Look, I use computers all day every day. I’ve got a lot of music, it hangs out on plex, it hangs out on my phone. Those two things, they handle metadata gracefully within their zones.
Try to take that out? Oh boy.
Trying to load that on an iPod Classic because you’re tired of your music listening being interrupted by notifications? Oh boy ^2.
I’ve got about 9.5k songs, some flac, some mp3 some who knows.
If any of you are planning on playing with an iPod here’s some advice.
SKIP ITUNES ALL TOGETHER.
Only use it for restoring an iPod.
Don’t let it touch your music.
Manually convert FLAC->ALAC with ffmpeg. Instruct ffmpeg to ignore any video/art streams. Rebuild your library structure to be mostly flat based on artist/album. Run MusicBrainz Picard to grab album art and save as a single “cover.jpeg” in each album directory, then use foobar2000 + foobop(ipod plugin).
You will see people suggest this, think “oh how bad can itunes be, let me try that first”.
I’ll tell you. BAD. Itunes album art discovery? worse than letting a stoned gerbal pick randomly via where their poop lands.
Don’t waste your time. I haven’t tried alts for Linux yet, but foobar2000, despite being ugly as all hell does the job perfectly.
Another weird bonus I’ve found is using the ipod in conjunction with my audio interface + direct monitoring through my speakers lets me just not worry about how to reach my music from various OSs, its just there, running through the same speakers/headphones as my pc audio.
Yeah that’s a good point too. I dual boot Linux/Windows. I only use windows for gaming so it doesn’t usually matter, but my Plex server lives on my Linux install so it goes away when I’m in windows.
My router is in a terrible place, which I take advantage of by putting an ancient laptop with ubuntu server into the top shelf of a closet and it gets the privilege of being my only wired network device.
Makes the SMB and plex serving a bit snappier though.
I definitely recommend the ancient laptop server route. “Ancient” has began to mean 8gbs of RAM and an i5 in the last few years which is more than enough.
