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What do you use to manage your music library?
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.
The torrenting scene is alive and well, and tools like Soulseek (Nicotine+ is a GUI client on linux) are great for downloading music as well. Beets is an excellent tool for managing a library on the filesystem side, and Jellyfin is my personal choice for a front-end.
soulseek 4 LYFE!! swear to god one day i'm gonna get a soulseek tattoo, because of how much music it's given me access to that i otherwise wouldn't have. (sorry for the terrible grammar, i'm multi-tasking)
Same here. Soulseek is a constant in my life. Using since it's inception to now.
Seems almost eternal, like torrents.
It's one of the smoothest download experiences I've had the pleasure of using. For years upon years now.
I don't know how they fly under the radar so well.
There even seems to be a decently modern headless option with a WebGUI for us who don't like to run stuff on our desktops: https://github.com/slskd/slskd/
The only downside is that it doesn't integrate with the *arr -system of tools (yet), so everything needs to be done manually
I've paid for Spotify for a long long time... I thought it was pretty mainstream, but as time went on I realized I might be the only person I know who does. I manage all my monthly subscriptions pretty closely. This is the only one I've never really thought about!
I know it's not SUPER cheap, but the only complaint I've ever had about it was that sometimes some artists weren't available on it, but I was able to add that music to my library through other means (ripping CDs, buying from other sources, otherwise acquiring...). And often, that music becomes available anyways, because Spotify is so big.
Other than that, it's the easiest music management experience I've ever had. I can add anything and everything to any playlist I want.
Yup, Spotify (imo) is a good example of “it’s easier to pay for it than pirate”. 99.5% of songs I want to listen to are on there, and the other .5% are Neil Young and some vaporwave tracks. Tons of podcasts, decent discovery mechanisms, it’s a no brainer for me.
I thought the same thing about Netflix ~5 years ago - just wait until record labels start removing their content, Spotify starts jacking up prices, and starts forcing ads even on paid plans.
If there’s anything the streaming era has taught me, it’s that sometimes it’s nice to own things in a form that corporations can’t claw back from you when the bean counters demand it :)
I'm not sure the same economic pressures apply to Spotify as they do to streaming services like Netflix.
With TV shows, a good show can be a big draw for a given platform. I might choose to pay for Disney+ because I really want to watch The Mandalorian and other Star Wars shows. In a situation like this, exclusivity becomes very valuable - if you have the only platform where I can watch The Mandalorian, and I've heard that it's really good and I want to watch it, then I'm coming to you.
However, with music, I suspect the majority of people aren't searching for a district artist or album that they really want to listen to, but rather they want to listen to music in general - perhaps in a certain genre or style, but they're much less likely to pay for a particular band. There are obviously exceptions, but not enough to build an exclusive streaming site out of - see the troubles Tidal has has trying to build a product out of exclusivity. Therefore, it's generally more profitable for the labels to put their content on every platform.
I agree that ownership is valuable in its own right, but I do think music streaming is one of the best example of where "you will own nothing" works really well. I don't want to own most of the music I listen to - I listen to far more than I'd be able to afford if I were to buy each album individually, and I can listen to artists that I wouldn't normally think about listening to. It's not a perfect system, but it's a very pro-consumer system, especially given that you can also still buy all the albums you want in addition to supplement your listening.
Interesting ideas about their differences - thanks! I certainly hope you’re right. Time will tell.
(For the record, I am also a Spotify subscriber - I’m just warily waiting for the day I’m forced to cancel my subscription because of its enshittification.)
I've been slowly exporting my playlists and hunting down the individual songs to ensure that if Spotify does go the way of the corporate dodo I'm at least prepared to dip without major disruption in my working out or commuting areas of life.
in this case it might be easier to pirate it
SpotX removes ads
Spicetify can be used to customize your Spotify client regardless of whether or not you have premium
My main complaint with Spotify lately is how slow it has gotten - maybe it's just because I have too many songs saved, but I generally find that it takes 2-3 times longer for a song to load in Spotify than it does for a video to load on YouTube. Also, if I accidentally open a playlist folder, it can take a full 10 seconds to load.
I literally only use Spotify for music discovery now due to how slow it is, and will buy or otherwise acquire everything I really like and listen to it locally.
I’m not sure how much of it applies to the mobile apps, but Spotify on desktop is a real piece of work from an engineering perspective.
Instead of being built as a single cohesive whole, each pane of the desktop app’s main window is built as its own independent “mini-app”, with each loading its own separate set of libraries. This means that some libraries are loaded into memory in triplicate or more… quite inefficient, so I’m not surprised that it gets slow.
Apparently the desktop app is built this way so the engineering teams can be fully siloed off from each other, with zero need to communicate and so marketing can twiddle with UI changes they think will boost revenue without consulting engineering.
Same her but then with Joni Mitchell. I just listen to everything on Spotify and have downloaded my favorite Joni Mitchell albums as MP3s using Newpipe and tagged them using Automatag. It works so well I even payed for the full version, which I don't often do for apps.
Foobar2000 user here with a single music dir that I manage manually. Been flirting with using other software to tag genres for better autoplaylists but other than that, my simple needs are satisfied.
Also same. Recently, I wanted to add some additional tag support because I keep "losing" tracks I like a lot, and got this very helpful advice from /r/foobar2000. TLDR it's some code/markup to use to add extra sorting dimensions to your media selector view, to sort by custom tags.
Same here. Though for me Foobar is my Windows backup option for playing music - usually I'm on Linux, and there I've been using a music player called Lollypop for the past few years, which is a pretty good option for OP.
Foobar runs mostly ok in Wine FWIW. I think I had to hold back Wine 8, but it’s really all I use system Wine for, so shrug. I can even foo_upnp on the local network. Sadly BubbleUPnP stopped working years ago for remote streaming
I was very unhappy with Foobar2000 on Linux as I ran into all kinds of edge case issues. I ended up trying out every music playing and management application I would on Linux and I ended up liking Quod Libet the best. It isn't particularly customizable layout wise, but it matches up fairly well to how I had foobar and has excellent tagging, sorting, and plugins.
foobar2000 can be used to manage that directory, though not automatically (which is good in my opinion). It has powerful built in tools for organizing and naming music files based on their metadata.
This right here. Also highly recommend the foo_upnp component to let you stream the music locally (e.g. to Chromecast Audio using BubbleUPnP)
I personally use plex (specifically plexamp) and I really like it. I use last.fm for scrobbling and finding new music (but honestly I have mainly gone based on pure recommendations from friends, and its been great). I don't know enough about alternatives to last.fm to determine if self-hosting is worthwhile. In terms of getting new music, I buy cds, and flacs online, and acquire the other stuff when I can.
iTunes on an ancient Mac Pro. The only reason I still have this computer is to store my music. I haven't really found anything better for managing a large (50k+ tracks) library. When I rip CDs I run them through MusicBrainz Picard to fix up the tags. For playback I use Plexamp. I bought a lifetime pass a few years ago.
I'll usually borrow music from the library, but if I'm going to buy I try to buy physical media and from a source as close to the artist as possible. I'm a big fan of the vinyl + download code combo.
Are you having difficulty finding iTunes replacements because you aren't running on MacOS or just because you are looking for something potentially better?
Foobar2000 is utterly fantastic on Windows, but it doesn't have some of the flashier features like viewing albums by their art. It's also very extensible so it basically transforms to be the music player you want it to be.
There's actually two good options for Linux, Amarok and Music. But I'm boycotting Music because I hate so many of the changes Gnome has done to their UI, especially how they have made the names of their apps as generic as possible.
IIRC all three of those programs are cross-platform to some extent, but they aren't really as good as they are on their primary platform.
Migrating that much music is going to be A Project. iTunes does what I need. I have a somewhat complex management system involving smart playlists, stars, and grouping tags and I just haven't had the time to verify how or whether that would transfer to another program.
No interest in switching to Windows or Linux.
Same. I've been using iTunes since version 1 on OS 9.2, I'm super accustomed to it. My library isn't as big as yours but it's almost 20k. I still find it a breeze to use and organize my music, even though some of the design choices they've made since it became Music are a little annoying (wasted screen space and redundant controls while viewing playlists, mostly).
That kind of change is why I'm still on iTunes and haven't moved to Music.
How are you still using iTunes?
If it’s on macOS, likely via Retroactive, which patches old versions of iTunes, iPhoto, and Aperture so they’ll run on current releases of macOS.
I haven’t used it for iTunes but it worked well for rescuing some old photos from an Aperture library.
It's on a machine running High Sierra. The motherboard won't support a newer version of macOS so nothing is getting updated. I pretty much only use it as a music server anymore.
Earlier this year I took the plunge to get my massive music collection onto my homeserver and serve it to whatever using a subsonic-compatible service.
The general project workflow went
Messy, 2TB music folder > Import to final directory using beets to handle all tagging and structure > point an instance of navidrome/gonic at the organized directory filled with accurately tagged files > install subsonic clients like play:sub and feishin on my devices to enjoy my tunes with a beautiful interface wherever I am in the world.
I miss the workflow of foobar2000 and my local files but this has allowed me to actually explore my collection more thanks to all the accurate tags, cover art, and "see more like" features of modern media players.
I also setup a Navidrome backend for music on a raspberry pi 4 in docker with a dynamic DNS service. I was shocked at how easy it was and how great it is setup. I paid for Synfonium and it is awesome. I find it to be like Spotify on steroids.
That said, I need to reorganize the folders and I need a better way to discover new music, that's what is keeping my Spotify sub at the moment.
I have my navidrome linked to my listenbrainz.org API. It shows similar users to me, through which I've discovered a decent amount of great music. It's a little more work but I like the human element.
I kind of don't anymore; my music library is on a computer I haven't used for quite a while and I just have a small portion of them synced to my iPhone. I'm putting together a server so I can actually access it.
But my organization is pretty simple; I just have folders of albums and extensive tagging done with Musicbrainz Picard. That music is then indexed into Foobar2000 for an easy listening experience.
Part of the reason for the server is because I don't really want to run Windows anymore, so having everything on a server gives me a little more freedom. I know there are ports of Foobar2000, but only the Windows version gets the love it deserves. It's just going to be hard to find alternative players that can properly decode HDCD
I use Jellyfin on a 24/7 Linux server.
I get music the old way - by ripping my original CDs (which I keep buying) to FLAC. I use commandline tool called "abcde" for ripping.
Sometimes I buy FLAC from local music company eshop.
I’m using a combo of an iTunes library I’ve been carrying forward since the early 2000s in the mac Music app along with Apple Music.
It works well enough, but I’ve been starting to think about going back to a fully-offline library again, which will entail acquiring hard copies of the songs I’ve currently only added through Apple Music. Would probably still be using Music (formerly known as iTunes) for this simply because I’ve not found an alternative that is both an iTunes analogue and high quality; lots of iTunes-alikes exist but most are half-baked at best, and other well known music apps seem to mimic other old players and/or don’t gel well with the Mac desktop.
I download from soulseek/nicotine+ and torrents from a private tracker and put in the music folder where everything is in lowercase with the following structure:
artist/year - album/track number - track title.flac
And if there isn't I download a cover.jpg to put there too.
It's on an external 2TB HDD. To use on my laptop and smartphone with more limited storage I convert everything to opus and sync with syncthing.
I use Picard for my library management, every new song and album i get goes through it.
https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
I use it to tag every song right and then use it to move and rename this songs in a scheme i like.
I use Windows currently so I'm not sure how helpful I'll be, but I thought I'd still share what I use.
I used to use Winamp, but then development stopped so I started looking for other options. The main things I wanted that Winamp couldn't do were multiple genre tags for music and being able to split up artists so a track with multiple collaborating artists would show up under each individual artist's files instead of its own artist listing or whatever. Eventually I stumbled onto Musicbee and that's what I've been using since. For larger libraries it works a lot better than Winamp did. Mine isn't huge by any means (~10k files) but I still feel it's a noticeable improvement compared to Winamp. I will admit I do miss Winamp sometimes though, and I'd be willing to switch back to it if those features were added in later.
Musicbee can apparently run in Wine but requires a few tweaks - I'm looking at switching to Linux myself soon (I don't intend to stick with Windows past 10) so I'll have the opportunity to experiment with that myself eventually.
For adding and fixing tags I still find Musicbrainz Picard to be the best for the job, and for finding album art I use a little program called Album Art Downloader. It can fetch all albums in a folder without an image file for the cover and then run searches for all those albums, which makes the process a bit easier on me.
I get my music mainly from physical albums (vinyl, CD, tape) and Bandcamp downloads. I do have the physical equipment to play all that media but I also like having everything accessible digitally for the sake of convenience. Most of my files are either CD rips or Bandcamp downloads - my turntable doesn't have a USB connection and my tape deck isn't rigged for cassette rips either (perks of having a setup with some equipment being older than I am). I prefer FLAC files over other formats. I have everything digital on a 5 TB external drive right now (using only 1 TB of it right now but I wanted extra space for the future) and I'd eventually like to set up a NAS server at home for music and other stuff like TV shows. I'm also one of those people still using a portable music player - the Sony Walkman NW-A105 has been great in the year and a half I've had it so far.
I do have Spotify as well (I share a Duo sub with my brother) but a lot of what I listen to isn't there or disappears from streaming every so often... I'd much rather own what I want to listen to. It works well for music discovery, though, and I do buy anything I really enjoy to support the artist. For music recommendations I've also had a Last.fm account since 2011 that's pointed me to some cool stuff in the past.
I find lots of rarities (older music not on Spotify) and DJ mixes/sets on YouTube that aren't available elsewhere. Got tired of YT striking down videos from my playlist and having no insight in how to re-add the albums if they were re-uploaded elsewhere, or YT not caring that the music isn't anywhere else on the net. I group them into YT playlists and use yt-dl to download them and archive them. I have playlists for different vibes and then genres if I have many of the same genre starting to pile up.
If I really want high quality, I'll usually see if I can find it on Bandcamp if it's something newer.
On my local side, it just mirrors my YT playlist as a folder. I have a script (using yt-dl) I run periodically that will only download the newly added items from each playlist. My car can play FLAC (Kia Forte GT 2020) so I can just dump those folders to different genre USBs that live in my car. If I want to play a different genre I'll put in the USB and put it on shuffle, or select the folder/track. I did this originally to save data, and it works pretty well. If I'm not in my car, I'm usually on WiFi or need to be more aware of my surroundings and shouldn't be listening to music, or would feel more fulfilled later if I actually engage with my environment. This self-restriction is based on my constant need to be streaming things, at work, in the car, at home and I wanted to limit my access a bit so the slight inconvenience of not streaming everywhere is worth it. I just wanted to be able to play music in my car if there's nothing good on the radio.
This way I can still access my music from my phone, car, work computer, etc via YT, that's pretty close to what I have on my personal computer.
Different USBs with different genres is an absolutely genius idea I never thought of, and I’ll absolutely be stealing it!
I’m currently mostly using Spotify because I have enough siblings on my family plan to make it super cheap for us all, but as my parents live kinda rural, I’d definitely like a better offline option than I currently have. Also, small USBs are so cheap these days so that really does make for an excellent option! Thank you for sharing!
Yeah, it's great in areas where your phone can't get service. Streaming music was my #1 for data usage. I need a good way to label them and it would be perfect. I can be indecisive when choosing music and using USB forces me to keep my eyes off my phone and creates a 'mini-radio' effect where I have to deliberately choose a genre and partially commit to it for a little while. I would even argue that swapping USBs when driving is safer than trying to fiddle with a smart screen and trying to change your radio station/playlist because its fully tactile and I only have to look down once to align the usb with the port. When I found out my car could play FLAC natively I was impressed. Of course it can play MP3. Fairly sure it can't do WAV or OGG though.
Mostly Jellyfin.
Upstairs I have a 300 disc sony CD changer plugged into an optic fiber cable to a home theater receiver which has only 5.1 DTS discs in it. (Fragile by Yes is pretty amazing as is Maximum-Minimum by Kraftwerk.)
I also have about 100 minidiscs and 2 minidisc decks but unfortunately no working Net-MD decks to burn minidiscs off my computer. I get the discs from Japan on Ebay so other than a few I burned most of these have something a Japanese person recorded. Some of it is western music (Nirvana, the Star Wars soundtrack) and some is really Japanese.
A USB stick for the car and also a USB stick attached to a smart speaker with army bugle calls and music from Hyperdimension Neptunia and other JRPG for waking up.
Lots of CDs, some commercial discs well cared for in sleeves, some discs printed off the computer that handled roughly and replaced when they fail.
I store and manage music with Jellyfin, and purchase it mostly with Qobuz and Bandcamp.
I have a mixed approach of what others mention here. Regarding music sources, mostly I try to purchase things from Bandcamp, I know there are other places to purchase but haven't tried them yet. For albums that I can't purchase I either buy the CD and rip it myself or sail the high seas.
I use gonic to stream from my own server where the music is stored.
I don't have a good way to discover music, there's no recommendation engine I've found that works well for me. Usually when I feel like trying something new it will be quite a bit of effort to listen to many things until I find one that's alright. Unfortunately that also comes with the downside of not knowing when artists I like publish new music. At the moment it's a completely manual process that I would love to automate (I've looked into Lidarr before but it didn't quite work for me).
These days? Physical bookshelves with records1, audio Blu-Rays, DVD-As2, and SACDs on them, mostly. Plus a few regular CDs and audio cassettes still knocking around. Anything I care enough to own I want to actually own, in the highest quality I can get it3. For more casual listening, streaming is just too cheap not to take advantage of.
1 With the records being there because the mixes tend to be more dynamic than the usual loudness war casualty CD or digital mixes. Otherwise I'd be glad to be done with them, too. The BDAs, DVD-As, and SACDs are there for that plus the fact that they're all discrete multichannel formats. In other words it's not for the higher sample rate that just allows it to capture frequencies humans can't even hear, or for the extra bit depth that never actually gets used -- vinyl as a format actually has a worse dynamic range than even redbook CD, the contents just tend to be more dynamic because you can't as easily make it all loud all the time.
Needless to say, even the most dynamic classical recordings aren't using those extra bits of dynamic range on the high resolution digital formats. There's just no need to go from a whisper to a jet engine taking off. And I mean a real jet engine, not the movie magic version that feels loud but doesn't actually blow your ear drums out.
2 And also the odd audio only DVD-Video, because the DVD-Audio format never really took off and a lot of multichannel recordings are only available as DVD-Video with lossy DTS audio. Looking at you, Jethro Tull. Whose new releases even come out this way instead of on Blu-Ray, which is also using the standard video disks, but it's fine because those video discs have archival quality audio on them. That's really my preferred format right there, it's future proof because it's a mass market format and not some weird audiophile only thing.
3 and preferably the most channels