From 356c3988f8920cbc74eb52fd1ded1d461a3bd85b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Cory Dransfeldt Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2023 15:50:57 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] chore: music post --- src/posts/2023/i-dont-want-streaming-music.md | 33 +++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 33 insertions(+) create mode 100644 src/posts/2023/i-dont-want-streaming-music.md diff --git a/src/posts/2023/i-dont-want-streaming-music.md b/src/posts/2023/i-dont-want-streaming-music.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f94b25b1 --- /dev/null +++ b/src/posts/2023/i-dont-want-streaming-music.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +date: '2023-04-05' +title: "I don't want streaming music, I just want to stream my music" +draft: false +tags: ['music', 'streaming'] +--- + +I don't want your streaming music service, I just want the music I've collected and care about available to stream. + +Apple Music *kind of* offers this, [with some serious sharp edges to watch out for](/posts/2021/apple-music-a-tale-of-woe/). Spotify doesn't offer this, neither does YouTube Music. Want to stream music? Sign up for a service, hope your favorite artists and albums don't rot out of their catalogue and run with the algorithmic recommendations sourced from that ever-shifting catalogue[^1]. + +I have the audio files for the music I care about and I've spent a long time collecting them. They're all tagged and named consistently using [Meta](https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/)[^2], shuffled off to an external hard drive, encrypted and mirrored up to B2 and GCP. *I just want to listen to them without using all of my local storage to do so.* + +I leaned on iTunes Match to do this for a while but, funnily enough, Apple will still dedupe your audio against their cloud catalog, overriding meta tags and audio availability as they see fit.[^3] You can sync music into Spotify via playlists, but that's not a scalable solution to, well, much of anything. + +I've got a bucket of files locally that I want to listen to — I want a bucket in the cloud with a player attached that'll send data to Last.fm[^4]. I want a solution that lets me play my music without a cloud providers algorithmic nonsense and restrictions applied to it. + +This leaves me in a place where I've ruled out the popular streaming music providers and looking for something considerably more niche. Here's what I've explored: + +- **VOX Music Cloud:** this does what I need, but I don't like any of their player software. It works, but it doesn't feel *right* — their desktop app feels like a mini player, the new beta is missing features and the iOS app isn't enjoyable to navigate. +- **Astiga:** nicely designed, supports the [Subsonic music API](http://www.subsonic.org/pages/api.jsp) and lets you source music from cloud storage. **Awesome.** Not awesome: I don't particularly like any of the available iOS apps and scrobbling from iOS to Last.fm is inconsistent. Not perfect — absolutely worth keeping an eye on as it develops. +- **Roon:** a very promising service, but one geared more towards the audiophile audience and with hardware requirements I'm not interested in investing in at this point. + +Pretty limited, right? My solution and the one I'm really enjoying is [Plexamp](https://plexamp.com/). I knew Plex supported music playback — I didn't realize they had an excellent, bespoke app to support it.[^5] Plex scrobbles to Last.fm from the server, auto-populates artist metadata, does a stellar job matching similar artists and building playlists from *your own collection*. That's it, that's what I wanted. I don't want the collection to drift, I'll add to it when I find music that I want to listen to more than once and *sometimes*, I want to throw on a station or playlist constrained to that set of artists. + +So here we are: I have a cloud-based Plex instance, it's used solely for music playback, the artist images match up with Last.fm and [my now page](/now). The metadata is defined the way I've elected to define it and it's available via an [rclone](https://rclone.org) mount to Google Drive. This is all more complicated than listening to music should be, but I can hit play and listen to what I want to (and get decent recommendations too). Apparently that's too much to ask for from most services, or maybe I'm just out of touch.[^6] + +[^1]: When I last leveraged Apple Music's catalogue I kept a smart playlist that highlighted releases that fell out of their streaming catalogue. +[^2]: One of those apps that does exactly what it sets out to in a robust and reliable manner — plus it's native to macOS. Go buy it. +[^3]: Does anyone know what music in the genre 138 sounds like? No? Apple seems to think different artists in my catalogue fit the bill. +[^4]: Their recommendations are still the best — funny how gleaning data from dedicated fans' listening habits'll do that. +[^5]: It's not native, but it's so good that I really don't care. +[^6]: Probably both.