Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

Thanks.

I tried it with macos but the installation was a little beyond me. I followed their instrux but got permission errors.

I'll have to take a look at substreamer - I've been using iSub for years, and play:sub has never dealt well with my (very large) library. I moved from madsonic to airsonic-advanced recently and it's much faster, except that for some reason loading an album on the web player takes 10+ seconds. On the other hand I very rarely use the web UI so it's not a big deal.

Navidrome seems seriously impressive - much easier to install than any other subsonic clone I've used, and it's using way less RAM (literally 50mb versus 4gb...)

i literally could not get it to install on macos. you have to create a directory in /opt and put a bunch of files in there, and another file in your Library folder, and i kept getting permission/ownership errors and i have no idea how to fix them.

I didn't do either of those things! I literally ran it from the downloaded folder, pointing it to a config file I'd made:

/Users/admin/Downloads/navidrome_0.42.1_macOS_x86_64/navidrome --configfile '/Users/admin/Dropbox/dotfiles/navidrome/navidrome.toml'

The config file is very basic, it looks like

LogLevel = 'DEBUG'
ScanInterval = '1h'
TranscodingCacheSize = '150MiB'
MusicFolder = '/Volumes/Music 2TB/'
DataFolder = '/Volumes/Music 2TB/navidrome/'

and tbh I think the only thing here that actually really needs to be there is the MusicFolder entry.

Okay will try! There's a page on the navidrome site that has all this other junk you're supposed to do

Navidrome is not feature complete yet (smart playlists not done yet, genre navigation etc) but it’s developing at a pretty breakneck pace at the moment, saw they’re now working on chromecast and sonos integration.

Wish one of these would have gapless playback in web player.

Apparently very hard to do in-browser…

and sonos integration.

i dug in about this, and its already possible according to several posts about it.
definitely gets around the dreaded 65k limit.
but i think i will stick with my own current system as its now bedded in and i find it very easy ..
but still, it could be a very good solution to a crap problem.

Apparently very hard to do in-browser…

I want a box on my home network that has RCA cables running out to my receiver. The box would have a web interface to browse albums and play stuff, but it's not actually playing music through the browser. Can Navidrome etc do gapless playback in this case?

That's "jukebox mode" (music playback on the server itself), the original Subsonic had this, but it's currently not implemented in Navidrome but it's one of their projects for this summer (#2).

so, working around the flat clockwise from the bedroom i am now at the last chunk of cds, pop/rock a-t, two 4-sided carousels, 8 shelves to a side = 64 shelves of about 20 cds per shelf. currently on shelf 15, Crimea to Dead Can Dance.

and i must've done a good job of ripping these originally because so far i have found exactly 1 thing in this batch that i didn't have lossless copies of - Cocteau Twins, Otherness EP. i also ripped the three Belly Gepetto EPs because there was some confusion over the numbering (identical catalogue numbers a year apart, different lead tracks, typo on track 2...)

keeps me off the streets

Did not know that MP3Tag is now available for macs.

could somebody please recommend a decent file converter for mac? FLAC to 512 AAC. mediahuman wasn't working right...

ALAC gives me gapless playback issues on my ipod classic and FLAC doesn't play on them at all. it's a nightmare...

i installed rockbox but the battery life is practically cut in half with it. a shame. running musicbee for playback and tagging on windows. so efficient.

― maelin, Sunday, February 28, 2021 6:58 PM bookmarkflaglink

are you 100% sure about rockbox cutting down battery life?
because it's usually the other way around, rockbox improves battery life, and it would also take care of your FLAC and gapless playback problems.

thank you, but it's too late now... i switched my entire library to 512 aac.

there's an OS X version of Foobar 2000 that should do FLAC -> AAC conversion

<3333 thank you! i loved foobar on windows!

XLD: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xld/

i never got into the ipod or mp3 players as the only thing i do is convert youtube videos to mp3 and make my own cds of the music i can not collect on cd.

my guy xzan, you need soulseek in ur life.

for those missing classic itunes on mac:
https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive
i'm so happy!

What’s so desireable about the old iTunes? As far as I can see the new Music app is the same application, only with video stripped out and a couple bugs fixed.

They dumped the XML format which broke a load of DJ apps and other integrations iirc

Ah yes that - Apple deprecated the XML file back in High Sierra already and finally removed it in Catalina. Apps are supposed to use the iTunesLibrary API instead, but yeah a lot of older applications were never updated. You can still generate the XML manually btw, File > Library > Export Library.

easier to manage ipod stuffs on the old one. also cover flow. probably more things.

Music app makes my little search window go away all the time and then I have to click a dropdown menu and select "show filter field" or some shit and I hate it.

Finally broke down and got a standalone mp3 player a while back. First I had a Shanling Mofi which I liked a lot because it was so tiny, but after a little over a year it's batter crapped out and started swelling and destroyed the thing. Shanling offered no support.

Now I'm using a Hidizs AP80 which is a little bigger but seems to work well. But with both units, once a card is loaded up with a ton of music most of the features are lost and you can only use it with files.

The SD card based Walkman is hardy and sounds great and has long battery life. Only real drawback is proprietary usb cable.

On the el cheapo side I love the fiio M3K now that someone made a Rockbox port for it. Battery life pretty good too, though not as long as the Walkman.

NB I only do folder and file browsing no database stuff

The SD card based Walkman is hardy and sounds great and has long battery life. Only real drawback is proprietary usb cable.

Agree; I've had one for several years and love it. You can't really make playlists on it, though, at least I've never figured out how.

lo l I still can't figure out how to create a playlist in Plex. I kind of found one weird way of applying a filter to your entire Library and creating a smart playlist based on that but I just want to drag songs into a playlist for the gym.

it is a huge pain in the ass and not very useful!

It’s kind of wild

I think bandcamp allowing downloads may be the final straw in my attempt to actively maintain a collection or at least add new songs to it

why?

xp what happens when they get bought out in ten years and the "allowable" content changes?

personally I'm saving all my Bandcamp downloads on two local drives and one offsite hard backup

or,to use another example, what happens if the artist leaves the site?

(unlikely, but still)

been thinkin' a lot about this shit lately because I had my 1st 5TB drive die and it turned out my offsite backup had dropped his drive w/my stuff, so Ii had to back up from my personal copy which is closer than I'd prefer to get. Guess I gotta get redundant offsite data dumps, the good news is that transferring 3+TB only takes a day or so.

personally I'm saving all my Bandcamp downloads on two local drives and one offsite hard backup

Wise. (Currently I'm the reverse -- two offsite, one local.)

or,to use another example, what happens if the artist leaves the site?

― sleeve, Thursday

damn, you make a point

or the album is removed...that's happened as well.

sometimes intentionally, i kinda like the fact that some albums are ephemeral by design

spent too much of sunday trying to get digital jukebox to supply images to the playlist app. the server has a plugin that exposes them on a noddy javascript-based http server, only the url isn't documented (took about an hour to work out - needs query param ?path=/prefix/artist/album/ ). and the app lets you specify a hostname and prefix but doesn't do query parameters, just path parameters.

the server will also fetch images from the web if they aren't there (and enabled), only the jukebox has no internet access, runs on a wifi hotspot hosted by my old phone, which the app also runs on.

ended up writing my own, hardcoding the mountpoint for the drive, keeping it as simple as possible. will try and add a read-through cache tonight, somewhere other than the music drive, which is mounted read-only

only then did i notice that only about 5% of the directories have images and i need several thousand more... (might add artist images first, and/or generic fallback images)

Interesting. Link to the digital jukebox you're using?

even now only about 40% of my album archive has album cover images, life's too short