[HN Gopher] Apple Music is the last library focused music service
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Apple Music is the last library focused music service
Author : erdaltoprak
Score : 100 points
Date : 2021-12-01 18:21 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (erdaltoprak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (erdaltoprak.com)
| [deleted]
| andrewla wrote:
| Google Play Music was extremely album-focused, but their move
| over to YouTube Music has basically scrapped that.
|
| 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).
| standardUser wrote:
| Google Play was ideal because I could upload _any_ of my own
| music and it was part of my library, accessible anywhere in the
| world.
|
| 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.
| 651549846546 wrote:
| I've been keeping an eye on https://ibroadcast.com
|
| 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
| brundolf wrote:
| I put my personal collection on Dropbox and use an app (iOS)
| called TuneBox that presents it as a streaming music player
| Nomentatus wrote:
| Youtube music subscription was supposed to do this, with your
| previous Google Play library, if you made the transition.
| Using Google Home devices. I plan to pony up for that someday
| when things settle a bit for me, so hope I do get this
| service.
|
| Just checked and they still have my music "stored" waiting
| for me.
| MBCook wrote:
| Apple Music does.
| morsch wrote:
| Spotify actually lets you do that, so you're in luck. Add
| local files on your desktop to a playlist, download the
| playlist on your mobile device, done. I'm using the feature,
| it works. Though it does _not_ work with my "Spotify remote
| play" (or whatever they're calling it) kitchen radio.
|
| 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...
| erdaltoprak wrote:
| Hi,
|
| 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!
| sorenjan wrote:
| I don't use Apple music myself, but I've heard that it
| doesn't actually use your songs but uses song name
| matching which sometimes gives you censored versions of
| explicit songs. Is this true?
|
| 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.
| shrikant wrote:
| Well, I'm pretty sure GPM did some level of acoustic
| matching nonsense to optimise storage or bandwidth,
| because it changed a bunch of songs that I'd uploaded
| into a different language version of song.
| hbn wrote:
| I haven't tried this myself, but from what I read about it,
| it's basically a manual sync you have to do which isn't
| what he was asking about. GPM had a music locker feature,
| where you'd just upload it once to your account and then
| you could stream it from anywhere like anything else on the
| service.
|
| YouTube Music and Apple Music have similar features but
| they're not nearly as intuitive or convenient as GPM's was.
| hbn wrote:
| Spotify is actually the only one of the big 3 (Spotify, Apple
| Music, YouTube Music) that doesn't have a cloud music locker
| feature, and it's basically the entire reason I can't use it.
|
| 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
| hraedon wrote:
| Apple offers iTunes Match [1], a service that is separate
| from Apple Music. It is something like $25 a year and does
| more or less what you're asking for here, especially in
| conjunction with Apple Music.
|
| [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146
| merb wrote:
| also itunes match is included in apple music and you can
| mix and match apple music and match (or local songs and if
| they are not local), you can also sync these with any
| device
| [deleted]
| artdigital wrote:
| That's exactly what Apple Music does, and the article even
| mentioned.
|
| 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
| oregano wrote:
| Hmm around 18-24 months ago I gave Apple Music a try but
| found there were TONS of tracks from my personal library
| that the service would not play. Perhaps they've improved
| things since then? I went all-in using Plex as a personal
| media server since then and while the UI isn't as nice, it
| lets me steam my personal library anywhere from any device.
| quitit wrote:
| The article mentions this as one the key differentiators
| between AM and other big music services.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| YouTube Music is the reason I moved over to self-hosted
| Jellyfin to host my music collection.
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| Same here, except I went the Plex/Plexamp route. Terrific
| experience.
| _jal wrote:
| To anyone else who still wants to own their own music, I
| highly recommend looking at Jriver Media Center. Not free,
| and it is a bit of a strange application at first. But I find
| it extremely capable and flexible, and because it is just a
| player, they have an interest in catering to you instead of
| the copyright rentiers.
|
| 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/
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Where do you source your originals? Bandcamp is my go to, but
| not all artists publish there. Amazon often has physical CDs
| and MP3s for artists, but I have not patronized them for such
| goods (yet).
|
| My process for downloading from Bandcamp, extracting the
| files, and syncing them to the storage could be automated a
| bit more I think.
| kuschku wrote:
| Bandcamp and CDs, the best way to get music in proper
| formats.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Bandcamp, and for old/obscure things I can't buy elsewhere,
| SoulSeek.
|
| edit: forgot about discogs.com
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Another option is Funkwhale. I've not tried it, but it seems
| cool.
|
| https://funkwhale.audio/apps/
| heavyset_go wrote:
| This is a nice one, too. I just couldn't get it to play
| nicely with Docker Swarm.
| Thaxll wrote:
| It's really a weird merge, I browse youtube and I see the music
| I like from Youtube Music there because musics are somehow
| fetched from YT and not from a different place ( like it was on
| Google music ).
|
| 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| In my experience you can open most all videos categorized as
| 'music' from YPP creators, but the 'songs' section of search
| results is effectively the Google Play Music/actually-
| published songs index.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| And vice versa - I'll try to look through my playlists, and I
| get a mix of my music ones, and my YouTube ones. Just a
| baffling design choice.
| mayneack wrote:
| Like several other comments here, I had the same experience as
| you and decided to go with plex. What no one mentioned is that
| plex allows you to add a tidal library in addition to your self
| hosted content. It's not a perfectly seamless experience
| because you have to mark tidal albums one at a time to add to
| your self hosted library and I don't think you can cache them
| offline on plexamp (for android at least), but it's the best
| I've found.
|
| 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
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Everything is worse under Youtube Music. Embarrassing product.
| kingcharles wrote:
| I have to disagree. One of the reasons I use YouTube Music is
| because their search includes all the random music uploaded
| to youtube.com. This means that a lot of really rare tracks
| that YTM never received officially from the labels can be
| integrated into your library. I guess YTM then tries to sort
| out the royalty issues as they do through youtube.com.
| matwood wrote:
| I was very happy with GPM, and was a long time user since the
| beta (7.99/mo intro pricing was also nice). Then they stopped
| updating GPM and started pushing YTM. It was terrible so I went
| to Apple Music (at the time it had recently come out), and have
| been there ever since.
| willis936 wrote:
| I've been on the same journey. My plan is to self host plex.
| Cache the music I want, VPN/stream when I want to add more to
| the cache.
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| I have Qobuz combined with mpd (there's a plugin). It's not
| the cheapest but it's decent for what you get and the UI is
| simple and doesn't get in your way. My only regret is that it
| doesn't have lyrics AFAIK.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > an unlimited virtual store and bring whatever content I want
| and organize it recursively by tags
|
| Isn't that what Spotify and Pandora are?
| andrewla wrote:
| I've never used Pandora in a paid mode, so I can't speak to
| that.
|
| 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.
| hnrodey wrote:
| Create a playlist from the album so that it's in your
| "collection" (of playlists). That's only way I know how to
| accomplish.
| echelon wrote:
| The degradation of Google Play Music into YouTube Music has to
| be one of the most disappointing product merges in history. All
| of the power functionality disappeared. I can't even find the
| music I want anymore without great effort.
|
| 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.
| Arrath wrote:
| I'm glad I'm not alone in lamenting the demise of Google Play
| Music.
| ryanobjc wrote:
| itunes match is what you want.
|
| 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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Seems like something similar happened to Google Pay[1] as
| well. With a few exceptions Google seems to suck at
| discerning between good and bad products. It'll shelve the
| likes of Reader or neuter Google Play Music, but insist on
| pushing garbage like G+.
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/the-new-google-
| pay-r...
| Talanes wrote:
| To be fair, Reader and Google Play Music did both outlast
| G+, so it's not like the garbage fairs any better.
| Yhippa wrote:
| This one boggles my mind. To take something that worked
| resonably well and degrade it into...whatever it is now is
| such a bad feeling. I guess Resume Driven Development is
| alive and well there.
| blakes wrote:
| I miss GPM so much. No one I know in person knew it existed,
| yet they still get to listen to my rants about Google killing
| the one true music service.
|
| 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _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._
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| YTM supports caching music locally much like GPM did,
| although I believe you have to explicitly specify what you
| want to cache on your device.
| stavros wrote:
| Remember Grooveshark?
| bsanr2 wrote:
| Grooveshark was better than any other service - including
| Pandora - at exposing me to music that I wasn't expecting to
| love but did anyway.
| cuddlybacon wrote:
| > This article explains how students do not follow the same
| organization paradigm based on folders and local file management.
| This could be, in part, attributed to the new ways young students
| learn, which is on online first operating systems or tablets,
| where by default, the local system is hidden and also where
| everything is done through applications.
|
| 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.
| neogodless wrote:
| > This quote comes off as somewhat elitist.
|
| 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."
| pfortuny wrote:
| It is not elitist. Really: it is just a guy trying to find an
| explanation to something that gets his attention. There is no
| adjective in it.
| erdaltoprak wrote:
| Hi,
|
| 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!
| cuddlybacon wrote:
| Hi op,
|
| 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.
| beerandt wrote:
| I was recently at an office where there were a dozen or so
| student workers studying for a test that required them to print
| out some things to bring.
|
| 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.
| hasbot wrote:
| I keep a copy of my entire music library on my phone and don't
| use any music service at all. I have over 13,000 songs across
| over 1200 albums and 500 artists. I don't need to find any more
| music; there's plenty of good songs in my library that I haven't
| fully absorbed yet.
| Gatsky wrote:
| iOS or Android? What do you use to listen?
| hasbot wrote:
| Android. I use GoneMAD Music Player 2.3.2 (the rewritten
| 3.0.X version is a buggy mess with no new useful features),
| but really any music player will do.
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| you can't do this on iOS. Even if you could get a phone with
| a large enough SDcard, natively ... transfering that much to
| the phone would be prohibitively painful. And one might be
| tempted to go through that once, but to go through it every
| time you get a new phone would drive you mad.
|
| 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.
| danaris wrote:
| > you can't do this on iOS
|
| 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...?
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| >512GB of internal storage
|
| 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.
| TillE wrote:
| > Yeah, see - this isn't really your music collection
| then but reliance on Apple's Library and them "matching
| it" with what they have.
|
| What? You just transfer your files directly, exactly as
| you could with an ancient iPod or whatever.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| Does PowerAmp have any streaming ability? Seems simple
| enough to drop that library onto a cheap home server and be
| your own streaming service once SD cards are completely
| gone.
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| It has a "streams" function. I've never used it.
|
| 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.
| supernovae wrote:
| I wish apple music would directly support Sonos Streaming, i'd
| switch over from Spotify in a heartbeat if they did Sonos direct
| like Spotify does.
|
| Not switching everything to apple play..
| krrishd wrote:
| - Custom Music Artworks
|
| - 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.
| [deleted]
| tehnub wrote:
| >Uploading your music to the cloud and streaming them as any
| other song
|
| This is the reason I switched from Spotify to Apple Music. It's
| just such a convenient feature.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I use Plex to stream my local music library. The "Plexamp" client
| player is, well, buggy as hell, but it mostly works, and will
| transcode on the fly if it needs to.
|
| As a bonus it works for videos too.
| gglitch wrote:
| Music-as-a-Service is fantastic as a convenience, and I too have
| discovered a lot of great music this way, but (a) I _all_ the
| _time_ want to listen to a record and find it missing from their
| catalogs; and (b) as with so much else on the web, I 'm so over
| the constant minor psychological drag of knowing that my
| interactions are being tracked, logged, and gamed.
| ghaff wrote:
| I had a large enough digital music library pre-streaming
| services that I've elected to (mostly) keep maintaining my own
| library/playlists/etc. But I'm honestly not sure what I'd do if
| I were starting from Square 1. Would I really spend thousands
| of dollars to purchase songs/albums? Well I'd almost certainly
| pirate a lot--and TBH a fair bit of my library is Napster
| copies of previously owned vinyl--but there's still all the
| organizational effort.
|
| 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.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| (a) was the breaking point for me. I pirated my entire Apple
| Music library from Soulseek and switched to Plex + Plexamp. Not
| as convenient for discovery but otherwise superior for me in
| every way.
| amelius wrote:
| Minor conveniences will destroy the world.
| floatboth wrote:
| > psychological drag of knowing that my interactions are being
| tracked, logged
|
| 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
| tptacek wrote:
| Music is probably one of the only services where I get value
| out of being tracked and logged; I listen to enough different
| artists that it's very easy to lose track of something, and to
| find myself in a rut of listening to the same 10 artists for
| weeks on end. One thing Apple Music does pretty well is
| providing a bunch of different gradually-learning thingies that
| keep the rotation fresh.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I don't think any of these things play my flacs either. Never
| been enamored of monthly payments as well so am unsurprisingly
| not a fan.
| daigoba66 wrote:
| It was a sad day when Rdio was bought by Pandora and shutdown.
| They were the best.
| burnte wrote:
| Amazon Music has a library too.
| alliao wrote:
| I'm in my late 30s and nostalgic listening have taken up most of
| my listening time. turning into my dad basically. zero regrets
| though.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| no it's not, they are all the same
|
| is OP trying to pump his portfolio? that's what he meant by
| "library focused"?
| hammock wrote:
| Is there a library-focused video streaming service?
| zwily wrote:
| Maybe Plex?
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Plex and its father KODI are very good for local. There are
| plugins for external stuff. But the quality is kind of random
| and subject to the whims of whatever SaaS they are scraping.
| shmerl wrote:
| I prefer to buy, not rent music. Bandcamp is good for it and they
| sell FLAC. This is also fitting comparison to cassettes library a
| lot more than Apple Music where it's not your library, but
| Apple's.
|
| Other stores like 7digital are also good.
| devmunchies wrote:
| From the article: > Uploading your music to the cloud and
| streaming them as any other song
|
| You can purchase music from Bandcamp and upload it to your
| apple collection. I bought an album from Bandcamp today.
| the_only_law wrote:
| This one feature may get me to switch to Apple Music
| etchalon wrote:
| You can buy DRM free files from Apple. So the file is yours,
| transferrable, but you also can always go back and get another
| copy from Apple.
|
| The combination of the iTunes Store, Apple Music, and iTunes
| Match is the most expansive music service offering I can think
| of.
| grumpyprole wrote:
| iTunes won't even play FLAC files, so it's rather
| inconvenient for people with existing libraries. Yes I know I
| could convert it all to some proprietary Apple format, but
| it's easier to just not buy an iPhone.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| shmerl wrote:
| Not from Apple Music though? I thought it's rent only. iTunes
| sells files, yes.
|
| I still prefer stores that sell FLAC. Apple's aversion to
| common open audio formats always irritated me.
| jjcon wrote:
| Apple Music is DRM yes (it can be de-DRMed though fairly
| easily), purchased music from iTunes is DRM free.
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| I guess it's not just me: It _is_ confusing. I thought
| there were two ways to get music from Apple but
| apparently there are at least 3.
|
| One of which gives you re-downloadable DRM-free files.
| etchalon wrote:
| There's only two ways. Apple Music (streaming) and iTunes
| Store.
|
| 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.
| etchalon wrote:
| Apple Music is the streaming service.
|
| 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.
| shmerl wrote:
| I prefer to buy lossless formats. For playback I can
| encode them in Opus. M4A is not a proper open format,
| it's patent encumbered.
| vlunkr wrote:
| I'm considering taking a break from spotify premium and I'm
| wondering what the cheapest way to buy music is these days. It
| seems like buying and ripping used cd's might actually be the
| way to go. Of course you don't get FLAC that way.
| shmerl wrote:
| Ripping audio CDs would be equivalent to FLAC quality. Make
| sure to rip them to FLAC or any other lossless format of
| course.
|
| There are a bunch of stores that sell FLAC that I use:
|
| * https://bandcamp.com
|
| * https://us.7digital.com
|
| * https://store.tidal.com
|
| * https://www.junodownload.com
|
| * https://www.prestomusic.com
|
| * https://www.prostudiomasters.com
|
| Can't comment on prices, I didn't really do a comprehensive
| analysis.
| fossuser wrote:
| There's something sad to me about the verge article that's linked
| inside of the hn post
| (https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...)
|
| 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?
| hateful wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28615884
| jjcon wrote:
| I ripped my Apple Music library and switched to Plex (listening
| via plexamp - also looked at Jellyfin with finamp) because I
| thought Apple music was pushing music completely outside of my
| tastes (and particularly American centric) and was becoming too
| antagonistic to personalization and libraries.
|
| 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.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| "Add to Library" is a joke, there's nothing stopping them from
| deleting things at will. Sometimes they stay around but wont
| play, other times the magically disappear forever.
|
| It's insanity producing.
| peatmoss wrote:
| Apple is also the only service to get gapless playback right,
| near as I can tell. Since adding lossless (I care less about
| "high-res" or "spatial"), they are far and away my favorite.
|
| 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.
| orobinson wrote:
| This is exactly why I started using Apple Music. Some of my music
| collection isn't on streaming platforms but Apple Music let's me
| host it and stream it in a library right alongside music I don't
| "own".
|
| 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.
| RileyJames wrote:
| This is why I use Bandcamp.
|
| I don't trust apple not to change the deal at some point.
|
| Where as with band camp I actually own things.
| xoa wrote:
| I mean, I'm 100% with you on Bandcamp being absolutely
| awesome. But I'm not sure what you mean by this?:
|
| > _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.
| tempodox wrote:
| What I love most about Bandcamp is that you can download your
| music in lossless compression (ALAC/FLAC). It beats lossy
| compressions every time with the headphones I use.
| rsync wrote:
| Apple Music is library focused if you have very simple
| requirements and if your "library" was created, or coincident
| with, the iTunes ecosystem.
|
| 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_.
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| Help me understand how filename is useful in a way that other
| metadata doesn't already cover, please.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Somewhat niche, but in the electronic music genre (house,
| techno, trance etc.) albums and single tracks are a rare
| thing. People mostly listen and consume DJ livesets/-mixes,
| and using filenames & folders to organize is basically the
| way to go. It is very difficult to come up with any sane
| metadata system, let alone that all music players are unable
| to cope with _that_ kind of music collection. Public metadata
| databases like Musicbrainz etc. are not a thing there, and
| sets are usually not commercially sold - so all metadata
| would also have to be manually entered.
|
| 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.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| The product referred to as "Apple Music" isn't library focused.
| The app now known as Music and the service known as "iTunes
| Match" is.
|
| 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.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| That's not correct.
|
| 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
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| All the features of "iTunes Match" are included in Apple Music
| as long as you have "Sync Library" turned on.
|
| 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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Is DRM applied to iTunes Match too now? That's unfortunate.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| lol no, the other way around. Music you upload remains DRM-
| free.
| ratww wrote:
| Oh wow... If it is, I will probably rethink my
| subscription. I have uploaded a lot of music I bought in
| other services or ripped legally from CDs I physically own,
| adding DRM to things I own feels immoral to me.
|
| Wish there were more alternative mobile OSs and platforms.
| Apple is getting on my nerves too much lately.
| jghn wrote:
| Likewise. IIRC Apple Music is a lot more (3x?) expensive
| than iTunes Match so not sure if the price increase would
| be worth it to me. But my thinking it wouldn't track _my_
| library was what made Apple Music a nonstarter for me.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I just checked - not so far as I can see.
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| iTunes Match is a subscription service, right?
|
| Buying individual tracks or entire albums from the iTunes
| Store gets you DRM-free music files. No?
| tshaddox wrote:
| Apple Music isn't as library-focused as I would like it to be. Or
| perhaps the better term for what I'm talking about is "album-
| focused." I hate that when I add a playlist to my library, every
| single track in that playlist causes its album to show up in the
| Albums list and that artist to show up in the Artists list. This
| makes the Artists list essentially useless for browsing, because
| there are hundreds of artists that I've never heard of because
| they had a single track in some playlist that I added to my
| library. I can understand why it works this way, but boy is it
| frustrating. I would love to have a manually-curated set of
| albums (viewable by album name or by artist) totally separate
| from the ability to add playlists to my library.
| mediocregopher wrote:
| Until they're not anymore. Let's get off this stupid ride, we
| don't need big centralized services to tell us how to consume the
| content we're ostensibly paying for.
|
| 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.
| elevaet wrote:
| Bandcamp all the way. Their revenue share is extremely fair,
| their site is tasteful and functional, and they've been
| blessing the world with flac since their beginning.
| [deleted]
| deanCommie wrote:
| You're incredibly wrong, but in a very classic way:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
|
| 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.
| Demcox wrote:
| Had been a die-hard Spotify user since it launced but was so
| aggrevated with podcasts being presented using the same method
| behind foie gras.
|
| 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).
| victorbstan wrote:
| This is why I find it extremely irritating when non apple users
| can't understand why I use apple stuff. On many levels, not just
| music, they offer things others don't.
| verisimilitude wrote:
| Since I don't listen to much music on my phone, I've actually
| taken in a step further: my Apple Music local library music files
| are stored in a .sparsebundle on my NAS. I wrote a little Obj-C
| app to automatically mount and unmount that sparsebundle when I
| open and close Apple Music (nee iTunes) on MacOS. This prevents
| the sparsebundle from becoming corrupted, as they tend to do.
|
| 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.
| taylodl wrote:
| Having recently upgraded to Catalina (I've been running Mojave
| for quite some time now!) I somehow completely missed the boat
| that iTunes is gone and has been replaced with Music. Apparently
| the functionality of iTunes has been split between Finder (sync
| iPhone, rip CDs) and Music.
|
| 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.
| lolsal wrote:
| The more I use a streaming music service like Spotify, the more
| new music I find, but the shorter my musical memory becomes.
| jl6 wrote:
| I believe memory formation is aided by multi-sensory
| perceptions. The experience of going somewhere to buy a CD,
| unwrapping it, opening it, putting it in a specific player at a
| certain time of the day, getting up to hit the next track
| button... this is a much richer set of experiences that form a
| much tighter web of recollection than just the audio alone.
| These experiences may all be totally mundane or even tiresome,
| but they help cement the memory of the music.
|
| 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.
| lolsal wrote:
| I don't know about all that - I can easily look back at my
| music library and browse through what I listened to 2 years
| ago. That is nearly impossible on Spotify (I assume on
| purpose).
| btown wrote:
| If you consistently like/heart songs as you go along, put your
| Liked Songs list on shuffle sometime - you'll find great old
| gems!
| lolsal wrote:
| I do this! It's great, but discoverability/brows-ability is
| lost.
| jdpedrie wrote:
| This hardly works at all for me. Spotify will happily shuffle
| the most recent 75-100 songs on my Liked Songs list, but
| something from 2012? Forget about it.
| lolsal wrote:
| I thought I was just imagining this behavior. Humans are
| bad at 'random', but I swear when I randomly play my 300+
| song playlist, I tend to hear the same 20-40 songs over a
| couple hours.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| I put music I like in playlists that I listen to in reverse
| order by date added. As a result, I form pretty strong
| associations between my playlist songs and times in my life,
| down to about the week.
|
| 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)
| achairapart wrote:
| Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Music or whatever now is
| called. I tried them all. They are all the same to me.
|
| 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!
| conradev wrote:
| Much of that data is in these services, in some form, for
| billing
|
| Too bad that exposing it is likely too "niche" for them to
| prioritize
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Musicbrainz has the most of this kind of information. I often
| use it to find out where/year the songs from a compilation came
| from. Wikipedia as well, though it is unstructured.
| joshvm wrote:
| I understand Spotify actually has an advanced search (including
| range queries, lyric match and metadata like labels) but it's
| not documented well and the app itself doesn't present any
| options to the user.
|
| https://support.spotify.com/us/article/search/
| achairapart wrote:
| Interesting! I never heard about those advanced search tags,
| at least there's something.
|
| Thanks!
| isolli wrote:
| There are such niche services for classical music. For
| instance, idagio.com is really excellent with metadata. You see
| e.g. all works by a performer or all performers of a work.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Hey man. Thanks, just subscribed. Classic music experience
| always sucked on modern apps. This is the first one that does
| it right.
| conception wrote:
| Idagio is so good. I sub even though I'm not on it a lot to
| keep it afloat.
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| please god, do not buy out discogs and leave it the hell alone.
|
| 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.
| ValentineC wrote:
| Have you checked out MusicBrainz [1] as an alternative for
| Discogs?
|
| They're run by a non-profit [2], which is worth supporting,
| and a bit hard to "buy out".
|
| [1] https://musicbrainz.org/
|
| [2] https://metabrainz.org/
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| I, mainly, use Discogs more as a trading platform for
| vinyl. The fact their meta-data db is phenomenal is an
| added bonus
| SllX wrote:
| I second this. Discogs is amazing in the way that only
| independent websites can be, and not just as a database
| (which would be locked up by the buyer, stripped of its more
| interesting and obscure data and turned into a feature for
| the buyer's "platform"), but also as a marketplace.
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