Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

yeah. i mean Prism is actually allowing me to use my phone to control the Apple Music library that’s on my computer but eh??

i guess i can recreate my playlists on Prism but it would be nice to have a standards-based ecosystem so that i know i won’t have to do it all over again for some other app once Plex gets bought by like Tiktok or something

i'm saying apple doesn't want you to have an apple music library on your computer anymore. they want you to subscribe to the (other) apple music that's not on your computer and give them money! time to move away from the apple music (on your computer).

yeah that’s what i’m kind of in the process of. feels kind of sisyphean doing my playlists again but i guess i should just give in to impermanence

btw the 'standards-based' thing you're looking for might be satisfied by looking into airsonic/subsonic compatible servers and players. airsonic is an open source fork of subsonic and seems to have an active community. but setting these things up probably involves a lot of pain. so ymmv. as i've stated before itt i use navidrome but have been too lazy to open up my NAS to the outside world to allow streaming.

This whole fragmented thing around music libraries is really annoying, I now have four music library applications to manage, each with its own playlists, it's a total shitshow.

- I've got Apple Music (the app not the streaming service) since it's the only way to sync music to iPhone/iPad natively, but it can't stream outside the home & the integration with AppleTV is terrible, it's also really limited with things like multiple genres/multiple artists/release types/etc, so:
- I've got Plex since you can stream remotely, Plexamp is a great Phone app & Plex is the only half-decent music player on AppleTV
- I've got Navidrome since the web player is easier/better and handles things like compilations a bit better
- I've got EngineDJ since I'm forced to use it to sync with my stand-alone Denon DJ controller, unsurprisingly as a library manager it's shit

On my PC I still use the Zune software to manage my digital music library. Somehow it still works, though last update was in 2011, and of course all the support and help links are long-since broken.

Zune lifers are the new 78 collectors (and I love them both)

Haha. It's true. I still use a Zune (my third) and if I can find a refurbished one when this one finally dies, I'll probably get another.

iTunes is still chugging along well for me. I even have an iPod Classic that still syncs properly.

It's kinda funny but telling -- I've noticed over the last couple of months a weird little bug in iTunes/Music that doesn't allow me to easily collapse individual tracks from promos into one album anymore with one step. (Importing rips is simple and works just fine.) It's not the end of the world and has only affected a couple of things, it just takes way longer to do it since I have to track by track. So I've been chatting every couple of weeks with a higher level Apple support person who is as puzzled as I am, and from context I definitely know now that I am among the very VERY few users using the program that way anymore (ie, to organize things in a home library, utterly separate from Music either as resource database or center for streaming), and that the bug was so obscure that I appear to be the first one to have reported it from what I'm gathering, though I've seen a couple of comments from people on the discussion forums indicating they've had similar issues. At one point the support person, knowing I was a music writer per our chat, called me a 'professional' user and I got a sense that was distinct from just about everyone else who uses it. Odd feeling!

We are the annoying ones, the edge cases, the power users - starving hysterical naked