Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

will Plex stream FLAC files from an external HD?

muzecast

yes xp

Honestly I tried uploading my entire library to Dropbox and it was just a diabolical idea. Takes ages and doesn't really work as anything other than backup. Don't bother.

i will stick a few mixes or whatever on there and it works great. what was wrong with the whole library thing, did it just choke trying to transfer all the files?

Has anyone had Google Music Manager suddenly stop opening on Mac? Not stop uploading, but not opening/running at all? Tried deleting app and preferences panel and reinstalling with no luck. Assuming it's coincidence that it happened just as Google announced the rollout of Youtube Music but until yesterday it's been working fine for a couple of years.

The only thing I noticed was sometime in the last week it asked for keychain access to the password of the linked google account a few times. Once I granted it, it was fine -- maybe your issue is related to that?

have to clear out a bunch of CDs so I'm finally ripping/adding them to my database after years, and I'd forgotten how useful it was as a way of keeping up with new artists when properly maintained. already found out about at least three 2018 albums I had no idea were out

You mean browsing your digital library reminded you to go see what an artist has done lately?

it has random page functionality so I usually go through when I'm adding to it, random page a few times, and see if that artist entry needs updating with new albums. they often do

Ah yes, I find going through my library randomly will lead me to think, "What's so-and-so up to these days?" and I'll find a new EP, some guest appearances or whatnot. Alternately, I make an effort to listen to stuff that has no 'Last Played' date and so I go crate-digging in my own library.

My iPod broke a wee whole ago and I've gone full 'phone for all audio' using SD, downloaded Spotify playlists and Google Play Music to plug the gaps. It's dawned on me tonight that I don't need iTunes any more and a few hours messing about with MusicBee and it feels like a great weight has been lifted. (Not enough to delete the mighty behemoth; not yet.)

i love just using folder structures. mind, it's easy for me cause i've never been a playlist guy, it's just open an 'album' and play it through around here

got my first 400gb micro sd and i've been pretty manic filling it up i must say

4TB HDs are now less than $100

But who makes a portable music player with them?

give it a couple years and you'll have 4TB solid-state drives, those will be suitable for portable music players... 4TB spinning rust doesn't work well, it's a huge power drain and too fragile.

What is needed is a little fucking portable player that just perches on the USB port of a solid state external HD and can access whatever’s on it

surely Dragonfly could make something like that...

can't they just make some more ipod classics? A solid state 256 gig HD on a dedicated music player and I'd be in musical heaven

yeah but no FLAC support is a dealbreaker for me

problem with portable music players isn't storage space, it's a robust enough ui to deal with 4 tb of music files

xps - iPods support ALAC which is a pretty simple lossless transcode from FLAC; and it's possible to buy old iPods which have been gutted and filled with SSDs / flash memory, including 256GB variants

You can always setup a plex server and stream your home collection.

I don't mind DAPs... the Hiby R3 is cheap, responsive, compact and very user friendly (and sounds great for the price). No need to buy and gut old ipods anymore.

Does the Hiby take a single micro sd or does it have dual slots like some of the fiio players?

Apple wants you to use their cloud storage and pay them a monthly fee, not your own hard drives. iPods are dead and not coming back.

Well there’s a 512 GB iPhone.

don't mind DAPs... the Hiby R3 is cheap, responsive, compact and very user friendly (and sounds great for the price). No need to buy and gut old ipods anymore.

Googled this and it’s a touchscreen device with wireless & bluetooth, so if you want a portable player with physical controls that doesn’t waste battery doing anything other than playing music, it’s definitely not a substitute for an iPod.

ipod classics are rockboxable. sansa clip plus and clip zip too and you can slot a 256gb microsd in them

Hiby R3 has a micro SD slot, got a 128GB card in mine, they say it'll take up to 2TB...not that those exist yet

It also has some physical controls. One rocker button alters volume, the other deals with fast-forward/back, stop/pause, moving between songs

does it have an airplane mode to shut off the wifi / bluetooth? (i'm assuming the screen turns off when not being used, like a phone)

it actually looks a lot like my previous phone, which also has sd slot and (removeable) battery and isn't that much bigger. i wonder how well that would work...

The wi-fi & Bluetooth isn't continually on (unless you want it to be). There's a 'Wireless settings' screen with 4 sliders to turn wireless, Bluetooth, DLNA & AirPlay on/off.

ipod classics are rockboxable. sansa clip plus and clip zip too and you can slot a 256gb microsd in them

― chihuahuau, Friday, December 14, 2018 9:01 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sansa clip w/rockbox can also take a 400GB microsd as I can now confirm.

Had a Clip Zip before the R3, still got it in fact. Not sure how easy they are to find now, got replaced by the Sport & some other model, which people don't seem to like as much (not sure if the new ones are Rockboxable)

Sport and whatever they call the one after that are not rockboxable and never will be because of the kind of chip they use. IIRC the type of chip the Zip and Plus used is no longer made by anyone. I have a Sport and it is pretty terrible. Longer battery life though, I'll grant it that.

clip Zip is currently my everyday player, i hear more music on that than anything else.

the Sport uses a different chip (xp) and they didn't have a rockbox build for it the last time i locked. the other one (Jam) does away with the colour screen and just has a tiny bw screen instead. did toy with buying a new one and rockboxing the Zip but i haven't yet.

the 16GB sd card i had in my Zip would take 10 minutes to index if you added anything to it. not ideal. but the 24GB total was enough for everything i've bought since 2011 so it's handy.

just looked up the Sport, it's the only mp3 player I've hung onto.. and it's still for sale! Good battery life beats having Rockbox for me. What do you find so bad about the interface? I may be in for trouble with navigating when I put an SD card in there, which this thread has me thinking to do. Though I keep a bunch of mp3s on my phone, my usage of it always gravitates towards Spotify/newness.

I just bought this Sony NW-A45/B Walkman (and a 200GB micro SD card to go with it) to replace my dying 160GB iPod classic.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0765ZVM6Y/

^^^I am using an NWZ-A17 with my new 400gb card in it (had been using it with a 200gb for a couple of years before that). It's great. Nothing has beaten the iPod classic but this comes in second for sure. Great SQ, really long battery life, solid build. I have it on a lanyard which makes me look like a total fucking moron.

> sansa clip w/rockbox can also take a 400GB microsd as I can now confirm.

yes, the limits come from the fat32 filesystem, not the hardware nor rockbox. up to 2tb you're good to go

there aren't even hints of a 1TB yet are there?

that Sony blurb is heading into snakeoil territory 8)

"New solder maximizes clarity

High-quality, lead-free solder creates a more efficient electronic connection between components, including the S-Master HX amp. Enjoy purer audio playback with enhanced vocal clarity, every time you press play.

New circuit board for pure, solid bass

The circuit board has been optimized to improve electricity flow, making the power supply stable. That means you experience clearer sound and pure, solid bass in your music."

also, no ogg support = a deal killer for me

Oh, you're the guy who listens to ogg.

i'm the guy old enough to remember the mp3 patent mess, yes. linux laptop with oggenc installed by default (and better quality for given bitrate) and a portable player that supported the same, it wasn't a hard decision and now everything i own is ripped as flac and ogg 8)

I favor 256kbps AACs myself.

lame

it perturbs me that lame went from version 3.99 to 3.100

8)

(lame wasn't always an option, certainly i remember having to compile it from source)

i was going to say that the clip zip lacked support for aac but apparently it's ok. it does have trouble with m4a files from iplayer so i generally transcode them, but if aac is supported and i can just change the container format then that would be better (and faster and smaller). will try tonight.

again, decent, available aac encoders were hen's-teeth rare (for linux) when i started doing this. oggenc was just there.

I hear ya koogs. I'm a Linux guy myself and was on the OGG train for a while. Now only hearing it from Spotify though.

I've read that the Clip Sport has a strange 2,000 file limit. Rockbox would've been nice after all. Oh well, I'll experiment with this limitation. I don't think I have that much use for an mp3 player in my life really.

Sony used to make some real nice little mid-market players, before going either real cheap or this extreme HiFi stuff. I remember they forced you into using "Sonicstage" though, which was just the worst. anyhow. thanks!

The Sony nwz I have was not ridiculously expensive - around 270 iirc. iPod Classic-ish.