De-Clouding: Music
rosswintle.uk110 points by surprisetalk 5 days ago
110 points by surprisetalk 5 days ago
Interesting that they prefer syncing. I went the other way and stream everything, but locally. Music acquisition is 95% bandcamp (5% is Amazon or Qobuz or physical CDs I rip), the FLACs gets transferred to the N100 server in my living room, where it gets picked up by Navidrome[0]. Navidrome then streams it to the kitchen (via Music Assistant to a pi3 with USB-connected speaker), to my phone (via Symfonium), and to my browser (via the web app). The server has tailscale for remote access as well.
[0] Until recently I used Jellyfin, but the performance of Navidrome is far superior.
I did the same thing, except my navidrome is a VM in a DC. Also run nextcloud, too; so my phone (camera) gets backed up on local NAS and in a DC. there's no way i have enough storage on my phone to tote my music, too. I have "thumb drives" for cars, one with some music, the other with OTRR radio programs (from archive.org). My car has a disc changer so i have 3 days of stream rips from 10 years ago, as mp3 cds.
Streaming was good, when pandora was free - and even when they first asked for money, it was still good. I never saw the appeal of spotify, and i'm glad $0 of mine went to their product.
I have file boxes full of audio CDs that haven't been backed up yet, who knows how long any of the stuff in there will be available in that format? My favorite anecdote is that some songs on official music streaming platforms will have the same artifacts as kazaa/limewire tracks 23 years ago.
I forget if symfonium has a paid version, but i think i sent money to them. There was another app for android that i tried (and probably gave money to as well), but symfonium never does the wrong thing, although i haven't figured out how it weights songs for random track shuffle.
i'm frazzled from this week, apologies for rambling just to say "hey, me too!"
Yeah, symfonium is paid, but almost universally recommend.
I switched to seafile from nextcloud, much faster and I never used all those NC features anyway. Native photo syncing and backup support on android.
I recently got that big CD box out and ripped everything as flac for archival.
Same setup, minus the Pi. That includes originally starting out with jellyfin!
When on Jellyfin, I used to manually transcode the entire library to ogg and use syncthing to replicate it to my devices. Symfonium's ability to cache transcoded files is quite handy (although the initial backfill of ~20K songs took a few tries)
moving away from streaming honestly. recently i was without net for a bit and i found actually i dont have a lot of music anymore locally because i switched to streaming when it came out, happy to ditch a lot of diskspace/cupboard space.
now i slowly build it up again ;') its nice some streaming apps offer cache thats handy for offline, but its often a bit limited unless you play with it a bit.
Yes, Navidrome is great! and very lightweight. It's your own private Spotify, and has various players on each mobile platform. Recommended.
i run it in 4GB of RAM; it does OOM every quarter or so, i've had to restart it 3 times this year. I assume there's something i am doing inefficiently with it, but i suspect it's related to logging. Feels like it OOMs quicker the more i use it, but that's just a hunch.
it probably wouldn't hurt to cron-job a sighup and reissue the start command once a week.
The OOM issue is fixed in the most recent updates -- it was a memory leak linked to the file scanner, IIRC.
In my teens I started collecting CDs instead of tapes even though I didn't have a CD player, because I record them to tape on someone's player. So when I got my first PC and shitty little modem, I had a nice little stack of CDs to rip, as soon as that because feasible. (Actually, I remember ripping Rage Against The Machine's "Bullet in the head" to .wav in 1994, I think, and then deleting it because it took up most of the hard drive space). I've used audiograbber, EAC, Nero and a whole bunch of encoders. I must go back and find my earliest surviving rip and see what I used to encode it.
Anyway, none of what the author is doing is novelty to me, I stuck to my guns this past 30 years. I buy on Bandcamp or 7digital, or I rip charity store CDs. Occasionally, for really hard to find stuff, I download from YouTube or get a torrent, but only if I can't find it legally.
I've been running Musicbee on Linux/wine for a decade (I think). My last two DAPs were tiny, light-weight Hiby models.
I have had happily never actually paid for any music streaming service.
This is definitely admirable, for lack of a better word. It's frustrating how having been in the "streaming world" for a decade now, it put a stop to me getting music that I can own DRM-free which puts a pretty big wall in front of this optin for me.
It's kind of like we've been incurring debt all that time, and the "payments" are all deferred as long as you keep the subscription. But if I drop the subscription, suddenly I don't own any music newer than 2015, despite having paid $1200 -- it was just to rent music from Apple all that time.
Which kinda would be fine since I can afford it and it allowed me to get more music than I probably would have bought with a $1200 iTunes gift card.
But as you pointed out, Apple Music (and in my humble opinion Spotify and YouTube Music) both have modern-day UIs that are a horror show, only getting worse with each passing release. But the only choice is to keep subscribing to one, or rebuild your library at great money or time expense. :(
It's not that hard to set up Audacity to record the audio loopback input on your computer; https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_recording_compu... is a way to do it on Windows, and if you're on Linux you probably already know how to do it so I don't need to explain it. (Which I wouldn't be able to do immediately without looking it up, as the last time I needed to do that it was on my wife's Windows computer).
I'll refrain from explaining the rest of the steps to commit what some people would consider to be copyright violation, though IMHO if you paid for the music you should have a right to download a DRM-free copy as long as you don't distribute it to others.
Though of course, that does factor into the "time expense" you mentioned. But it's something you only have to do once, and you don't have to do it for your whole library at the same time.
Sounds like piracy with extra steps and a worse end result.
Certainly torrenting the same tracks you'd paid for through whatever no-downloads-allowed store, if you can find those tracks, would be fewer steps, and whoever put those up would likely have tagged them already. But if you have obscure tastes in music and nobody is offering those tracks in a torrent, Audacity can rescue you from vendor lock-in.
The legality of torrenting music tracks you've already paid for elsewhere, which would be breaking the letter of copyright law but not (IMHO) its spirit, I will leave to others to debate.
Based on the description, it seems like fair use. It's like transferring music from your own vinyl record to a tape. It's not up to other people to judge why someone prefers to listen to music from a reel-to-reel tape instead of a vinyl record. The same is true for streaming versus listening from WAV files.
I think if you transcoded all the music you want from Apple Music so that you could just listen with an MP3 player or PC of your choosing instead of their software, if you continued paying the subscription fee indefinitely - would be pretty defensible, ethically upstanding, and let's be real, there is a 0.000000000% chance you'd ever get sued for doing that on your own.
The hazards of course are that if someone were to do so and stop paying the subscription fee, they're in dubious moral territory, and if someone built a tool to "help" you do it automatically that person is going to be sued.
Re-recording and correctly tagging every song I've added to my "Library" in the past decade in realtime would cost me thousands in lost productivity though, and I'm likely in the bottom 20% in the metric of "percentage of my library added in 2015-2025." So I'm locked in by the sheer impracticality. Someone who actually keeps up with new music, I can't imagine how many hours they'd have to spend.
Many people experience this but spend many thousands more on a vehicle lease and have to nothing to show for it afterwards
True. I think that's something many are ok with - but the transportation is a service, not much different than Uber. Which arguably is a more correct mental model of car-having vs. being fooled to any degree into viewing the car as an investment.
The need is "transportation" -- you have a number of ways to rent that transportation (bus, train, cab, Uber, rent-a-car, lease) or you can buy a depreciating asset (car) that cuts your per-mile cost slightly from the renting options.
And in the case of my Apple Music subscription I have to make peace with it being an entertainment service that I don't get to keep any physical or digital manifestations of after I stop paying. Like a movie ticket.
It's also revealing to do the maths on how much you'll spend on streaming if you assume you'll keep your account for the rest of your life.
I'm ~50. Let's say I live to 80. 360 months × AU$25 = NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS WAIT WHAT?
I mean, sure, I might spend $9k on Bandcamp or whatever. But I dunno really if I would.
Later that day
Damn though, Apple Music is convenient...
Consider that if you spend 9000USD on bandcamp you can pass the files on to your great grand children
I've been buying used CDs on ebay when I can get them for ~8USD per album, and buying FLAC/ALAC on bandcamp and qobuz for anything that's hard to find. A couple of albums that aren't streaming I had to pay 30-50 USD for a used CD, Ecstatic by Mos Def, Parabolic by Aoki Takamasa. It's kinda fun to find out what music is "rare" and what music is cheap.
Jellyfin + Finamp is a solid combo, and a flash modded iPod 4th gen (last one with a black and white screen) to play music in the car. It's a good feeling to know none of my albums will ever disappear. (To be sure, albums have disappeared from Qobuz, and now they have a message that says 'be sure to download after purchase !!')
iTunes 12.13 is actually a solid music player on Windows. Ripping CDs works great too. There's no iTunes that runs on the latest MacOS tho, since they supplanted it with "Apple Music". Kind of ironic, but Windows has always been bigger on backwards compatibility.
I am surprised to see those discussions w/o a single mention of roon. As a music lover, roon is a software I've happily paid 100 of $ for.
While not OSS, roon 1) can run on linux 2) supports large local libraries (I have > 2k albums in FLAC, and it supports much more) 3) have roon arc that allows you to listen from phone anywhere 4) has a very good system to link metadata and recommendation within your library.
The metadata support is truly wonderful, you can easily browse your music like wikipedia, can find music per composer, performer, discover related musicians, etc. I strongly recommend people serious about music to try it out.
I've happily replaced spotify with it a few years ago, and will never go back.
Roon seems great but the pricing is really steep in my opinion... Costs practically as much as a streaming service, but you still need to get your own music.
At least they have a lifetime purchase option, though it costs $830!
It is not cheap, but it is clearly made by people who care about music. In those days where "slop" is so common, for people who can afford it, it is a nice refresher.
Another minor inconvenience is that it is memory hungry for large libraries. In my case, for ~1 TB of flac, the docker takes 5-6 GB RAM on my debian NAS. Limiting it at 4 GB definitely crashed w/ OOM, at 8Gb never had issue.
`yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 "URL"` does the trick for me, then I just load it on to my phone's mp3 player. These days, I also use a python script to quickly add the artist and name id3 tags, but I always just rename the file to "artist - songname.mp3" too
yt-dlp has a `--add-metadata` flag, it puts the channel name in the artist field, video name in the name field and gets the thumbnail as well, I think. Could be useful!
That will work for the videos that youtube tags as music releases, but I also pull music from videos that don't conform to that correctly.
For example, if I wanted to download Better Luck Next Time by Bombs Away (a random example from the My Mix playlist right now), it would set "Artist" to "Central Station Records" and "Name" to "Bombs Away - Better Luck Next Time [Official Video]". I have a reasonably diverse and sometimes niche music taste, so that problem would crop up a lot, and at that point it's just easier to do it myself, but it would work well for some people =)
I have a python script set up so I can just do "./id3.py artist name filename" and it'll do all the id3 stuff for me (apart from thumbnails, still working on that)
I realise my workflow isn't ideal for some people who want everything to "just work" but I'm happy enough to sort out filenames and stuff like that myself, it makes me feel happy. I do the same with my very legally acquired films and tv shows too
yt-dlp is fantastic. Don't know if useful, but they do permit to rename the file name directly from the options. This is a syntax example:
yt-dlp -o '/home/yourusername/Videos/%(title)s.%(ext)s' "URL"
Yeah, I did see that, but the videos I download don't always have their titles in the format that I'd like, or they don't include the artist name or whatever, so I just do it myself.
For example, https://youtu.be/ll0egrmKZj0 doesn't include the song name or artist name anywhere in the title (I prefer this version to the final released version of Stand and Deliver), so I'd have to rename it myself anyway to "Look Mum No Computer - Stand and Deliver.mp3"
I have an offline music library that I use with Apple music app. It's the only way I can have Siri play playlists by name when using CarPlay; despite this functionality being broken for me since iOS 17 (have a longstanding bug report with escalation with engineers that have been saying they'd fix the bug for about 2 years now). Synchronisation is awful because it can't reconcile multiple copies of the library on different devices, so you're essentially tethered to one mac (or windows) for synchronisation.
I was also frustrated with some aspects of streaming services so I wrote my own offline alternatives: Tiny Player for Mac and for iOS a similar solution to Doppler: app + companion uploader app for the Mac. All free: https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player-for-mac/ and https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player/
That echo mini looks fun, but what I'd really like is a small touch-screen linux device that can both play my bandcamp local files and run Spotify, but that I can lock down to no other apps (no distractions!).
Should I just build one out of a raspberry-pi + screen, or are there better options?
Depends what you consider "better". There seems to be small Chinese devices that can be delivered with either Android or Linux. E.g. search for Pipo X8R (can't say it looks very good, though). They also seem to sell Windows mini PC's - maybe some of them will run Linux without too much trouble.
There are also a number of providers of displays marketed for RPi, some with mounts to attach it at the back. E.g. see EYOYO on AliExpress or elsewhere. Here's one[1].
This certainly makes the "build one" option quite trivial, since for most it's just a matter of screwing the RPi in and attaching a couple of cables. I'm planning something similar when I get time, and suspect I'll end up with one of those monitors.
Not exactly what you want... You can likely run Mopidy on a pi and lauch browser in kiosk mode to show its web interface. If you don't want display and ok controlling from your phone then you can run mpd for local files and librespot as spotify speaker.
The beginning of a post series? Could be interesting. De-Cloud is a great term for what you’re doing.
Jellyfin (server), Finamp (iOS client) and Tauon (Linux client) for me.
I'm a fan of keeping music videos and playing them on the background but VLC has been crappy and the default video player doesn't like older formats.
Do you have any recommendations?
Spotify, et. al., are wonderful for discovery but the chances your esoteric finds will stick around are precarious.
Their entire economic model relies upon providing the least amount of money possible to the rights holders. This seems to often mean removing access to "expensive" content in customer libraries.
I don't think it's a simple coincidence that some of the best tracks wind up getting removed arbitrarily. It's almost like I can trigger this to occur by listening to anything "not mainstream" too many times.
Their economic model is also based on trying to come up with new content all the time (hence podcasts), because once people realize they mostly listen to the same songs over and over again, they will resent the cost of a subscription.
This is the main difference between video and audio. One rarely watches the same movie or show more than once (it can happen, and there are people watching Succession or Friends on loop, but they're a minority). But we often listen to the same songs / artists and like the familiarity of it.
Subscription for music is not just detrimental to the artists: it's fundamentally a bad deal for users.
Nah. All of Spotify’s discovery is paid placement payola.
It’s annoying and gross and ruins the product.
> Spotify, et. al., are wonderful for discovery
Was. They deprecated their API which allowed you to lookup for more songs of the same type.
Probably just to piss me off. SpotifyQT + that was great.
Now I'm stuck shuffling through playlists.
I have a 512gb s22 ultra wifi only that was a handle down, the carrier radio was fried and they just sent a replacement... It's an amazing offline mp3 player loaded up with my 45k song Library. Using auxio from f-droid which handles it fine. Couldn't be happier. Also have the full library loaded onto my nextcloud (selfhosted, behind wireguard) and my laptop. I try to avoid the streaming side of things because camping and road trips happen.
I went through a similar exercise last year (back to purchasing/owning music) and couldn't be happier. Built my own offline player too.
Been using Plexamp off a NAS at home that serves music throughout the house (Apple TVs, Plex) or in the car, or anywhere for that matter.
I created my own cloud, exposing my Apache WebDAV server via DDNS. Using Evermusic for iOS and simply mounting it as a folder on my laptops.
I'm considering this idea currently because ATM all the Pink Floyd albums on streaming platforms have names describing the image instead of the original artwork (I assume for the WYWH anniversary.) What it reminded me was that we don't own anything they host so I look forward to exploring this as well.
and, they can remove things arbitrarily, even things you paid for.
keep backups for anything you value.
Discogs is amazing. Virtually every second hand record store on the planet is on there, so you can search up virtually any CD that exists, buy it, and have it mailed to you in a few days. I buy so much stuff there.
I often wish there was a Discogs equivalent for DVDs, but there doesn't seem to be.
Discogs was amazing, its sadly now a shit show. I refuse to buy from it or add to its database any more.
Friends: what suggestions do you have for offline voice-controlled music playing?
The music is on the disk, how can we get away from having to use Alexa or similar for listening music that is on our libraries using voice control? Thanks in advance.
My music collection is 1.2TB. Most VPS only offer 40-100GB on the cheap tiers. For now I just keep it local...
Any suggestions for storage oriented VPS that I can use for this use case and other backup/storage use cases?
Petrichor is indeed a fabulous name, Ross. Love for that smell is the mark of a true Briton.
I did the same like 2 years ago, but I am using Plex on my NAS. That gives me both, flexibility and owning my music. Only downside is that I don’t want to open ports to the outside, so I use WireGuard on my router.
The issue here is that you are subject to future policies of Plex and I think you should think about alternative from now regarding their recent moves and history.
I also have tried Emby, that worked great too. I installed it via docker and have both Plex and Emby running.
Is there a workflow of fetching individual songs and getting recommended songs? I'm now firmly in Spotify, I used to have whole albums and "scrobbled" my playlist to Last.fm.
For me Foobar2000 just works on macos
I had a look at Petrichor and Doppler, but the feature-set is incredibly limited. Foobar2000, while strange to use, at least allows me to do basic things like navigate my library by genre.
Try this in: View > Layout > Edit Layout
splitter horizontal style=thin
splitter vertical style=thin
splitter horizontal style=thin
tabs
albumlist tab-name="Album List"
refacets tab-name="Refacets"
playlist
splitter horizontal style=thin
tabs
splitter horizontal style=thin tab-name="Now Playing"
albumart
selection-properties sections=metadata
playlist-picker tab-name="Playlists"
playback-controls
CDs degrade. Online services go down. DRM stops being supported, licenses stop working.
FLACs are forever. Rip to FLAC and follow 3-2-1 backup rule.
obligatory plug for Navidrome [0], a "personal spotify server" which is simple to set up and allows playback + offline caching on any desktop/mobile device. it's a really polished piece of self-hosted software.
although there is something refreshing about the simplicity and resiliency of OP's setup.
Interesting article, especially the Fiio, I did not know that.
So here is my 2 cents:
I self-host navidrome[1] for music and audiobookshelf[2] for audio books and podcasts as well as syncthing[3] for documents (e.g. ebooks).
For streaming music the navidrome browser web client is already pretty good, but for my portable devices I use Substreamer[4] (free but non open source) and DSub[5] (FOSS). These Apps can switch playlists into Offline Mode and sync automatically. This is especially useful with the smart playlist feature[6] of navidrome.
To add music, I rip bargain Audio CDs with EAC[7] to FLAC and then use beets[8] with a cronjob that runs every 30mins to automate the process of importing the files and converting them to MP3 V0[9] to make it compatible with all of my devices (e.g. Car USB Stick). Then I archive the FLACs to keep space requirements low.
For audio books I use the Audiobookshelf App to download the files and then use Voice[10] as a companion app to listen. This is because the Audiobookshelf app is not a native app and Voice just integrates better. I'm currently in the process of adding some of my missing features like Support for Media-Button Tap-Codes[12] and better file scanning[13]. For iOS I'd probably use Prologue[11].
For Syncthing there is a Fork on FDroid that is still maintained and for iOS there also is something...
For standalone music players you could try the following:
- Hifi Walker G7 mini (cheap)
- Hiby M300
- Shanling M0
- Fiio M11 Plus
- Sony NW-A306
2: https://www.audiobookshelf.org/
4: https://substreamerapp.com/
5: https://f-droid.org/packages/github.daneren2005.dsub/
6: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/smartplaylists/
7: https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/
9: https://boomspeaker.com/mp3-v0-vs-mp3-320/
10: https://github.com/PaulWoitaschek/Voice
I did this by making my own cloud. Simply run a mod server that uses icecast as its audio backend. Then just like that you can listen to streaming audio from anywhere.
What server do you run? I'm planning to re-cloud my music, I mean I divide my music to two parts: that I listen to casually, and that which I want to own by myself. Spotify is so cheap it tempts really well, but I've already lost a few of my music from it (for example I had a title in my playlist, but it's lost, and I can't even see what the title was). I tend to re-buy each month a CD or two, so I re-own my music.
Not the person you asked, but I am running mpd[1] ("musicpd" in some package repos), using its httpd output to serve on localhost, and use a normal reverse proxy with Nginx to expose it on my VPN with HTTPS. To manage playlists and stuff, I connect to mpd from my LAN using ncmpcpp[2].
Nowadays there's probably better alternatives though.
Spotify has an option to show songs in your playlists which have been removed. In the mobile app, Settings->Content and Display->Show unplayable songs.
Hope this helps!
I never went to the cloud and have a well currated and sorted file-based record collection. Where a few years back people would look at me like a weirdo for not "just" using spotify, some of them have come around to asking me how to do it my way.
I have most of my music on my phone and can listen to it with zero network connection. There have been multiple instances where I have been the only person with music..
I did that around 1.5 years ago. I was at the thrift store and found an MP3 player "SanDisk Clip Sport Go" for $2.99, modded it to increase the memory from 32GB to 256GB, and now I have all my music there in a very small form factor that I had to put an AirTag on to find it! It also has FM radio, a screen, actual buttons, and the battery lasts a week with normal use. It doesn't have Bluetooth; however, I just attach a Bluetooth dongle "1Mii Safefly Pro" and can pretty much have high-quality audio to my speakers and headphones or even my car, and yes, I also found that dongle for $3.99 at the thrift store. Both are less than one month's subscription.