Increasingly Familiar Apple Lust Objects for 2016 and onwards

The big air is not selling very well apparently which is insane to me.

Perhaps getting rid of the very bad MacBook Pro will help with that.

i dont understand people who dont want the big screen thats the part you look at

Not if you’re connecting to an external 36”

i use an external monitor but sometimes i take the computer with me places

I can’t do serous, multi million dollar consequence work on either a 13 or a 15

Synology is cool but not the only solution. I was thinking about it for graphics because we work off one at the day job and that’s fine, but I don’t think it’s gonna work to do music off a network drive. So I’m more thinking one big drive internal or attached and backup and archive to Synology. Which I’m backing up to the cloud.

I used to have 4 drives in a thunderbolt enclosure that needed a thunderbolt to usbc adapter but one of the drives started going bad and they all kept disconnected and was a total pain.

I actually moved my entire music library to the Synology, then decided Apple Music was too slow so I moved it to an external ssd.

Too slow?

Yeah. But I think my library size is straining Apple Music app.

But also occasional weirdness where if the Synology isn’t mounted, music wasn’t happy obv. Once mounted the Synology volume is like any other directory.

Big library energy

I used to have a Synology but realised I rarely needed off-site access to those files so now I just have a fuck-off big external drive that I back up to the cloud. It works invisibly but not INAUDIBLY. The HD chatters like a fucking frenetic chipmunk. I am going to bite the bullet and get a fuckoff big SSD and then I think I will have finally achieved data nirvana

Data nirvana for me is downloading my 2k album Bandcamp library in flac and sharing it on slsk

Downloading it to what? And managing with what?

My new $6k space black m3 max MBP

How are you managing/lisrening? I still use Apple Music and have many years of playlists though most of them I don’t need. I do manage dj playlists that sync to rekordbox still.

Does your Synology not have an iTunes Server package? That would show the music files on it as a remote library, which has its own caveats, but the performance used to be a bit better than mounting a remote disk.

Barring that, there are a half dozen open source or freemium packages that do a lot better job with remote library management now. I’m still in the Plex ecosystem and the Plexamp app on iOS/macOS is pretty good. And you can have it download albums or playlists to your phone, etc.

ah, I missed the rekordbox synching bit. Not sure if there’s an easy solution there.

I haven't really explored using the synology as a media server.

I'm really tied into Apple Music. I use it for streaming and have even moved to making playlists in Apple Music using cloud stuff instead of my files so I can access those playlists from various computers and share them.

I avoided the whole merging of libraries thing for years because I heard horror stories. For the last few years my home computer wasn't sharing but my work machines were. At some point to get those playlists on my home computer as well I gave in and elected to sync the libraries but I think my home library was too big or confusing, I just ended up with multiple copies of the same playlists. It's a bit of a mess.

Plex works pretty well with Synology for a music server

The big air is not selling very well apparently which is insane to me.

The HD chatters like a fucking frenetic chipmunk. I am going to bite the bullet and get a fuckoff big SSD

I know the price differential isn’t great but I’d recommend buying your own external enclosure and ssd. Sandisk is the recent offender of delivering a defective external drive but overall the field’s not great

The Air was always for people who prioritised portability, and making it bigger is the opposite of that.

right, 15" is not what i'd choose, and i hope they do a 11 or 12" again. but the air is more than their ultraportable now. it's also their consumer entry-level laptop. and 15" laptops are by far the biggest selling laptops in PC land. they're what people who don't care about portability choose. so i'm surprised to see it do badly 🤷🏻‍♂️

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/07/26/15-inch-macbook-air-weaker-demand-report/

They want you to buy a big iPad rather than an 11" MBA presumably.

It’s amazing how much you can do on a tablet or phone now, pretty much all your random home crap. Why buy a laptop if you have one of those?

the interface is better on phone too

yep, maybe the market for consumer laptops (that are not $300 chromebooks) is now non-existent.

i use navidrome on synology - it's good. but i haven't figured out the accessing the synology from outside your wifi network though - think it involves tailscale or something - don't want my synology exposed to the big bad internet - i gotta figure it out

Didn’t need tailscale or anything. Other day friend asked me for the dr mix version of sister Ray and I was able to just access my synology from work and this have access to all my files.

You just need a Synology account - they mediate the connection through a web ... something. Anyway it works in Safari and you can download yr files from wherever.

right i mean to use as a music server. i think navidrome is based on the subsonic protocol so you can use a subsonic-compliant player to stream music from your navidrome install on synology. if you set it up right. i dunno if that works through the synology account interface.

I hadn't thought about the giant-screen PC laptop market, duh. That does seem to be having a bad year as well, though.

They want you to buy a big iPad rather than an 11" MBA presumably.

mainly use/need a laptop for slsking and torrenting + occasional "smart playlist" on iTunes

I couldn't live with just a tablet or big phone - touchscreens are slower to use, the spongy mobile keyboard options I've tried suck, the iOS file system is too obscure (as in with music apps, where things are being saved and where I can go to open files for samplers, etc.)

But I also wouldn't be the market for a 11" MBA because the difference in portability between one and a 15" MBP isn't large enough to matter for me.

I had a couple of weeks to play with iPad Air 4th Gen + Apple Pencil 2nd Gen + Logitech Folio Touch earlier this year (bought off eBay for daughter); it was pretty impressive and I began to maybe imagine a future without a laptop... but, it really does get heavy with the proper keyboard, and I manage to corrupt an old HDD (not fatally, I rebuilt it) by plugging two drives into a USB-C hub without sufficient power into the hub (iPads don't really do a safe eject). Still not comfortable with cloud-based Lightroom vs desktop "Classic", either.

xp - Oh, v good point about file systems.

yeah i wouldnt want to live with just a tablet even besides the work™ things i use it for im too much of a power user and besides am just habituated to it, but for a lot of people even just a big phone is fine, people live on those things theyre totally used to them, they dont need files or a keyboard etc

Slight derail re: the music discussion above--maybe someone here can help me out. My Apple Music library is a combination of streaming stuff and files I keep on a portable external SSD drive (stuff that isn't on the streaming service, like mono versions of some records or live bootlegs). I've gotten tired of having to get up and connect that drive to my MacBook and want to just put those files on my Windows gaming desktop so my MacBook is purely streaming using the iCloud match feature. How can I do that so that Music doesn't give me the "can't locate the local file" message every time I try to play them without the SSD? (It does stream if I hit cancel, but obviously halts playback on each subsequent track unless I hit cancel for each one). Do I have to just delete the albums from my MacBook copy of Music, and re-add it from the desktop computer?

The black MacBooks are really ugly. I'm currently using a 13" 2020 MacBook Pro, so I'm hoping I won't need to replace it for a while (my previous MB was a 2013 model).

blatherskite, how would you play those songs if they're on a windows machine? the match won't work if they're bootlegs or whatever. i think i'm missing something though.

Do I have to just delete the albums from my MacBook copy of Music, and re-add it from the desktop computer?

For the paid version, at least, it can match files in my library even if they are not in Apple's streaming service. I think Music uploads it, per this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146. For instance, I downloaded a mono rip of Leonard Cohen's first LP weeks ago, added it to my library, and can now play that mono version on my iPhone or desktop.

stet's idea sounds good

fwiw iTunes Match lets you download anything you matched if you want to grab your library again at some point, or if you don't feel like paying for it anymore

the fun trick is that if it successfully matches up your crappy 128kbps mp3 from eons ago to something in Apple's catalog, it'll let you download a DRM-free copy in 256 Kbps AAC. not lossless, but not shabby

ooh, it looks like it might let you download ALACs now. might be time to resubscribe to Match to use it exactly once

I've heard so many iTunes Match horror stories. Wonder if they've fixed those bugs.

My library got unwieldy enough that I'm pretty sure some of my songs that were supposedly iTunes matched have disappeared into the twilight zone over the years

yeah I avoided match for ever but recently said sure why not in the hopes that I could at least have my apple music playlists (filled w/ cloud material) on my home computer and in trying to scan/upload from my home computer it kept crapping out and I kept retrying and then gave up, and only then realized I now have like 12 copies of each playlist. Like it got as far as uploading the existance of the playlist but failed on all or some of the music.

Apple will only ever get my local files over my cold dead hard drives

this is why i am rolling my own (via navidrome on synology)

Bought myself a base model Mac Studio, I’m bringing back going on the computer as a discrete activity that happens in a specific place

revolutionary that