite artists, which were too obscure to replace, and bands I did shared gigs with or played in, and a few of my favorite studio albums I recorded. I started collecting on bandcamp and it was really refreshing. I picked up a few albums I used to own, but maybe only 1-2% of my collection. I like how they show you music that was purchased by people who share some albums in their collection with you. I tried streaming for a few weeks. It didn’t feel right, like I was ripping off the artist. I’d rather support bands I like by buying their album. I’d have to stream them thousands of times to give the same level of support as an album purchase. But of course I’m just a hypocrite because I stream television. Then again, I never collected video.
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
Roon.
lprd 3y ago
I cant wrap my head around using Git for this... My sweet spot has been Plex + Plexamp. I have a truenas server and created a 'media' nfs share for my Plex instance. I've been a very happy camper with this set up for the past 3 years. I can expand my storage at any time, ZFS is very powerful and gives me some backup options. Plex effectively replaces all my streaming service needs.
- footlose_3815 3y ago
  Running raid z2 myself with plex. One big downside to many ZFS configurations are that they don't scale. I can't add drives to that array unless it's a mirror AFAIK. What raid z are you running that lets you expand on the fly?
jrm4 3y ago
I kind of like how everyone appears to universally hate the advice here. I'm a 320K mp3 guy myself. Here's the thing I've come to realize over years and not sure where to go with it. All the great tools out there for tagging etc are ALBUM/ID3 oriented. I use Beets and it's really good for when I want the whole album. But now I'm realizing: there's a lot of songs I have for which I really really don't want the whole album. So I have this massively old collection of random mp3's with weird tags. Anyone come up with tips or ideas how to begin to tackle something like this? (edit, again, I don't much mean like "what software," more like -- how do you organize this? I keep coming up with decent possibilities, but none perfect and none that I can motivate myself to work on?)
- interroboink 3y ago
  I have a similar collection of one-off miscellaneous songs accrued over years. I've done a few passes with my own scripts to get the tags a little more sane, but it'll never be 100%, and I don't spend too much effort on it. For me, I keep things in Artist/Album structure, mostly. But there's always a "Misc" folder for each artist, for the one-off stuff. There's also a top-level "Misc" folder for truly random tidbits. For streaming in my home, I use Logitech Media Server (formerly Squeezebox), and have been happy with that for many years. It's open source, so I can always build my own player from a raspberry pi in the future if I need to. I tentatively hope it will last me the rest of my life (: Sometimes I just randomly search LMS for some text and see what songs come up, to find random stuff. Or sometimes I search on the filesystem using normal unix tools (`find`, `grep`, `locate`, etc). Works for me, but I'm not a major music nerd, either.
killjoywashere 3y ago
I just crossed this problem again as I am headed to the Arctic Circle and will be without Internet from Kodiak to Tromso, Norway, 42 days underway. All the subscription services time out after 30 days and give no shots about people going to the ends of the Earth. Fortunately, I had a bunch of music laying around and will be downloading a bunch more. I'm leaning toward going all in again, but the discovery capability of the streaming services is real. I will definitely be downloading a bunch of the stuff I've worked so hard to find, first.
footlose_3815 3y ago
I couldn't relate with the thought process of calling mp3s The Gold standard right after he acknowledged it was lossy.
bacon_waffle 3y ago
What's a good way to manage music where there's not a simple/tidy name for the performer? Are there tools that are good enough at handling metadata, that the structure of the audio files on disk doesn't matter so much? Before, I've organised things like `~/Music/Artist Name/Some Album/A Song.mp3`, and just used the media player of the day. But, that doesn't work great to find stuff by a particular musician when they tend to get together with different sets of other musicians to record one or two songs in any particular arrangement.
nuker 3y ago
Pro tip: import your collection to Music app on a Mac, buy “iTunes Match” subscription, it gets available as Library on iOS devices. Match likes high bitrates, better chance on matching a song and not uploading.
dusted 3y ago
My approach is very different, firstly: Storage is local, not on some cloud service. My music is stored on my fileserver, along with my other files. Even uncompressed PCM is cheap enough to store that I see no good reason to convert to a lesser formt, or even convert to a more efficient one.' I'll go for FLAC if available, or WAV or highest bitrate whatever lossy crap alternative. Even with large file support, GIT is not a nice way of storing music, I don't need any of the that git offer here.. My directory structure is "put it somehwere under /data/audio/music" if I have multiple albums from an artist, put it under /data/audio/music/artistname I let my scraper build an inventory from the metadata, when I'm on my own LAN, I run rhythmbox against it, when I'm out, I use a bespoke player to navigate it from fuzzy searching and building play-queues. There's a web-interface so I can play from the browser when at work, and an android app that I can use when I'm on the phone. Deleting things? I do that only when I've acquired a better quality release, or discover dupes. The only "cloud" principle I use is that I view my music collection as a cloud, it's something I search and explore, not a neat overview.. There's no way to have a neat overview of the infinite.
minho-comcom-ai 3y ago
git?? why not Resilio Sync. or Funkwhale.audio
- minho-comcom-ai 3y ago
  Are you really need to sync all music between work computer and home computer? If yes, https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#file-transfer--synchronization https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#fil... If no? https://funkwhale.audio/ https://funkwhale.audio/ https://www.navidrome.org/ https://www.navidrome.org/

90 points by ingve 3y ago

This guy overthought it... use Plex, so you can stream it. Don't be syncing large folders of files everywhere with git. And if you don't like Plex, there's a half dozen other comparable software titles that will stream audio. As for "smaller files" fuck that shit. For the longest time, I went with 320kbps mp3s. I was limited in the space I could dedicate to music (a few hundred gigabytes). But now? Storage is only cheaper. Get FLAC for everything. And the cloud? I think that's called "someone else's computer" or so I've heard. Stream/sync it from home.

baal80spam 3y ago
You won't hear a difference between FLAC and 320kbps encoded MP3 99% of the time, so why waste 10x more space for a FLAC?
- mr_sturd 3y ago
  Storage is cheap. Plus you might want/need to re-encode to another format down the line and any lossless format is better as the master copy.
  - grumpyprole 3y ago
    Don't forget also that re-encoding often happens with wireless streaming technologies such as Bluetooth. The effects of this are much less well studied. Bluetooth has more chance of sounding fine with a lossless source like FLAC.
    - mr_sturd 3y ago
      Agreed - I have my collection encoded in Opus on my phone's SD card. Tempted to do the same for my in-home setup to lock the sample rate at 48KHz - my tired old home server struggles to down-sample the higher resolution FLACs that I have before throwing it to SnapCast.
- doublepg23 3y ago
  I’ve gone back and forth on the question but with storage costs as they are I always have a Source of Truth in FLAC. For listening I figure I’ve spent so much $$ on my setup I’d be dumb not to ensure the source is not perfect too - for free.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  While true... I figured out how little I was saving by not doing FLAC. And there wasn't a point in saving that storage. I've got plenty, and that's with 5 bays still empty in the Synology. I only wish I could do the same with video.
- zh3 3y ago
  One day you might want to transcode - compression artifacts may well not be audible in normal use, different compression algorithms drop different bits though and so the result of transcoding between compressed formats is quite often an audible (even to my distinctly non-golden ears) loss of quality. Thus FLAC (as a reliable lossless format) - or even WAV (I chose to take the 2:1, 3:1 compression of FLAC over WAV personally).
- danbee 3y ago
  10x? More like 2-3x
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Besides the fact that storage is cheap, FLAC has a more ample metadata model than MP3 and I'm already used to working with the toolchain for that metadata.
doublepg23 3y ago
Yup. I use beets.io to push downloaded, tagged FLACs to my NAS and then Plexamp for music streaming.
- flir 3y ago
  What's that got over MusicBrainz Picard, out of curiosity?
  - rpearl 3y ago
    it can detect duplicates in your collection because it maintains a small database of what it's seen. Great for ingesting the big pile and cleaning up
  - doublepg23 3y ago
    I was just on a CLI kick when I discovered it. At this point it’s inertia and knowing the quirks quite well.

Gualdrapo 3y ago

It's more interesting to me the fact they tried to recreate a LaTeX article design in their website. But without hyphenation... Though about the subject of the post I too am still kind of a retro-grouch regarding the music I listen to. Everything is stored in my computer and I listen to it with ncmpc - even did a little dumb patch to change that horrible progress bar with a straight thin line, but I like it more than ncmpcpp that feels kind of bloated. I got a bluetooth speaker so I can "stream" to it when don't feel like playing it from my computer for whatever reason, and with KDEConnect can control it with my phone. I'm using mpdbus[0] to bridge mpd to mpris and kid3 to tag songs. No longer carry around music in my phone but when I did everything was in a micro SD card. I got an USB adaptor for it just in case, so I guess that makes it for the "streaming" capability. [0] https://github.com/mpostaire/mpdbus https://github.com/mpostaire/mpdbus

zh3 3y ago
ncmpc used to be this simple little thing, now it seems to be a C++ mess that doesn't even have backward compatibility (so here sticking with an old version thats works with MPD). Ref. patches, I use a cheap Amazon RF remote to control MPD - essentially a bit of code that receives button clicks and controls volume. forward/back etc. Low tech FTW :)

zh3 3y ago

Having built a rather large CD collection (over the decades since there were like 5 albums available on CD), eventually I used a rack of old computers to rip them all to FLAC - storage cost is way less than the original CD cost. Nowadays I tend to buy music on either CD or FLAC (from Bandcamp etc.). Storage keeps getting cheaper, bandwidth is cheap, and my bet was always the price of both will keep decreasing to where it's not worth the quality/transcoding issues of using any lossy format. It's now pretty much at the point where it's possible to stream lossless audio from the home server to whereever I happen to be (with a backup of an MP3 player with a big SD card whenever there isn't bandwidth).

JohnFen 3y ago
> Nowadays I tend to buy music on either CD or FLAC Yes! I only buy music on CD or FLAC. Nothing else is good in the long term. Sadly, when I first digitized my music collection around 1995, I didn't have that foresight and encoded pretty much everything as MP3s, mostly at 192kbps. And they sound poor enough to irritate me now. My collection was large then (and is even larger now), and I still haven't finished the project of digging those old CDs out to encode them as FLAC.
__david__ 3y ago
That's kind of where I am as well. I initially ripped my CD collection to flac in around 1999 or 2000ish. Since then I've only added CDs I've bought or flacs I've purchased to this "main" archive (I have side areas where things got acquired through less than legal ways). My main archive is roughly 500 GB. Since I use Apple stuff, I have a script that will transcode it to AAC and copy it to my laptop where I have keep this (annoying) duplicate copy (80GB). Apple Music then syncs that stuff to its cloud. I used to use Subsonic on my phone to listen to my music directly, but Apple Music is so nice since it seamlessly merges my main library with its streaming stuff. Nowadays I seem to use Apple Music for like 90% of my "discovery". And I still slowly buy up songs that end up making the cut. I'd like to transcode to Apple Lossless and have _that_ in the Apple Music cloud instead of AACs but I don't want 500 GB of music on my laptop. Somehow I can forgive 80 GB, but 6x that crosses my line… Perhaps I could use a mounted network share as my iTunes library, but I suspect iTunes won't be happy when part of the backing store constantly goes away and comes back later.

qbasic_forever 3y ago

git-annex is something to consider too. It's kind of like git LFS in that it doesn't directly store files in the git repo (so the files can be enormous or change frequently without all the overhead of commits in git), but it's more flexible and allows you to direct the files to be stored and retrieved from many different types of file stores (network drives, piles of discs/burned CDs/USB drives, S3 storage, etc.). Basically throw all your music files wherever you want, tell git-annex where they live, and then ask it what music you want on what machines and it will do the rest to go figure out what needs to happen to materialize those files in the right locations. I'd be leery of storing the music files in a git repo directly as MP3 tags and metadata are a wild west and some music players do wacky things like update ID3 tags with play counts, etc. on every listen (which would require committing and pushing music on every listen!).

_dain_ 3y ago
anecdote but last year I sunk three solid weekends into trying to make git-annex work to sync my files between devices, and was defeated. it is such a fucking incomprehensible buggy pain in the ass. I settled on syncthing instead. it has given me few troubles.
- yepguy 3y ago
  If SyncThing works for your use case, I agree that you should choose it over git-annex. However, git-annex is also much more flexible than SyncThing. For example, if you want to protect your music collection from accidental changes and are willing to use it manually from the command line, git-annex will work better. Or when I used it for my music, I had a branch for all my lossless files, and then a separate branch for curated and transcoded files that I used for syncing to devices with less disc space. (Perhaps not the most useful example, but the point is that there are a bunch of git-annex workflows that have no parallel in SyncThing or similar tools.)
  - _dain_ 3y ago
    >if you want to protect your music collection from accidental changes and are willing to use it manually from the command line, git-annex will work better. that's what plain old backups are for, surely? if I screw something up I can just restore from backup. and anyway this is just not something that has ever caused me a problem in the first place. how often do you even do something that has a chance of fucking up your music collection in particular?

apt-get 3y ago

Please don't reencode your entire collection to "save space", or use git for version control. Put your lossless files on a server as a source-of-truth (with a regular cold backup somewhere else) and install a streaming server, like Navidrome[1], which will allow you to transcode on-the-fly to all of your devices. This is how you build a true "digital music collection": so that you won't regret it 5 years from now, when the site you bought your flac's from closes down/erases your files (as has happened before on Bandcamp when an artist account gets deleted!), leaving you solely with the reencoded mp3/opus files you kept, unable to move to better formats as they progress. [1] https://www.navidrome.org/ https://www.navidrome.org/

sphars 3y ago
Another vote for navidrome. Easily self-hostable, and since it uses the Subsonic APIs, there's plenty of client apps to choose from (I personally like Symfonium[0] for Android). If you're already using them, both Plex and Jellyfin also serve as music streaming servers (Symfonium will also work with these) [0]: https://symfonium.app/ https://symfonium.app/
- loughnane 3y ago
  I love Jellyfin and tried it with music but it felt too clunky at the time.
- jhvkjhk 3y ago
  I personally use Ultrasonic. It doesn't look as good as Symfonium, but it's usable and open source: https://gitlab.com/ultrasonic/ultrasonic https://gitlab.com/ultrasonic/ultrasonic
  - sphars 3y ago
    I use Ultrasonic as well, but I've found Symfonium to be much more stable, especially wrt Android Auto and Chromecasts. There's several other open source Android apps as well. I've been testing out as many apps as I can find and documenting the features of each in this spreadsheet[0]. It's a bit out of date, and there's one or two more apps to add, but you get the gist [0]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Lr788M1pM3AFOpjR8CRA0_SPIApbMUGlBQY3pxrcrkY/edit?usp=drivesdk https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Lr788M1pM3AFOpjR8CRA...

gizajob 3y ago

Don't stream, pirate: Soulseek - slsk.org Information wants to be free. The artists get almost nothing from sales anyway and would like you to listen and enjoy regardless.

HumblyTossed 3y ago
Domain is for sale.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
joemi 3y ago
> The artists get almost nothing from sales anyway and would like you to listen and enjoy regardless. What you wrote may apply to huge artists like Beyonce or Taylor Swift (although even then they make a non-negligible amount of money off of sales since they do it in such huge volume). And it's true that artists make very little from _streaming_. But sales can be a large portion of income for smaller-than-Beyonce artists, especially if you buy physical media direct from them or digital media from places like Bandcamp. Especially if you buy digital from places like Bandcamp, artists can actually get a significant portion of what you paid. I think when you break it down, buying digital from Bandcamp nets the artists just as much (if not a little more) than buying a CD off their merch table at a show. Finally I assure you, most artists would prefer to get paid AND have you to listen and enjoy at the same time, instead of not getting paid and having you listen and enjoy.
- euroderf 3y ago
  Merch table !
creatonez 3y ago
It's a decent filesharing program, but one thing I find annoying about Soulseek is how the biggest users engage in actual piracy, that is, "paypal me if you want access to my collection". It's a really gross thing to do. Thankfully most users on the platform don't do it, just a few assholes. I wish soulseek-qt just let you hide all locked content from showing in the UI, so I'm not worrying about what I'm missing out on by not interacting with rude bitter assholes who want payment or trade. Anyways, your link is a 404, the correct domain name is https://slsknet.org https://slsknet.org

mr_sturd 3y ago

MPD + SnapCast = the poor man's Sonos.

acidburnNSA 3y ago
I love the Mopidy and Snapcast combo. Add iris plugin [1] for good UI and a openvpn server on your home router and you can stream to your phone anywhere. [1] https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/ https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/

bdavbdav 3y ago

I’m not sure I agree with any of this. Space is cheap - don’t transcode, let something like Plex deal with it for you. Git seems like an odd choice too.

jimt1234 3y ago

Here's a related question that I should be embarrassed to ask: How do I actually purchase my own copy of music these days? I mean, my own file that I can store on whatever file system I choose. I honestly don't know if it's even possible these days. Do I need to purchase a CD, then rip it myself? If so, are artists generally still pressing and distributing CDs? I recall Amazon Music used to have a "Download mp3" feature, but not sure if they still offer that. I apologize if this is a stupid question, but I really don't know. I've just been pressing "play" on my streaming service for so long, I forgot all about actually "owning" music.

JohnFen 3y ago
> How do I actually purchase my own copy of music these days? I buy my music on CDs or through a service like Bandcamp that lets me purchase music directly in a non-DRM lossless format. I've also had some good luck buying music directly from the websites of the musicians that made it. > Do I need to purchase a CD, then rip it myself? That's what I do if I can't find a good encoding for purchase. > If so, are artists generally still pressing and distributing CDs? A lot are, yes, but it depends on what sort of music you're into. Another great source, if you like small indie bands, is to go to their concerts and buy the CDs they always have for sale there. > I recall Amazon Music used to have a "Download mp3" feature, but not sure if they still offer that. They do, but don't do that. Their MP3s are poor quality (and you don't want MP3s anyway. Look for something lossless like FLAC).
CharlesW 3y ago
> Do I need to purchase a CD, then rip it myself? If so, are artists generally still pressing and distributing CDs? Ideally, yes and yes unless you can find it in a lossless, DRM-free format. For best accuracy, use something like EAC or dbPowerAmp to rip.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
basisword 3y ago
If you don’t need high quality files I’m 99% iTunes dropped DRM 15 years ago and you can do what you want with those files.

thcipriani 3y ago

You should avoid using git for storing music unless you use git-annex or git-lfs. Git is storing at least two copies of files: one in your working tree and one as a zlib compressed blob in the object store. It may also store more copies if, for example, you updated embedded metadata and then have to recommit the file.

TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
Git seems like the wrong tool for this. He appears to be using it for backups and syncing. There are better tools for that when you don't need version control.

AdmiralAsshat 3y ago

> I delete things that no longer spark joy. Deleting things is an important part of curation, even if my general inclination is to keep things forever. I used to think this way, but I had one too many things I acquired, then deleted because I wasn't really listening to it, then years later suddenly wanting to try it again because something just clicked and spending many, many hours having to re-acquire it. Storage is cheap. I just keep everything and buy a bigger hard-drive. Most of my headaches these days are around whether I correctly tagged something the first go-round and now having to sync all my backups when I decide I want to reorganize some of my albums.

biogene 3y ago
How many songs do you have in your collection?
- thriftwy 3y ago
  How is that relevant in 2023? IANP, but my flash thumb drive in a car has 3500 songs on it, representing a small fraction of the total.
- AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
  The last time I tried to count, it crashed Kodi. :) Let's just say 1.5 TB worth. Mostly 192kbps mp3s and higher, but maybe 10% or more FLAC.
  - biogene 3y ago
    Wow! I can't imagine how I would ever do justice to a 1.5TB collection. My own collection is only 100GB or so (I regularly prune).
  - thakoppno 3y ago
    Your collection crashing Kodi is one of those signals your behavior is far outside the norms, nearly technically infeasible given current system . One idea that keeps me up at night is a collection that expires itself. It’s probably like an LRU cache for music, reflecting a life-cycle that’s self-contained.

ssalka 3y ago

While streaming services offer a lot of convenience to listeners, I still prefer to download my music for offline listening - most important is that I retain ownership of the file; with streaming services, you pay only for access, and access can be revoked. Already, a handful of songs I have downloaded are no longer available online. Unfortunately it's become harder and harder to find high-quality music releases that are readily available for download. More often than not, I have to resort to sites that will rip audio from Spotify/YouTube/SoundCloud, because that's the only place I can find the given piece, and typically that'll come as 128kbps which can be pretty easily noticed. I hope more people push back on the streaming model and encourage artists to sell their music direct. I'll gladly pay an artist for their work but I'd rather not have a middleman (Spotify) involved. --- Interesting to see OP use git as a storage mechanism, I can see it may have some version control benefits, but what about actually playing the music? Do you just click through the file explorer to find the song you want? What about playlists, and other means of categorization?

tech_ken 3y ago

Tangentially related to OP but has anyone found a smooth way to move purchased music from Bandcamp to a private storage location somewhere? Currently I'm downloading music manually and dropping it into a sync location, which is kind of a hassle. PS- beets (beets.io) is an incredible tool for ingesting music in a standard way. My typical workflow is to dump albums into an inbox and ingest them further using beets. beets maintains a library db which I could see managing with Git, but idk why you’d track the raw files when you could use something simple like rsync to backup to a coldstorage location (either NAS or cloud).

__david__ 3y ago
I think I'm basically doing what you are doing. I have a 2 step process for this. The first is an Automator script that lets me transfer files from my Mac to my Debian server very easily—right click a file (or group of selected files) in Finder and my script shows up under 'Quick Actions' "Copy to <my-server>::tmp". [1] The second step is an "import" script on my server that unpacks the zip, grabs the meta data from the songs (including the cover art which Bandcamp provides), and shoves it all into the correct place. There's not much to share here because it pretty bespoke (and also kind of ugly internally since I wrote the first version almost 20 years ago--though the years of debugging have made most of the end-user experience pretty smooth). It sounds a lot like what beets does. [1] https://porkrind.org/missives/automator-is-pretty-sweet/ https://porkrind.org/missives/automator-is-pretty-sweet/
- tech_ken 3y ago
  Oh that's quite slick, I don't use a Mac currently but plan to switch over in the nearish future, I'll check out automations. Semi-relatedly I really like the CD collection portion of your website! Makes me want to implement something similar. With that said, I'm a little concerned that your Aphex Twin selection doesn't include Drukqs or SAW85-92, and that your Paul Oakenfold selection doesn't include Bunkka....
  - __david__ 3y ago
    I almost don't want to say it because if there's a place to look for RCEs on my site, that's the place. It's Apache::MP3 [1], a circa 2001 mod-perl (!!!) application. The one on my site is heavily modified—I added transcoding and later the read-only view that appears on my site now. At some point I stuck it into a container so that it at least has a slightly smaller blast radius. For a long time that was my main way of listening to my music. I was able to load .m3us into iTunes where all the songs were remote (over http using http auth with the 'http://username@password:example.com/blahblah-192.mp3 http://username@password:example.com/blahblah-192.mp3' style url). That worked for years and years until iTunes suddenly stopped supporting that. > I'm a little concerned that your Aphex Twin selection doesn't include Drukqs or SAW85-92 :-). My Aphex Twin phase was pretty short (I bought the 2 albums on 2003-01-03 and 2003-07-05, both from Fry's, according to my metadata :-)), it ended up with me deciding it was a little experimental for me so I never pushed too much further into the discography. It was kinda hard back then—it was committing to buy a CD usually sight unseen or listen to 30 second preview on iTunes (which is hit or miss depending on which 30 seconds of the song you hear). I'll check them out now with our modern streaming services :-). > your Paul Oakenfold selection doesn't include Bunkka.... That's one of the few albums where I bought just a couple tracks on iTunes. I didn't like the idea of a non-complete album in the collection so I stuck those all into 'Various Artists/iTunes Store' [2] (there's also a similar "album" from another somewhat sketchy store that doesn't exist anymore [3]). [1] https://metacpan.org/pod/Apache::MP3 https://metacpan.org/pod/Apache::MP3 [2] https://music.porkrind.org/Various%20Artists/iTunes%20Store/ https://music.porkrind.org/Various%20Artists/iTunes%20Store/ [3] https://music.porkrind.org/Various%20Artists/All%20Of%20MP3%20dot%20com/ https://music.porkrind.org/Various%20Artists/All%20Of%20MP3%...

siquick 3y ago

What would be the best way to put a streaming UI in front of Dropbox folder full of my music?

leokennis 3y ago
I can recommend https://asti.ga https://asti.ga
- dangravell 3y ago
  Thanks! I'm the operator. With regards to Dropbox, there's a simple free tool we've put up here: https://asti.ga/dropbox-music-player https://asti.ga/dropbox-music-player . It's useful in the sense you can playlist, loop, shuffle etc although you don't have the full library browsing experience Astiga offers.

Modified3019 3y ago

To be honest, song file sizes are of least concern in the age of hdd drives that are multi-TB for $100. I can easily store lossless formats and then use playlists to convert to a more portable format. What I really need is a way to be notified of releases from bands I want to track, and rate songs that I both do and do not own so I know what to ignore or investigate further. Of course this needs to be via something I myself can optionally own/manage, not just through a third party that will enshittify.

chuchurocka 3y ago
Headphones is a pretty good self hosted app that lets you know when artists in your library have something new coming out . It’s made for snagging music but I use it for discovery mostly
noman-land 3y ago
There exist the *arr series of apps that allow for subscriptions. Lidarr is the music one. https://wiki.servarr.com/ https://wiki.servarr.com/
l72 3y ago
I mostly just listen to small independent bands, so I typically follow bands (or even better, labels) directly on Bandcamp. I’m not a huge fan of e-mail so I convert all my Bandcamp emails to RSS[1] which I self host with fresh RSS. I have found that my wishlist on Bandcamp has grown to over 500 albums as I mostly use it as a “to listen to” list. But I find I need a place to rate and comment privately on my wishlist. I recently wrote an app called camp counselor[2] to help me manage my wishlist. [1] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email-updates-to-an-rss-feed/ https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email... [2] https://line72.net/software/camp-counselor/ https://line72.net/software/camp-counselor/

dreamcompiler 3y ago

Storing a music library in git? No, no, no. A thousand times no. The tool for this is rsync, or something similar with a friendlier UI like syncthing or Carbon Copy Cloner (Mac only). Git is a terrible solution for big binary files that never change.

minho-comcom-ai 3y ago
+1 to no. git-lfs is also no.

dankwizard 3y ago

My relatively default Chrome install for work renders this site quite unreadable: https://i.imgur.com/MrktdbW.png https://i.imgur.com/MrktdbW.png The font is fuzzy and it isn't a strong black font colour.

snvzz 3y ago

The lossy-to-lossy transcode script triggers me. Don't transcode. Please.

zzo38computer 3y ago
Well, you shouldn't transcode lossy to lossy anyways. (Transcoding lossless to lossless (with the same sample rate and same bits, although signedness and endianness may be different) is OK, though.)
- snvzz 3y ago
  Their example is: # find ./ -name "*.mp3" -exec ./to-opus.sh "{}" \; Which is lossy to lossy. Very unhappy. Even more so as the script doesn't even add a metadata tag to document that it is transcoded from mp3, as other scripts do.

joemi 3y ago

Music is very important to me, I listen to a ton of it, and I build up quite a collection. But then I get rid of the collection periodically. I don't want permanence anymore. Tried it for decades, and I'm over it. There are drawbacks to any collection method, physical or digital, and at some point those drawbacks start to wear on me and I start to loathe the collection process. After enough loathing, I get rid of it. Or if transferring it between computers or apartments is more work than I'm willing to put in, I get rid of it. Sure I've had to buy the same album two or three times on occasion, but not nearly as often as you might suspect (especially now that streaming services are a part of my listening habits). I'm much happier now that I'm not meticulously collecting and worrying about backups and such. I have an ever growing MP3 collection which is mostly stuff from bandcamp (and other artist-friendly digital sellers) and some ripped CDs. But I don't back it up, and I won't transfer it to my next computer (though most of the digital purchases are re-downloadable, at least for now). I stopped completely with physical media after living in a few very small apartments, and since I no longer have a turntable or CD player (or a CD drive, for that matter). So I just do streaming services or local MP3s (not meticulously organized -- I can just search the HD). It's not perfect, but neither were all the other methods I've tried (which include many of the systems people have suggested in the comments here), and this is far less work for effectively the same result. If anyone's feeling collector-burnout, I highly recommend just getting rid of your collection (throw or give away, don't try to sell the sell-able stuff) and starting again simply.

jcpst 3y ago
This is worth it. I purged my collection years ago. All I kept were my top 3 or so favorite artists, which were too obscure to replace, and bands I did shared gigs with or played in, and a few of my favorite studio albums I recorded. I started collecting on bandcamp and it was really refreshing. I picked up a few albums I used to own, but maybe only 1-2% of my collection. I like how they show you music that was purchased by people who share some albums in their collection with you. I tried streaming for a few weeks. It didn’t feel right, like I was ripping off the artist. I’d rather support bands I like by buying their album. I’d have to stream them thousands of times to give the same level of support as an album purchase. But of course I’m just a hypocrite because I stream television. Then again, I never collected video.

lowbloodsugar 3y ago

Roon.

lprd 3y ago

I cant wrap my head around using Git for this... My sweet spot has been Plex + Plexamp. I have a truenas server and created a 'media' nfs share for my Plex instance. I've been a very happy camper with this set up for the past 3 years. I can expand my storage at any time, ZFS is very powerful and gives me some backup options. Plex effectively replaces all my streaming service needs.

footlose_3815 3y ago
Running raid z2 myself with plex. One big downside to many ZFS configurations are that they don't scale. I can't add drives to that array unless it's a mirror AFAIK. What raid z are you running that lets you expand on the fly?

jrm4 3y ago

I kind of like how everyone appears to universally hate the advice here. I'm a 320K mp3 guy myself. Here's the thing I've come to realize over years and not sure where to go with it. All the great tools out there for tagging etc are ALBUM/ID3 oriented. I use Beets and it's really good for when I want the whole album. But now I'm realizing: there's a lot of songs I have for which I really really don't want the whole album. So I have this massively old collection of random mp3's with weird tags. Anyone come up with tips or ideas how to begin to tackle something like this? (edit, again, I don't much mean like "what software," more like -- how do you organize this? I keep coming up with decent possibilities, but none perfect and none that I can motivate myself to work on?)

interroboink 3y ago
I have a similar collection of one-off miscellaneous songs accrued over years. I've done a few passes with my own scripts to get the tags a little more sane, but it'll never be 100%, and I don't spend too much effort on it. For me, I keep things in Artist/Album structure, mostly. But there's always a "Misc" folder for each artist, for the one-off stuff. There's also a top-level "Misc" folder for truly random tidbits. For streaming in my home, I use Logitech Media Server (formerly Squeezebox), and have been happy with that for many years. It's open source, so I can always build my own player from a raspberry pi in the future if I need to. I tentatively hope it will last me the rest of my life (: Sometimes I just randomly search LMS for some text and see what songs come up, to find random stuff. Or sometimes I search on the filesystem using normal unix tools (`find`, `grep`, `locate`, etc). Works for me, but I'm not a major music nerd, either.

killjoywashere 3y ago

I just crossed this problem again as I am headed to the Arctic Circle and will be without Internet from Kodiak to Tromso, Norway, 42 days underway. All the subscription services time out after 30 days and give no shots about people going to the ends of the Earth. Fortunately, I had a bunch of music laying around and will be downloading a bunch more. I'm leaning toward going all in again, but the discovery capability of the streaming services is real. I will definitely be downloading a bunch of the stuff I've worked so hard to find, first.

footlose_3815 3y ago

I couldn't relate with the thought process of calling mp3s The Gold standard right after he acknowledged it was lossy.

bacon_waffle 3y ago

What's a good way to manage music where there's not a simple/tidy name for the performer? Are there tools that are good enough at handling metadata, that the structure of the audio files on disk doesn't matter so much? Before, I've organised things like `~/Music/Artist Name/Some Album/A Song.mp3`, and just used the media player of the day. But, that doesn't work great to find stuff by a particular musician when they tend to get together with different sets of other musicians to record one or two songs in any particular arrangement.

nuker 3y ago

Pro tip: import your collection to Music app on a Mac, buy “iTunes Match” subscription, it gets available as Library on iOS devices. Match likes high bitrates, better chance on matching a song and not uploading.

dusted 3y ago

My approach is very different, firstly: Storage is local, not on some cloud service. My music is stored on my fileserver, along with my other files. Even uncompressed PCM is cheap enough to store that I see no good reason to convert to a lesser formt, or even convert to a more efficient one.' I'll go for FLAC if available, or WAV or highest bitrate whatever lossy crap alternative. Even with large file support, GIT is not a nice way of storing music, I don't need any of the that git offer here.. My directory structure is "put it somehwere under /data/audio/music" if I have multiple albums from an artist, put it under /data/audio/music/artistname I let my scraper build an inventory from the metadata, when I'm on my own LAN, I run rhythmbox against it, when I'm out, I use a bespoke player to navigate it from fuzzy searching and building play-queues. There's a web-interface so I can play from the browser when at work, and an android app that I can use when I'm on the phone. Deleting things? I do that only when I've acquired a better quality release, or discover dupes. The only "cloud" principle I use is that I view my music collection as a cloud, it's something I search and explore, not a neat overview.. There's no way to have a neat overview of the infinite.

minho-comcom-ai 3y ago

git?? why not Resilio Sync. or Funkwhale.audio

minho-comcom-ai 3y ago
Are you really need to sync all music between work computer and home computer? If yes, https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#file-transfer--synchronization https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#fil... If no? https://funkwhale.audio/ https://funkwhale.audio/ https://www.navidrome.org/ https://www.navidrome.org/