Apple Music is the last library focused music service(erdaltoprak.com) |
Apple Music is the last library focused music service(erdaltoprak.com) |
I used to have a 3K song collection in FLAC which I had curated and spent a gazzilion $$$ on. I `rm -Rf`ed it in a heartbeat when Apple introduced lossless streaming.
I have learnt that maintaining a music library (even on a cloud service) is an absolute, utter waste of time. YMMV.
I use YT music when I have reliable internet and I want to listen to something I don't own.
I wish there was an API so I could write a DJ bot that would allow my Discord to queue and play tracks in an audio channel.
Maybe this MusicKit web api could help your Discord bot project!
Not switching everything to apple play..
This is the reason I switched from Spotify to Apple Music. It’s just such a convenient feature.
edit: spelling.
is OP trying to pump his portfolio? that's what he meant by "library focused"?
For me it was because I realized that the time I spent doing this had exactly zero benefit. At least to me.
This quote comes off as somewhat elitist. If someone hasn't developed the same workflow as you, that doesn't mean they are less informed or skilled.
The buildings internet was out, and not a single one of them realized you could save a file (while connected to cellular data) and then connect to wifi and print it.
They had only ever been taught to print directly from apps.
Sometimes it does mean they're less informed and skilled.
At least out of context, I don't see any judgement words in the quoted text to suggest one way is better than the other.
It's a bit like saying "people put food in their fridge and take it out, without ever stopping to check if the refrigerant is still working. This might be because they didn't grow up with having to refill the ice box."
I’m sorry if it appeared that way, it was quite difficult for me to covey properly my thoughts on this subject.
I wanted to portray that it just makes sense that music software isn’t made that way anymore since a lot of people do not follow that kind of paradigm anymore.
I don’t think there is only one good answer about how to tackle music software.
I hope my answer cleared this up!
Based on some other comments I think the elitist remark is uncalled for in this situation. Looking again, you were neutral on it. I just assumed it was meant negatively.
GPM even let you modify the metadata for albums; I had used this to strip out things like "(2020 Remaster Special Gold Edition)" from album names, and to cut "bonus" tracks off of albums (nothing as fun as playing an album and then getting a two hour long spoken word interview with Quincy Jones), and finally to reorganize my classical music so that the artist was the composer and the orchestra/performer name was just munged into the album title (obviously deeper nesting would have been better, but this worked well).
Now with YTM even browsing by artist is nearly impossible, and when you do, it doesn't display the albums by that artist that you've added to your collection, it just displays everything, so there's no real way to avoid seeing 20 copies of the same album remastered at different times mixed in with "pop rock of the 90s" collections. It's just dreadful.
All I want is a music service that lets me access an unlimited virtual store and bring whatever content I want and organize it recursively by tags (i.e. when I navigate to "artist" it presents me with the ability to narrow my search by "composer" or "album" or whatever). I stick with YTM mostly because it came with free ad-free YouTube. There is no public API to talk to the service, though, so I can't even build my own frontend (although there are numerous hacks, most of which involve checking your plaintext password into a git repository, which of course means compromising your gmail account which is essentially the end of the world).
As a consequence, I'm listening to my favorite artists less frequently, and haven't even thought about concerts, festivals, albums, etc.
A dumb but rich tabular music + metadata store would be a game changer. Add in tags and multi-dimensional ranking, and I'd be in heaven. Add an API, and I'll gladly pay $50/mo.
I want iTunes 1.0, but with the ability to sync between the cloud and all of my devices. With smart playlists that can operate over my tags and ratings.
That's it. No music videos, no real need for album art or lyrics, but certainly no UI removed for simplicity or dumbing down the product.
I want to index and traverse my music in my own way.
I too have been finding music discovery difficult since GPM shutdown. YouTube Music is getting better at discovery fortunately, but I'm not finding multiple new albums/artists per week, more like 1-2 new albums or artists every couple weeks.
One of my favorite GPM features was the "concerts in your area", that is the only way I knew that some artists were coming through my city. It was one of the last features they added. The new album release feature was fantastic as well, although YTM has it now and it works pretty well.
Also, GPM would cache music locally on your device as you played it. If you were offline, you could just display explicitly downloaded music along with the cached music, it was the best for driving through the mountains or flights. If you were playing a playlist, it would cache multiple songs ahead of the current song, sometimes I'd get 30 minutes out of service before the music would stop.
I'll probably complain about the death of GPM for many more years.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/the-new-google-pay-r...
You can upload your own music to the cloud, and whatever matches existing ones just matches to the itunes store so you dont actually have to upload everything - this is the 'match' in the 'itunes match'.
And it's $25/year.
I'm hoping to give Roon a try someday, but plex works well enough that I haven't quite gotten up the activation energy: https://roonlabs.com/downloads
Does any service like that still exist? I'm stuck with Spotify, which lacks dozens and dozens of albums that are important to me, and it won't let me upload them myself.
The feature is so niche, I half expect them to drop it without a word in any given update.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Play-quot-local-fil...
It fills my use case precisely and has replaced GPM. They host my own library (various upload/sync clients), with a reasonable web/app+offline experience.
it has chromecast support, tag editing and all sorts.
I'm a little concerned how slow they've been to monetise. Free version transcodes to 128kbps, eventual paid offering ("around $3.99 USD per month", currently free) offers original-quality streaming. Not aware of any library or bandwith limitations.
Edit: avert your eyes - their landing page is atrocious but once logged in things are much better
However, both YouTube Music and Apple Music treat your uploaded stuff as second-class citizens to the stuff streamed from their music collection. Which is one of the biggest reasons I miss GPM, since it was much better for that.
YouTube Music has a pretty intuitive music uploading system, though it comes with all the previously mentioned baggage of YTM. With Apple Music you have to upload through Apple Music on a Mac or iTunes on a PC, and it's a real clunky system that usually takes me a bunch of finagling and forcing syncs over and over again until it finally works. So pick your poison
I switched from GPM to Apple Music and not Spotify because I have a lot of tracks that don’t exist on streaming services. I can have playlists consisting of apple Music songs and my own songs, and get full Siri integration, play on HomePods etc
All three would meet your (possibly only) requirement of using your own music, and I wouldn't consider any too difficult to set up.
[0] http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp
Happy to answer any questions.
I also wrote up some other example services a while back:
- https://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-blog/2021/0... (these integrate storage)
- https://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-blog/2021/0... (these are bring-your-own storage)
Just checked and they still have my music "stored" waiting for me.
It seems that if the music is officialy available on Youtube, Youtube Music fetch the music from there, if not it's using an internal catalog.
If you want to avoid their awful YTMusic web UI there are options. There's a decent, standalone, GUI YTM application for KDE [0] which I've used (sadly it doesn't support logins, but if you just want a player it works well enough).
There's also a plugin for Mopidy [1] that lets you listen through your MPD / snapcast [2] server, but that's more fiddly.
[0] https://apps.kde.org/audiotube/
It sounds like you might like it, because it can do all that.
I'm not sure about your exact navigation idea but Apple Music has a JS api for web applications as well as "local" OS level API on iOS, so there are blessed third party interfaces. On iOS, there are really polished and customizable full alternative clients like Marvis Pro. On iOS and macOS, you can also "end user program" Apple Music via Shortcuts. I have accomplished a lot with that, building an interface for browsing playlists as album collections, grouping those playlists and workflows for moving stuff between them. On the web it looks more like some toy projects (still full clients tho).
There is the official web app and an android app, but I think you can only get to the full metadata management power on a Mac (because it still caries most of the iTunes legacy there).
I use it with my main stereo and stream music to network players in other rooms. (It does video stuff too, I don't use any of that.)
No connection to them other than as a happy customer. https://jriver.com/
My process for downloading from Bandcamp, extracting the files, and syncing them to the storage could be automated a bit more I think.
Isn't that what Spotify and Pandora are?
Spotify has some features that map to this, but is way more artist focused than album focused. When you click on an artist, you get the artist's page, and navigating to the albums that you have added by that artist is nearly impossible. That is, there's no way to engage hierarchically -- to say "I want to listen to a Neil Young album that is in my collection". You have to either decide on the album from memory and just find it, or you have to go to the artist and hope that the album you like is one of the "recommended" or "hot" ones by Neil Young.
There is one big thing that all these streaming services are missing: *METADATA*
Give me all the album by this label, all the songs produced by X or all the songs where in Y plays drums. All the albums recorded at some studio in the year Z. With tools like this I will spend years (and whatever money) on your service. They will give me unexplored ways to find and listen to new music, totally new meaningful relationships!
Heck, 9 times out of 10 even the album year is all wrong with these services! (I know, all these "remastered" editions from the labels don't help at all).
And they don't even need to build those datasets, they are already there, just ask (or buy out) discogs.com!
Apple Music is the music as a service subscription that keeps pushing adverts in app and keeps turning itself back on even if you're not subscribed and have turned it off.
For a while there was a subtle difference in that music uploaded to Apple Music would have DRM applied to it, and iTunes Match would not, but this is no longer the case.
iTunes Match, which the author mentions, is responsible for exactly 1 of the features listed:
> Uploading your music to the cloud and streaming them as any other song
Everything else is part of Apple Music, the streaming service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Music
Match is just hidden legacy, because the standard subscription includes it's features anyway.
Remember last.fm? We used to track music listens very deliberately to share with the public… Back in the day I had a "minor psychological drag" whenever I listened to something without scrobbling :D
EDIT: In case anyone is wondering why gapless playback is important, the entire genre of classical music pretty much demands it. Also, anyone who listens to popular music where one track seamlessly leads into another will know how frustrating it is to not be able to stream an album as the artist intended it to be heard.
E.g. the between-tracks material on quite a number of live tracks of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series (which on the physical CDs is part of the pregap, so it's skipped if you directly navigate to a track, but it's definitively played if you just listen to the album straight through) is currently missing from all official digital releases, even though those bits are definitively part of the appeal of those albums.
- Custom Artists / Producer / Lyrics description
- Custom rules to ignore songs on random selection
- Custom rules to select equalizer per song
- Folder based navigation
- Smart Folder based playlists
- Uploading your music to the cloud and streaming them as any other song
Nails my reasoning for having stuck to it all this time as well. way easier to include my own (un-published) music, mixtapes/etc that never made it to streaming but that I have mp3s for, album art that I want to swap out, etc.
I do fear that these might all be incidental features and they eventually re-orient to mimic Spotify's approach more closely.
[1] Yes, the latter can be enabled for any track in iTunes, but unfortunately it doesn't work with the solution I'm using for syncing my library to an Android phone, plus I also want the listened/not listened display, which is definitively a Podcast-only feature anyway.
I also generally like the paradigm of being able to collect streamed music into a library so I can come back to things again and again. Back when I last used Spotify around 2015 I used the starred playlist to do this but it was no substitute for just being able to see a collection of albums. I’m not sure if Spotify’s UX around having a “library” of music had improved since then.
I don’t trust apple not to change the deal at some point.
Where as with band camp I actually own things.
>I don’t trust apple not to change the deal at some point. Where as with band camp I actually own things.
The whole point here though is that the "deal" if you're just doing your own library sync is that it's your own library. Yeah you can listen to Apple Music's streaming stuff too and in that case it could indeed presumably vanish at some point (I don't think it'd be at all about Apple though, it'd be about the actual rights holders, Apple doesn't own the copyright on most[any?] of this stuff). But if one chooses to make their own library the core source of truth, the worst that could happen there would be Apple throwing in the towel on the cloud match stuff. There'd be no more seamless easy sync of libraries between devices in that case (unless they astonished by enabling a selfhost/LAN version of that again) but it's not like you'd lose anything at all. Everything you own you'd still own.
There's often a trope that young people are good with computers, but I think this is mostly false. Here some (maybe significant percentage) of college freshman don't know how to save a file?
I have a 500GB card in my android and have 70% of my digital collection on it. I, also, make the card the primary destination for my photo/videos from my camera. I have my own home-grown backup solution. A mix of my own backup solution combined with the SDcard means i never have to rely on cloud services to my music, nor to backup my valuable files.
But this chapter in my life is coming to a close as phones increasingly take away sdcards.
Eventually my phone will fall back to just being my phone again. Because i refuse to use their services to replace functionality they took away.
I use PowerAmp music player. It's the most full features player out there that's got a good deal of polish to it, IMHO.
The OP notes "Folder based navigation" and "... Folder based playlists" but note the use of the word "folder" and not "directory".
Take a look at this dialog box:
https://www.tech-recipes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/itun...
... and note all of the fine-grained ways to sort by ... but also note that the most basic attribute of all (filename) is missing.
I am not sure for whom iTunes and its interface is optimized for but I do know that any sane way I could imagine of moving my music onto an iPhone is totally impossible.
I’m not sure if this solves your issue but you can uncheck ‘add songs to library’ then only songs/albums that you actually add to your library show up and others only live in playlists!
Other stores like 7digital are also good.
The combination of the iTunes Store, Apple Music, and iTunes Match is the most expansive music service offering I can think of.
I still prefer stores that sell FLAC. Apple's aversion to common open audio formats always irritated me.
You can purchase music from Bandcamp and upload it to your apple collection. I bought an album from Bandcamp today.
I think I prefer finding music and musicians 'the hard way'. When you have 'everything' the urge to find new things disappears at least in my opinion. I now buy a lot of music, mostly on bandcamp and I even subscribe to a few artists monthly. I find this experience far more rewarding but to each there own.
It's insanity producing.
As a bonus it works for videos too.
It’s pretty cool being able to scroll through my playlists and essentially have a journal of memories.
I assume no one else does this, because relatively few services consistently enable that kind of sort, and none that I’m aware of allow you to edit the “date added” field in the playlist data.
(This is a disguised plea for help and/or for Apple Music engineers to enable editing of playlist data - I won’t switch services if it means losing my memory journal/playlist)
This is why you remember something more if you write it down - you get not just the memory of a fact but also the tactile experience of holding a pencil, feeling the paper, of an aching wrist…
Passively streaming someone else’s (or an algorithm’s) choice of music in the background is probably the worst possible way to build music memory because you don’t even have the association of choosing or even reading the track title.
Ritual serves a purpose.
Navidrome on a home server, hooked up to a big ol hardrive, ultrasonic on your phone connected to navidrome (offlining supported), support artists you really like by buying their shit off bandcamp, rip everything else cause let's be honest these artists aren't seeing stream money anyway.
People will gripe and complain about how much "work" it is to maintain these things, but let's be real: every single person in here has at least one friend who'd be willing to host something like this for them. What it comes down to is that we're in the habit of relying on big tech companies rather than the folks around us. But habits can be broken.
I'm a senior engineer, and a pretty technical geek. I'm also plenty social, and am that one techie friend for a lot of non-technical people and field regular "Hey what kind of <> should I buy", or "Can you help me configure <>".
I've never heard of Navidrome or Ultrasonic.
Could I figure it out in 30 minutes of googling or reading? Sure. But the point is that these concepts are not nearly as ubiquitous as you might think.
I'm also not interested in hosting a music server for my friends, and dealing with all the tech support concerns that would come with it.
> I'm also not interested in hosting a music server for my friends, and dealing with all the tech support concerns that would come with it.
I didn't say _you_ are. I said someone you know is. We do exist, if you care to ask around.
Music had all my iTunes purchases (good), but none of my albums I'd legally ripped from my CDs. Long story short, I had to import the library. At least all the music is there and I can play everything. The frustrating thing is some of the album artwork has been lost - even though they're there in the library that was imported!
On my iPhone I use a music player called Plum. I love it. I wish something similar existed for MacOS.
As long as Music remains the only Mac app with "OK" and "Cancel" buttons on the Preferences window, iTunes lives!
At least on Windows we've been spared this splitting up of iTunes so far, though I wonder for how much longer…
- Basecamp
- Direct artist websites
- 7digital
- HDTracks
Almost everything I've bought (tens of albums) are FLAC and sound great. I also feel great supporting artists better than my Spotify subscription is able to.
Also I have Apple One for my wife and I, which comes with Apple Music, Fitness, 2TB iCloud, Apple TV, etc., for AUD$40/month (I think?) which is hard to ignore price wise.
I know that cancelling a subscription based music service and buying the albums would have a long term net saving of money, and I can easily afford to drop $4-5k on music right now, it seems counter intuitive.
Apple Music stood out as the obvious choice (iPhone and OSX user) and I have not looked back since I migrated last summer. Their way of structuring also made more intuitive sense - can't really pin point why.
Also, a really nice plus that AM offers true lossless for free (yes, I have proper external equipment for listning and not just AirPods Pro lol).
Then, I use that same little Obj-C app to detect when I'm away from home and open a VPN connection to my NAS's network. So, wherever I am, I can stream music on my laptop from my local library.
After doing this for a few years instead of paying for Apple Music, it has already saved the cost of the NAS and its hard drives.
Thanks!
i already stopped last.fm after CBS ruined it.
I've used every music service and quit for a multitude of reasons. Libraries that "have everything" but manage to be missing albums or have albums takne down all the time, "shuffle" functions that don't work (Spotify), apps that prioritize and shove music in your face that you have no interest in (Tidal), or just being unlucky enough to be owned by some of the shittiest corporations the world has seen since the robber barons (Apple/Google).
The more they get rid of digital music stores, the more i fall back to vinyl.
Streaming sucks.
They're run by a non-profit [2], which is worth supporting, and a bit hard to "buy out".
Tidal’s ML algorithm has a pretty strong prior probability set to match their owner’s taste.
However, their recommendations are excellent for other genres once their suggestion algorithm has had time to digest your library and listening habits (about a week or two for me).
You can use it with both Tidal and your own music files.
Like a song, why not show the performers so that users can what else they worked on. They'll probably like other projects the performer was involved in.
Apple does have little writeups about albums which I like. Nice to have context about what the album is and why it might be worth listening to.
Additionally, you might enjoy Jellyfin. While they're not streaming "services", they do have a high focus on metadata driven library exploration.
Too bad that exposing it is likely too “niche” for them to prioritize
Since this is the "did you know Apple Music actually..." thread: You can at least browse by record label nowadays and it's pretty nice.
I still feel this way. Though I also still use Foursquare/Swarm to check in. I also scrobble most of my TV and Youtube. All my podcast listening. I love scrobbling!
And also TBH for files (and email) in general I used to spend a fair amount of effort filing into hierarchical structures. These days I do a bit of rudimentary sending to an archive folder or tag, delete older stuff (or not), and figure I can find something with search if I really need it. And, if I can't, it probably wasn't worth the effort to do the upfront librarian work anyway.
Musicbrainz Picard helps a lot with that.
You just need to give up on real files and folders. If you want the fusion of library focus and streaming service, they don't make sense anyway. iTunes is going to take over all management of the filesystem. You just have to surrender all that, than it can be very powerful.
If you actually wanted to migrate, you could copy the filename into the comment tag on the way in, but that seems dirty.
In case anybody wonders about the (legal) sourcing, in most parts of Europe it is still perfectly legal to record radio stations, locally download from Youtube/Soundcloud etc. and even share/copy with close friends and family. And the market for livemixes is huge in the youtube era, see productions from Cercle, Boiler Room etc.
If your "music library" is post-iTunes then it isn't that useful - you have compressed media files with metadata embedded in them.
However if your music library is older than itunes and consists of lossless WAV/PCM files there is no metadata. There is only the filename.
WAV/PCM files don't have metadata.
There is no id3/tag data. They do not have a "title" nor do they have anything else. That's a problem if your music library predates iTunes and iDevices.
There are a bunch of stores that sell FLAC that I use:
* https://www.junodownload.com
* https://www.prostudiomasters.com
Can't comment on prices, I didn't really do a comprehensive analysis.
SongKick and Last.fm have solved this problem for me for years. I haven't used them for concerts since before COVID, so I don't know if they're still good for shows.
edit: forgot about discogs.com
Edit: I think I understand your point better now. I've just learned that Match is not necessary if you already subscribe to Apple Music. I still wouldn't call it legacy though, since you might just want to sync music you own between devices and don't need the rest of the service. In this case, Match is a lot cheaper than Music.
So putting your music on an iPhone isn't impossible. It just means that you would have to take the time to add metadata to the existing files (and possibly first converting them to a lossless format that supports metadata--I'm guessing PCM does not).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV
> WAV files can be tagged with metadata in the INFO chunk. In addition, WAV files can embed any kind of metadata, including but not limited to Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) data[25] or ID3 tags[26] in extra chunks.
That aside: why are you using WAV when there are mature, open lossless compression formats like FLAC?
FLAC is supported in iOS since v11, in Android since Honeycomb, and I'm able to listen to FLAC on a Mac running the now-ancient High Sierra release via the finder's quicklook, or iTunes. I don't think I installed a plugin, but I could be wrong.
YouTube Music and Apple Music have similar features but they're not nearly as intuitive or convenient as GPM's was.
I was trying to explain that in the blog post too, in Apple Music your own added songs are uploaded and act as any other streaming song and I think it’s pretty amazing, also the fact that your song now has all the inherited features like Siri/Spotlight search!
I remember when I used Google Play Music and it kept the AOL sound in "my" copy of a certain Tatu song, so that was definitely streaming the uploaded song.
You cannot officially force an upload, but I would expect there to be some kind of hack for it. If I remember correctly, calling the album "Red Album (sorejan's Version)" actually does the trick.
Wish there were more alternative mobile OSs and platforms. Apple is getting on my nerves too much lately.
Buying individual tracks or entire albums from the iTunes Store gets you DRM-free music files. No?
I’ve since setup a Synology NAS with Plex and it’s mostly great.
With this setting, and an interface that can group playlists by album and filter them by artist, you can get as many additional "virtual libraries" as you want, kinda like Twitter lists. Remember you can also put playlists themselves into folders and create dynamic playlists.
You can assemble music for various situations or events, manage things like "planning to check out" etc without polluting your core library.
If you want to go deep on this and use iOS, check out Marvis Pro also.
How do you view a playlist organized by artist or album? Does that require Marvis Pro?
The iTunes Store is the "purchase the file" store.
The iTunes Store sells M4A, which is a common open audio format.
The iTunes Store does not, however, sell lossless files, as far as I know. Apple Lossless (ALAC) is only available when streaming from Apple Music.
One of which gives you re-downloadable DRM-free files.
iTunes Match lets you "upload" your library to Apple. It matches your library against Apple's catalog. If they have the song, you get a copy of their version of the song. If it doesn't have a match, they retain your uploaded file.
I have a lot of random local music that isn't on iTunes, and which you can't easily find anymore. For years, I was paranoid about losing my ripped copies of the files, but iTunes Match has preserved them for me, in the cloud, for years now.
I beg your pardon?
First of all, a nitpick:
> Even if you could get a phone with a large enough SDcard, natively
...iPhones don't use SD cards for storage. They never have. They have internal flash storage.
-
With that out of the way: I have a 10,000 song collection that I sync to my iPhone. It's only about 60GB of music. iPhones come with up to 512GB of internal storage, and there's an option when syncing your music to convert higher-bitrate music to 128kbps (or 192 or 256kbps, your preference) AAC files. I guarantee you, a library the size of hasbot's will fit on an iPhone with no problem.
I have no idea where you get the idea that you can't fit a decent-sized music library on an iPhone. Maybe you're one of those who believes that only lossless audio is worth listening to, and didn't consider that that's a niche opinion...?
How exactly do you sync to your phone? I've been using an iPhone for the last 3 or 4 years and I entirely gave up on the concept of having my own music on my iPhone as I used to do on Android.
First issue: I have to deal with iTunes to sync and organize my music on my iPhone. I still haven't drink the full kool-aid of apple and thus still use windows as my personal PC. I refuse to use iTunes, I have a powerful pc that can run the latest games and this absolute piece of crap of a software still manage to freeze syncing large quantities of files.
Second issue: I have tons of FLACs that I need to convert to whatever the hell iOS wants as the default file AAC, ALAC, I can't even remember. So now I have to duplicate my music library to fit iOS / Everybody else.
Third issue: My ridiculously expensive iPhone still manage to transfer files using USB 2.0 speeds. Whereas my 4(?) years old android had USB-C and happily managed to transfer my entire library in no time.
Sorry for the rant but this issue is my biggest regret from buying an iPhone.
It takes a while to tx 100+ gb, sure, but you do it once when you get the phone and after that you just move diffs.
It’s not perfect - I get errors from time to time saying music I have isn’t available in my region. Fix is a resync of those songs that got lost.
This is one of those go with the flow situations… the cost is dealing with iTunes, the benefit is carrying around all the music you’ve collected over the years in your pocket.
There may be some non iTunes methods that work as well, I’ve never looked into it.
That you have to share with photos/videos, apps, downloads, and everything else.
>syncing your music to convert higher-bitrate music to 128kbps (or 192 or 256kbps, your preference) AAC files.
Yeah, see - this isn't really your music collection then but reliance on Apple's Library and them "matching it" with what they have. I could never sync from their library b/c their library wouldn't have huge chunks of my actual digital collection.
I have hip hop mixtapes, Grateful Dead livesets, local artists who never had a major record deals (Fighting Gravity and a variety of punk bands), EDM live sets, and tons of stuff not in the Apple/iTunes Library they could never do anything with.
Secondly, like 30% of my collection is in FLAC, which Apple doesn't even support.
>I have no idea where you get the idea that you can't fit a decent-sized music library on an iPhone.
Because my music library is:
Server: $ du -sh Music/
905G Music/
Phone: 305GB ( i recently purged a ton to make space for videos/pictures )
Even if i was dealing with 60GB and even if i could rely on what was in their library - pulling down 60GB to a phone is painful. It takes me literal SECONDS to swap and SDcard from one phone to another as opposed to hours over WiFi.
Nevermind on android i can move files via ftp, smb, or any number of protocols. Even over the wire - it's plug and play. Copy and paste through any Windows, Mac or Linux file manager.
Thus, I don't have to rely on apple's crappy proprietary music apps to move files over a network or even a USB/lightning cable.
>Maybe you're one of those who believes that only lossless audio is worth listening to, and didn't consider that that's a niche opinion...?
No. I have a lot that's 320K mp3s. In fact, the grand majority of it is. Maybe 5-10% of my collection is worse quality than that. Virtually nothing is at 128k or worse. I typically stay away from Apple specific formats, lossless or not, regardless of their benefits.
What? You just transfer your files directly, exactly as you could with an ancient iPod or whatever.
Nope. This is 100% false. You may be mixing up "sync your library from your computer to your iPhone" with "sync your library from your computer to iCloud," which are completely separate things.
I have a local music library the core of which goes back to about 1997. I have never subscribed to Apple Music, iTunes Match, or any of the other music subscription services. I synced portions of it to various iPods and early iPhones, and several years ago when iPhones with large enough internal storage to affordably sync the whole thing, I've kept it all on my iPhone as well.
> I typically stay away from Apple specific formats, lossless or not, regardless of their benefits.
AAC is not an Apple-specific format. It's an industry standard (MP4 audio); it just never gained quite as wide acceptance as MP3.
I've heard good things about airsonic (https://airsonic.github.io/). I used SubSonic before and i just didn't like the clients that connected to it. AirSonic is based on SubSonic but there's supposedly a bunch of improvements.
If there's no "file matching" service - how does the OP i'm responding to "upgrade" the sound quality of the files on the device?
Until you get a new phone.
>the cost is dealing with iTunes, the benefit is carrying around all the music you’ve collected over the years in your pocket.
I have this benefit without iTunes. I get to keep the 30% or so of my collection that is in FLAC, don't have to use 3rd party software for transfer (as any OS's file manager will do) and when i get a new phone i merely swap the SDcard.
