Look, I use computers all day every day. I've got a lot of music, it hangs out on plex, it hangs out on my phone. Those two things, they handle metadata gracefully within their zones.
Try to take that out? Oh boy.
Trying to load that on an iPod Classic because you're tired of your music listening being interrupted by notifications? Oh boy ^2.
I've got about 9.5k songs, some flac, some mp3 some who knows.
If any of you are planning on playing with an iPod here's some advice.
SKIP ITUNES ALL TOGETHER.
Only use it for restoring an iPod.
Don't let it touch your music.
Manually convert FLAC->ALAC with ffmpeg. Instruct ffmpeg to ignore any video/art streams. Rebuild your library structure to be mostly flat based on artist/album. Run MusicBrainz Picard to grab album art and save as a single "cover.jpeg" in each album directory, then use foobar2000 + foobop(ipod plugin).
You will see people suggest this, think "oh how bad can itunes be, let me try that first".
I'll tell you. BAD. Itunes album art discovery? worse than letting a stoned gerbal pick randomly via where their poop lands.
Don't waste your time. I haven't tried alts for Linux yet, but foobar2000, despite being ugly as all hell does the job perfectly.
If you're using a classic iPod, install RockBox on that shit. It supports FLAC natively.
I yoinked a 5th gen for the express purpose of modding to hell and back so I'm going to try it. This recent experiment was packing my library onto my 6th gen which will stay stock due to the case design.
If you're an albums listener the best organization is the simple artist, album, track hierarchy. Even if you just listen to a handul of tracks, not albums, this organization is still the most obvious and straightforward. Yes, iTunes sux ass but it should still be able to cope with it, too if the metadata is correct (as iTunes doesn't care about folder structure).
. ├── Animal Collective │ ├── Animal Collective - Feels │ │ ├── 01 Did You See The Words.mp3 │ │ ├── 02 Grass.mp3 │ │ ├── 03 Flash Canoe.mp3 │ │ ├── 04 The Purple Bottle.mp3 │ │ ├── 05 Bees.mp3 │ │ ├── 06 Banshee Beat.mp3 │ │ ├── 07 Daffy Duck.mp3 │ │ ├── 08 Loch Raven.mp3 │ │ ├── 09 Turn Into Something.mp3 │ │ ├── cover.jpg │ │ └── Folder.jpg │ ├── Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion [V0] ...That's 1000x portable so long as you have the option to manually manage the music collection on your intended device such as a Rockbox-based player.
To convert music, I use
fre:acand lately I've been converting my FLAC to opus (140kbps).Foobar2000 in Wine is still my favorite music player but Quod Libet is an OK (not good) substitute when you use the Waveform Seek Bar plugin. And possibly other plugins that might fit your needs.
I don't really download music anymore but if I do I will try to get a FLAC source and convert it myself to Opus. I am pretty done with MP3. The only advantage mp3 has is ubiquity, but king Opus is so good. My collection would only take like 50GB instead of 130 if it were all encoded in a modern Opus format with 128 or 140kbps.
For streaming music to myself I find that Jellyfin can work nicely with the app Finamp. It is programmed with Dart so it has a very Android looking UI. Not nice for iOS. And it doesn't have some nice features like tracking your recently played (I don't think) so every time you use it it's like you're starting from a basic home screen search. I don't listen to my music that much in this way so I have little experience with it, but I can confirm the experience worked solidly and reliably, even if some of the UX lacked polish.
Addendum: for streaming podcasts I use audiobookshelf, not Jellyfin. It is designed for audio books, really, but it still has good podcast tracking capabilities. The iOS app is in beta so I use the mobile web interface, but because Apple is Apple any audio I try to play back in Opus format does not work well. The mp3s play back fine on iOS.
This is what I've been doing for years. It originally came from a library organized by iTunes, and I just kept the structure as I added stuff.
Typically on Linux I'll run cmus since the cmus server is easy to tie into keyboard shortcuts and its very fast at re-understanding a library. I don't plan on using foobar for actually listening to music but it was great for getting stuff on-device.
I'll look into Opus encoding, I'm curious because my torrent/plex server is on a 10 year old laptop without a lot of space.
Do you have a particular reason for cmus over mpd + ncmpcpp (or + something else?)
tiling window managers and using a TUI app means less screen realestate used.
and tbh I barely use it anymore compared to plex.
Yeah, it's bad. And once you get to classical albums it's far, far worse since you've also got Composer/Orchestra/Performance Date/Conductor/Soloists/etc etc.
I saw someone's classical music scheme on /r/musichoarders after I landed there looking for info on auto-tagging. My god that folder structure was complex. I'm infinitely greatful that classical just isn't my thing and if I have the desire, youtube is more than enough.
Its actually stupid easy to do by hand, connect the ipod as a disk, show hidden files, drag the music off, import back to itunes for mostly de-obfuscated music.
Its sorta fun collecting libraries from used ipods.
Every time I reinstall OSX I just click "do not agree" on the iTunes TOS and after that it doesn't bother me again unless I open it by accident, in which case I just click "do not agree" again.
iPod == good
anything else apple == bad
There wasn't really a decent portable music player that could compete without being an audiophile device, and even then, no device got the UI right IMO. The devices themselves were kneecapped by everything around it. There's no good way to navigate through thousands of pieces of hierarchical data on a small device but the scroll wheel was the least bad by far.
Even if you found another device that could sorta compete, either their UI was awful or build quality suffered. A touch screen is alright but I want to put my phone down.
Figuring out foobar2000 was both an intense relief and inspiration for this post. ipod classics are like 30-40 bucks now, 30 bucks for a storage upgrade and a torrent client and you never have to worry about license conflicts again.
what kind of ipod do you recommend? and what's the storage upgrade?
The 5th gen ipod classics are some of the easiest to mod. The storage upgrade is from a company called iflash. You can grab an sdcard adapter to replace the og HDD which also helps with battery life. There's another company called elite obsolete electronics that sells batteries, screens, and other parts and tools for getting in. so you can basically find the cheapest 5th gen classic, and buy all the parts to make it look and act new as long as it wasn't water damaged.
Only thing to really consider is RAM in these, the ram mainly effects shuffle, and sets a max # of tracks that you can shuffle. 7th gen classics got up to 50k songs before shuffle crashes. 5th gens between 20k and 30k depending on storage. The ipod mini 2nd gen can also handle between 20-30k and can be upgraded comfortably up to 256Gb which is neat.
Hell yeah, this is absolutely my shit. Thanks for this, looking forward to the rabbit hole
Intentional technology is longer lasting technology which is less ewaste and less brainworm. I'm all about it. Its crazy the deals you can find too.
Itunes album art discovery? worse than letting a stoned gerbal pick randomly via where their poop lands.
I think this is why half my music library has the album cover art from Fashion Nugget by Cake
:croc-pog: WINAMP!!! (winamp... winamp...)
It really whips the llama's ass!
Anybody try out the new sony walkmans? are they a considerable designated music listening device replacement?
I saw them and they look beautiful, but it's sad to know it's basically just a custom Android smartphone. Also stupid-expensive for what they do.
Think of it more as the ipod touch with dedicated hifi DACs and amps
On Windows, I've had pretty good with the old version (v2.x) of XRecode. It's some random dude's shareware project that is basically an FFMPEG wrapper GUI that lets you mass-edit track metadata, download and attach album artwork, and automatically rename files based on the track metadata. I use it for splitting FLAC CUE sheets to individual FLAC track files in my main music library, and occasionally for transcoding those individual FLAC track files to MP3 VBR for my phone/other devices. My music hoarding has gotten to the point where the
Artist > Album > [Track #] - [Track Title]layout isn't quite cutting it anymore because of having remasters, represses, and releases from different regions/countries, so I've gotten to the point where I'm including catalog numbers and UPCs in the metadata comment field along with some bracketed snots for stuff like[], etc.I still wind up having to juggle multiple convert/rename presets for situations like "various artists" collections and multi-disc albums, but it's flexible enough to work with my "filesystem first" mentality by enforcing some measure of consistency between the metadata and the filesystem on initial imports into my library directory. Too bad the developer completely fucked up the UI in version 3. I've had it for several years and still haven't figured it out -- luckily it didn't upgrade over the top of the old version; it just installs as a separate program.
I also still use Winamp (only as a player, almost always launched from File Explorer shell menus), so I'm probably not the person to be taking advice from in any year past 2011 or so.
I just use MusicBee with an MP3 (320 or V0, usually) library. Auto-embed the album art (usually comes with where I pirated or bought it, sometimes gotta' search for it though), etc. etc. In tandem with iTunes 12 I can drag-and-drop music from MB onto an iPhone using either the native Music app or VLC (I have my favourite albums on the music app and my massive unlistened backlog in VLC that I try to work through).
Beets and MusicBrainz Picard are worth mentioning, though my experience with either has been far from seamless. Turns out maintaining good archives requires labor. :sadness:
