[0] Until recently I used Jellyfin, but the performance of Navidrome is far superior.
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!"
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.
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)
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.
it probably wouldn't hurt to cron-job a sighup and reissue the start command once a week.
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.
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. :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
At least they have a lifetime purchase option, though it costs $830!
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.
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 -o '/home/yourusername/Videos/%(title)s.%(ext)s' "URL"
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"
FLACs are forever. Rip to FLAC and follow 3-2-1 backup rule.
Should I just build one out of a raspberry-pi + screen, or are there better options?
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.