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Anyone still listening to music with files instead of streaming?
My hardrives are filling with music, but most of my friends only use spotify, youtube or something like 'em.
I do like spotify, and other streaming services for their convenience, but I still have to have all my music physically on my harddrive. I'd rather use my customized foobar2000 to play my songs than any other proprietary player.
Anyone here still stuck on the oldschool way?
Absolutely. Aside from DRM concerns, local music players are a lot more lightweight, snappy, and efficient than connecting through some bloated web interface. That, and a lot of my music listening is done from my phone, and speedy mobile data coverage is neither cheap nor ubiquitous.
Of course I do still use streaming services to find new stuff when I'm at home or otherwise on an unmetered connection.
Yup, that's the main reason I use them. Another reason being that I can not rely entirely on online services.
Does the iPhone really not support FLAC? I thought it supported either that, or apples proprietary lossless codec.
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2017/09/14/iphone-x-hardware-flac-codec/
Also Wikipedia says that as of iOS 11 it supports native FLAC playback. It seems maybe it’s only supported on recent iOS hardware devices? Personally I’ve always converted FLAC to ALAC or other formats via XLD then imported to iTunes.
Edit: The rub is that the iOS Music app does not allow for FLAC playback. So, you’d have to use the Files app, or some other app. (I have a feeling this is probably some kind of deal Apple must have struck with the music industry—usually these kinds of really strange decisions boil down to some kind of idiotic intellectual property bullshit.)
My solution for FLAC -> iPhone was to setup a home server accessible via the Plex app like that other user mentioned. It let's you sync content for offline playback on your phone. Otherwise, the music files exist only on your home storage and are accessed over the internet.
Looks like you need Plex Pass. A lot of people use it this way for the same reason you would though. I'm fortunate enough to live in an area where the cell reception is good or I have wifi, but I still use the sync feature so I have stuff when I'm driving through rural areas in case the signal goes out. I'll also add stuff if I know I'm gonna be flying somewhere. I bought the lifetime Plex Pass when they had a discount running years ago, and it's been one of the most valuable purchases I've ever made. You can even tell it to sync the highest possible/original file quality.
Does your car have any kind of USB port? What are you working with? I've heard of both SD solutions and other kinds of external HD solutions. How's your home network btw? Any kind of speed limitations or data caps? Just brainstorming with ya.
One other idea: if you don't want to stay with iPhone, consider Android, etc. options with expandable SD slots that you can use to load high quality media and easily accommodate your 100 GB requirement. I'm not familiar with non-iOS, but you've gotta have plenty of apps that would accept FLAC. Hope I've helped you some!
I hear what you're saying and agree about smartphones. I definitely respect simplifying your digital life too... especially as someone with carpal tunnel, ha!
Enjoy the next ocean you find yourself in.
iOS got native FLAC support iOS 11 and macOS got native FLAC support in 10.13.
Of course both of Apple’s major OSes have supported ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) for many versions and ALAC was open-sourced by Apple in 2011.
Not really. However, there are ways around it using foobar2000 mobile, Onkyo HF Player, or one of many others that will take FLAC. Instead of syncing with iTunes, you use the
File Sharingin iTunes -- which is great if you don't use iTunes for music anyway.Omg thank you for linking that app. I've been looking for a replacement for Vox since they ruined the app with the last major update.
Holy shit that new Nokia bananaphone remake is awesome! Thankfully they still make it in yellow.
I'm sold
I used to, but I deleted my entire collection of >1000 hand picked songs and switched to Spotify. I realised I was hoarding. These days I'm mostly listening to Spotify playlists, and it feels better: I explore more, and I feel lighter without all those audio files. There is the possibility that something disappears, but it's not all that important after all, and if sth. is very important, I can always grab it with youtube-dl.
One day, I hope to reach the same realization with video. ~1200 movies and ~120 series collected over many, many years take up several TBs of space. While I do rewatch old movies, I can't say the same for TV shows, except a select few.
Maybe one day I'll end up paying for a streaming service...
You could save quite a bit of space by re-encoding them with more modern codecs and trimming the foreign-language audio and subtitle tracks. After a little bit of experimenting, I ended up transcoding some of my DVD collection with VP9, it took 1/5th the space of the originals.
I do remove foreign audio, but I'm too lazy to do the rest. It would take weeks to re-encode everything.
Yeah, it would take weeks to wncode, but it's not like it's time you would personally invest. You only need to set up a cue and have your computer do them when you are not using it.
Easier solution for me was to just upgrade storage space. Last year, I went from 2x4 TB in a 6-year old NAS (DS212j I think) to 4x8 TB in a DS918+ from Synology. It's compatible with an expansion unit if I ever need, but I should be fine for at least a few years. I was able to conserve a lot of storage space with my home surveillance system (4 exterior cameras) even though I have them on max 3 megapixel quality thanks to Synology's motion detection features. No problem retaining videos for 60 days since they're recording only when there's motion.
One of the most useful features of the Synology environment for us is DS Photo. I have my wife's phone and my phone set to automatically back up all our photos as soon as we connect to our home wifi. This is crucial when you've got baby pics you don't want to lose data to finicky Apple solutions or if you want to save storage space on your mobile device.
Sounds like you got a good setup. I have a 4x4TB raid 10, which means ~ 7.3TB usable capacity and I only have ~200GB left. I'll either have to upgrade (a $1000 investment) or stop hoarding.
I gotcha. I don't really understand all the raid stuff--I'm all self-taught and working knowledge on this--but mine is single redundancy on each of the 8 TB drives so 16 TB of usable capacity. You actually have more data than me though - I was getting near my 4 TB limit before upgrading but decided to clean off old data at that point during the transition. I also didn't have the surveillance system until the new device. Puts me at about 5.75 TB of total data now, and that's probably nearing 3 TB of music/audio, 2 TB of TV shows, and the rest in movies, camera footage, photo library, or non-media. Not a big movie guy but did just come to the realization that hey I could rip all these old DVDs sitting in our dusty disc jackets so maybe someone gets use out of them, why didn't I think of this before? Oh I could even have some fave concert DVDs on-the-go, how bout that.
Most recent upgrade to the system was running my OTA antenna through an HDHomeRun box then to my router so I can watch live TV on Plex with a whole guide, DVR, etc. It can even auto-detect and remove commercials from my recordings.
I don't feel like hoarding is a bad thing. It feels like you're archiving, you get to organize things properly, it's almost physical. There's something appealing in that idea itself to me.
I actually started switching from streaming services to files because of that. I never really got the hang of exploration with Google Play Music, it doesn't know what I want (neither do I though).
Did almost the same but left some rare variants of songs as files. The rest are in a streaming service. This is a more chaotic way of listening to music but the valuable feature is music discovery based on songs you like or directly specify to find something similar to. Also I listen to music only occasionally, so a file collection would mostly "collect dust"
Same here with both music and movies. Ditched the stuff I can find on Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, et al. but kept the rarer stuff that wasn't so easy to find on those platforms. No longer need a home media server or anything fancy for most of my use and feel so much lighter from it all.
Also, with data rates for mobile, have certain items in Spotify and Netflix downloaded so I don't burn data.
My car has an SD slot in the dash so I keep a 32GB card in there fairly full of my favorite albums. It's a lot easier than plugging an aux cord or the terrible Bluetooth interface of the car.
I have a music library I've been curating since high school, over eleven or so years ago. I started using winamp and that's what I still use.
30150 songs (192.96gb) is where I'm at now. I cried for two days when I lost all of my track counts two years ago but I see it as a way to rediscover music I haven't listened to in years. I also use winamp to manage my 256gb ipod classic. Besides pandora every now and then and some artists I can only find on youtube, I can generally find physical copies of what I want (or I'll try to buy it if I can find it).
My process is buy/torrent -> tagscanner to put everything in the format I want with album art -> winamp.
I still have some music i uploaded to google music years ago from my old winamp library and its irritating when i find something i didnt tag properly. I dont remember what i used back in the day to do my tags but it was pretty garbage. I bet the tag software today is excellent
thanks for mentioning tagscanner, it looks fantastic
I used Pandora for a little while, then I found Grooveshark and liked playlist management... then Grooveshark died and I decided that I ought to take matters into my own hand. I use gnod.com to find new music (it's AI, like Pandora) but then I always download the files, usually off youtube with a custom script to automate most of it.
Grooveshark is why I don't rely fully on streaming music anymore. Spotify is a good supplement to my home library on the fly, yet I don't have to worry about it going out of business someday and losing all my library data.
For sure. I've spent a lot of time with streaming and giving it real chances but it is a pain in the ass that I hate dealing with.
I can organize and display local files however I want and I don't have to deal with the massive gaps in every streaming service's library. There's basically no instance where I'd rather stream.
Here's what the player I use now looks like (Tauon Music Box).
I listen to all mp3s and flacs that I've downloaded on my Cowon portable DAP and despite loving streaming for work, would never think about deleting my music files.
My first complaint is that phone batteries can suck pretty bad, and I'd hate to beeft in the lurch for music and phone stuff because I spent too long listening to tunes. My mp3 player lasts for 100 hours!
Second - phone audio quality sucked last time I checked. My Cowon has no hiss or noise, and the proprietary EQ settings are absolutely amazing.
Third - physical buttons are so important to me when I'm working out. I don't want to have to get the phone out to pause or switch to the next track.
Fourth - phones are so big. What if I just want a little thing in my pocket?
Lastly - if rather not always be plugged in to the web. Listening on my phone makes thr temptation to screw around on the web too real.
I love Digitally Imported and all of the other streaming services for background music when people are over or for when I'm working on something, but if I only listened to stream services, I'm worried that Id miss out on the fun of the music search.
I took one look at the Spotify desktop app and noped right the fuck out. foobar2000 for life. I only buy $10-$15 worth of new music every month anyways, so it wouldn't even save me any money.
It's still all about Winamp, baby.
I much prefer to own my music, though there's some stuff I stream from youtube that I plan to buy eventually.
My tastes in music is far too obscure (read: full of foreign music) to bother with streaming services. Most of my music collection has been acquired through blood, sweat, and tears.
Yes. I still download music (flac) because i only listen to full albums.
I like to listen the way the artist intended and go through an entire album instead of listen to single songs here and there.
What stops you from doing that on a streaming service? I use Tidal to stream and I only listen to full albums. Anything I can't find on there I'll purchase off HD tracks and the albums I fall in love with I'll usually buy on vinyl.
Nothing. I just like to have the music available as files for me.
And i convert to mp3 to listen on my car (usb thumb drive) and opus on my phone. I don't want to subscribe to a service and install apps for that kind of thing.
Collect FLACs on my PC to play through my stereo at home. Then convert some of it to mp3s for my cheap mp3 player with 64 GB micro SD card for tunes on the go.
I don't think I will ever intentionally listen to a streaming service, because what benefit does it provide over what I already have? Streaming would require paying for a data plan (which I don't to save money), listening to ads or paying for ad free, reducing the selection of songs available to listen to, and often times hearing the same small playlists repeat more often.
I have 18,000+ songs on my PC and currently 4000 on my mp3 player. Given the rarity of my content vs whats available to stream I'd probably lose out on 2/3 of the music I actually like to be constantly disappointed with any streaming platform.
After Grooveshark shut down, I tried Spotify, but I was always annoyed that I couldn't upload my own music that I had but they didn't. A lot of weird tiny bands/one-off tracks that Grooveshark recommended for me just aren't there. Plus they kept trying to get me to sign on to a new ToS that prohibits ad blocking, and they kept trying to work around my ad blocker.
Eventually I gave up on them; now I keep all my music as files in Git Annex, tagged with Picard, and play them through my own Funkwhale instance. I can log into it from any browser and stream all my music, and I can federate music across from other people's instances. I get the whole Free Music Archive from https://open.audio for example, with my own non-free music layered on top just for me.
The same. I use youtube or bandcamp to stream.
I kinda do both. I use AirPods or wireless Sony ANC headphones with my phone and Apple Music for kinda casual listening, then have an iPod Mini with 128 GB of storage that I use with a Fiio and some AKGs for more "purposeful" music-ing.
The streaming stuff is sort of insidious, though. I was always super-proud of how my music collection was organized, but I've found that a lot of the playlists I've been making for the last few months have been drawn from the streaming stuff. Bit of a fuss to give it up now (although not more than an afternoon's).
I do: solely for the reason being I have no mobile data, and my playlist is highly curated. I use a tool to surf the shores of music and grab them in FLAC, and also get album art. I use streaming services to discover songs, however.
I use Spotify (nearly exclusively) to discover new music. It's working great.
Things tend to disappear on Spotify, or for some reason a song you're listening to gets swapped with a similar version (e.g. explicit becomes clean). That's weird and violates my idea of a virtual personal space. I keep a personal copy of all my music. I used foobar in the past, but it seems to crash on Ubuntu 18. It's possible my cloud drive is to blame, but I won't be investigating because I did find an alternative to foobar that I don't remember the name to.
On phone , first time listening to a song using newpipe (YT app is terrible IMHO), if i like it then i download it (newpipe supports downloading either video or just sound).
On computer i usually don't listen to music, but when i do i open invidio.us to some song i like and then i go ahead and click one by one on the musics i want
I've got about 2500 songs on my main machine, all in 320kbps, with about 700 on my alt, some but not all duplicates, of the same quality.
I use Plex for everything and have about 1.5 TB of music (probably 10-15% FLAC, the rest MP3 of some sort). I’ve had decent performance from Plex across all the platforms I use it with except occasionally on Apple TV. That could just be the Apple TV freezing up as it does though.
My server is on a gigabit connection and I have WiFi or strong cell reception like 99% of the time, so I can access my whole library—movies, TV, music, audiobooks, concert videos, and even podcasts (love that)—in my pocket within one app anywhere. If I do need to go offline, it has a local sync feature.
Oh I also have an OTA antenna setup at home that runs through a special box (HDHomeRun) then into my router. Allows me to use a guide, watch, and DVR live TV through Plex from outside my house if I want. It even automatically detects and removes commercials. I mainly use it for sports and other major broadcast events.
Same, rthough with a smaller collection. I was going to say "both" as I have my own files, mostly FLAC, and if I'm at home I stream them at full quality, and if I'm out I either listen to the few albums I bothered to sync over to my device or I stream at a lower quality. I have a far bigger audiobook library though that I do the same with.
I love Plex. Coupled with Sonarr and Radarr it was an absolute god-send when I was ill and more or less bedridden for a year.
What trackers do you have Sonarr and Radarr connected to? I've tried Sonarr (but not Radarr) and am kinda confused by it. I'm also particular about which version of a show I grab and don't have the same preferences for each show. For instance, I'll settle for 720p with the shows my wife watches without me since she doesn't notice the difference in video quality and it preserves my ratio. Also had trouble with Sonarr trying to grab shows I already had in full but not in the quality specified by the RSS feed I setup.
I'm sure it's a matter of tinkering in the settings, I just haven't wrapped my head around it yet.
The best indexers will ban you if you mention them in public, so I can't name names. But NZBGeek and DrunkenSlug are both really solid. I'm not fussy though, 720p is fine or me with shows, though 1080p is the minimum I'll accept for movies.
It is indeed a matter of tinkering with settings, but it's not something easy to explain in a comment. If you're not getting automatic upgrades to things you've probably got the cutoff set wrong in your quality profiles.
You don't need an RSS feed per se. Give Sonarr the API for your indexers and it's entirely hands-off per se.
Also if you're into music and don't already have it, grab Lidarr. Not as reliable and polished as Sonarr and Radarr but well worth it. Just needs a little more user involvement.
Almost never. The only mp3s I still have on my phone is 'watch the throne' because everything else I listen to is just on spotify. The convenience just can't be beat. I used to download everything 'in case I feel like listening to it'. But now I just stream it if I want to.
I do, with mpd - I use spotify occasionally on my phone (With a family plan, so pretty cheap) but MPD on everything else. It's light, it supports FLAC and any other format I've thrown at it, and I can use a CLI frontend on my computer with a GUI on my phone/anything else.
I find new music using streaming services (mostly Youtube) but I always buy the music I like (if it's available to buy).
That's partly because music on YT sounds awful; and I've had some music just disappear from Amazon or Youtube so I like to have the actual file on a few harddrives.
I used Apple Music religiously for almost 5 years until earlier this year when I discovered my old iPod. You can’t use Apple Music on an iPod (how ironic) so I broke out my old iTunes library. A few weeks later I cancelled my Apple Music subscription and just using iTunes. I absolutely love it.
I almost exclusively stream the foobar library (via bubbleupnp & fooupnp) on my home PC to my phone, work-PC, etc.
The only real exception is for something I either don't have or if I'm using the excellent relisten.net (archive.org streamer, with gapless playback! magic!)
I'm about 75% FLAC and only stream a few stations like
I keep a good chunk of music on my iPhone SE, but I mostly use a modified iPod 5.5 with 200gb storage (it can take four microSD cards), a 2000mAh battery, running Rockbox.
At home, its all about foobar2000 on both my HTPC (with an external DAC) and on MacOS through WINE.
Your FB2K layout is much fancier than mine. https://i.imgur.com/61HrknQ.png
I use MusicBee to manage my music across multiple computers. I sync it with an external SSD. 1384 songs currently, but I tend to download entire albums in either FLAC, 320 kbps mp3, or some are really high VBR rips. I don't use a streaming service at all.
You have good taste in music, quan7hum.
I have an extensive library (about 410GB) that I've been working on for many years with a heavy emphasis on electronic oriented music (Foobar 2k user as well). I used to be a heavily active last.fm user for over a decade but a redesign in mid 2015 or so unfortunately permanently ruined the usability and functionality of the service.
Last.fm was immensely helpful and generally a pretty cool place to be (lots of niche discussion groups penetrating some of the very ends of a lot of subgenres - sadly, this functionality was also killed). Recently though, I was really happy to have learned about https://libre.fm/ so I'm looking forward to contributing to that.
Yes. I was big into mp3 sharing before and during the Napster era. Have no idea how many files/GBs collected back then. Have some real treasures that just aren’t out there now.
I also worked in radio back in the day and have about a dozen shoe boxes of mix tapes I plan to digitize one day. Even more treasures there.
Pandora, Spotify, etc. are no good to me as music discovery services, but I do have a few internet stations that keep me current in my fave genre.
I have and use YouTube Music but I still have a collection of mp3s mostly from the 90s that I have kept around in one place or another (old hard drive, Google Drive, Google Play Music, Plex Server). Some of it isn't on any streaming service. I can stream it from GPM, YTM, or Plex but I do like to keep an offline copy on my laptop and desktop for playing in a local music player app sometimes.