I typically listen to music and discover new music through YouTube, but the gradual creep of ads and the possibility of videos being deleted in the future has made me interested in building up a personal library of tracks on my own computer instead of streaming.

What do you use to manage your songs, and buy songs when you find ones you like?

My main computer runs Debian so I'd prefer Linux compatible options, but I'd be interested I hearing whatever other people use regardless.

Hi everyone!

I've been using Vox for about a year now to listen to music and while there are some good qualities to it, I'm honestly fed up with the lack of volume normalisation and having to constantly adjust my volume manually (There's heaps years old of threads on their forums requesting or complaining about this). So here I am looking for a replacement and was wondering if anyone has a setup that I could copy. Here are the requirements that I have:

• I can stream my own music library of high quality music (FLAC format).
• It provides volume normalisation.
• I can set my whole library to shuffle.
• Native macOS client.

I've been doing some looking around and so far the most likely solution will be for me to set up a Gonic server at home and use Strawberry Music Player on my laptop. A close second contender was Youtube music but they don't provide a native client and I currently use a combination of keyboard shortcuts and applescripts to manage playback (I found media keys insufficient but that's a topic for another post).

I am currently paying a subscription fee for Vox so I don't mind if I have to pay for the new player, I'd prefer a service like that for ease of use rather than rolling out my own.

Update
For posterity I'm posting what I ended up doing. I tried Roon and while it looked and felt amazing, the ability for streaming out of home is very limited, it's intended to stream within a local network. It appears you can only do remote streaming to a mobile device and requires a custom port to be forwarded, I wanted to put this behind a reverse proxy but was not able to do that (Seems it's not supported).
I did not try Plexamp, after all the work I did to get Gonic set up properly it felt like I was doing too much work myself to pay for a solution. Ideally I wanted something that would "just work" even if it wasn't free but no solution did that. If I had access to a free trial I would have probably tested it as well.
I already had Gonic working within my home network going into this but setup of it is still trivial. The bulk of the work came in setting a dynamic DNS set up, and a reverse proxy (NPM) inside my network to provide HTTPS support with Letsencrypt certificates for Gonic (It's only HTTP). I spend too much time trying to have a secure setup (Crowdsec + Cloudflare) but after ditching that, I'm still happy with it and looking at logs it does not appear there's any significant risk to my network (I'm also using a geoip block to outright block requests from some countries).
As far as clients go, I settled with Strawberry. Tried the following:

• Sonixd: It had limited hotkey functionality and doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore.
• Submariner: Did not work.
• Clementine: Current version crashes on launch, rc version complaints about wrong credentials when connecting to the server.

So currently I get most of my music from soundtracks ripped from games and from Bandicamp. However, quite a few artists that go through traditional publishers are not on Bandicamp.

Now, while I could go through the hassle of installing iTunes on Linux through WINE, I dont want to because:

• WINE can be a hassle, especially if the app does some strange things.
• Id rather not support apple in any way if I can

So, are there any major platforms that allow downloading .mp3 or better yet, .flac files, especially for artists going through bigger publishers?

This submission showed up on /r/listentothis a couple of weeks ago. I'm reposting it here because it is the finest and most on-point collection of music I have ever encountered. The original post from /u/theamazingsounds is included below.

Hello again fellow music enthusiasts!

1 year ago, I made a post about my ongoing project to create a collection with as many genres as possible, aiming to give listeners a convenient way to discover new music. It got many interested and since then more than 50 genres have been added, as well as descriptions for every genre.

I'm making this post to thank those following already, and am once again open for suggestions and ideas. I also made a subreddit called r/TheAmazingSounds where you can post about music that you want to share with others. It is currently empty but I will try to keep it active and reply often.

You can find everything on Spotify. It is synced with other services but doesn't convert all songs.

Spotify | Deezer | Soundcloud | YouTube

Recently, this post was brought back to the front page with some fresh replies and it got me wondering how those of you with large (digital) music libraries organize them?

I'm not very tech savvy so I primarily just have my modestly sized library saved in folders by artist, but that leads to some folders only having one song in them which can be annoying to navigate when I need to. I have been thinking about just having all my songs dumped into one folder, since I'm able to filter them by artist/album in Foobar anyway.

I've been wanting to buy some music recently from some artists that are only available through places like Amazon, iTunes, Google Play... However, I have specifically stayed away from most of these platforms for various reasons, the primary one being that I prefer Bandcamp over all of them (and up to now I never had the need to go anywhere else anyway).

So my question is, have you bought any music from these types of platforms online and what was the experience like?

Some specifics for what I'm personally looking to get out of this topic (you don't have to answer these if you don't want to, general experiences are fine too):

• Can I buy music through my browser alone? This one's primarily aimed at iTunes, because when I go to Apple Music and click on the "Also available in the iTunes Store" button for a particular song or album, nothing happens. So I'm assuming it's trying to launch iTunes which I don't have installed.
• Is the music available in multiple audio formats and can I pick whichever one I want after purchase? This is what I like a lot about Bandcamp, you buy the music once and it gives you a bunch of different audio formats to choose from.
• Did the audio files come with metadata and cover art attached (and were they accurate)? This one's not a big deal overall since stuff like Picard exists, but it's just a nice thing to not need to worry about.

I thought it might be cool to get a random slice of people's music libraries, musical knowledge, and how they relate to songs that aren't necessarily standouts or favorites. Don't worry about the five tracks being a representative sample of your tastes or anything--I just think it's a fun exercise!

Also, if you get a bad list of five, it's okay to re-roll.

I'm downsizing my digital life. I deleted my account on reddit, on another phpbb forum and i don't have instagram/facebook apps anymore.

This subject got me thinking about my music.

I grab/buy albums in mp3 and i have so many that it's impossible to listen to everything. I don't pay for any service like spotify because i don't like. I prefer to download and/or buy in places like bandcamp where i can download the album.

I started reading about other codecs like flac and opus. The availability of albums in flac are way less than mp3 and it's a lossless format. If i focus on it i will be forced to downsize my music library.

The problem is disk space in my smartphone. I'm not an audiophile so i'm not able to hear the difference between flac and 320kpbs mp3. This is where opus enters. This codec gives half the size with better quality than mp3. Soundcloud uses it. A 96kbps opus is the same quality as 320kbps mp3.

Now that Android can play opus i don't see a reason to keep using mp3. The downside is converting flac files every time i want to put on my phone.

I could just convert flac to opus and just live with opus everywhere, freeing a lot of space. But i think keeping flac files is better for archiving because it's lossless. If opus for some reason disappears, i'll have a lossy format and would have convert to another one losing more quality.

How do you deal with music?

Primarily I use spotify premium since I am a student and get the sweet sweet $5 discount. I also tend to by vinyl records of albums that I have been listening to a lot so that I can help the musician/band. It's pretty nice because most vinyl comes with a digital download, so I can have a pretty high quality version on my computer. What clients do you use to stream music? Do you buy music? What do you think is the best way of obtaining music that is not pirating?