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.
:trade-offer: have you tried managing a large photo library?
If you’re using a classic iPod, install RockBox on that shit. It supports FLAC natively.
TIL shortform rhythmic podcasts are a thing.
If you’re an albums listener the best organization is the simple artist, album, track hierarchy. Even if you just listen to a handul of tracks, not albums, this organization is still the most obvious and straightforward. Yes, iTunes sux ass but it should still be able to cope with it, too if the metadata is correct (as iTunes doesn’t care about folder structure).
.
├── Animal Collective
│ ├── Animal Collective - Feels
│ │ ├── 01 Did You See The Words.mp3
│ │ ├── 02 Grass.mp3
│ │ ├── 03 Flash Canoe.mp3
│ │ ├── 04 The Purple Bottle.mp3
│ │ ├── 05 Bees.mp3
│ │ ├── 06 Banshee Beat.mp3
│ │ ├── 07 Daffy Duck.mp3
│ │ ├── 08 Loch Raven.mp3
│ │ ├── 09 Turn Into Something.mp3
│ │ ├── cover.jpg
│ │ └── Folder.jpg
│ ├── Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion [V0]
...
That’s 1000x portable so long as you have the option to manually manage the music collection on your intended device such as a Rockbox-based player.
To convert music, I use fre:ac and lately I’ve been converting my FLAC to opus (140kbps).
Foobar2000 in Wine is still my favorite music player but Quod Libet is an OK (not good) substitute when you use the Waveform Seek Bar plugin. And possibly other plugins that might fit your needs.
I don’t really download music anymore but if I do I will try to get a FLAC source and convert it myself to Opus. I am pretty done with MP3. The only advantage mp3 has is ubiquity, but king Opus is so good. My collection would only take like 50GB instead of 130 if it were all encoded in a modern Opus format with 128 or 140kbps.
For streaming music to myself I find that Jellyfin can work nicely with the app Finamp. It is programmed with Dart so it has a very Android looking UI. Not nice for iOS. And it doesn’t have some nice features like tracking your recently played (I don’t think) so every time you use it it’s like you’re starting from a basic home screen search. I don’t listen to my music that much in this way so I have little experience with it, but I can confirm the experience worked solidly and reliably, even if some of the UX lacked polish.
Addendum: for streaming podcasts I use audiobookshelf, not Jellyfin. It is designed for audio books, really, but it still has good podcast tracking capabilities. The iOS app is in beta so I use the mobile web interface, but because Apple is Apple any audio I try to play back in Opus format does not work well. The mp3s play back fine on iOS.
This is what I’ve been doing for years. It originally came from a library organized by iTunes, and I just kept the structure as I added stuff.
Typically on Linux I’ll run cmus since the cmus server is easy to tie into keyboard shortcuts and its very fast at re-understanding a library. I don’t plan on using foobar for actually listening to music but it was great for getting stuff on-device.
I’ll look into Opus encoding, I’m curious because my torrent/plex server is on a 10 year old laptop without a lot of space.
Do you have a particular reason for cmus over mpd + ncmpcpp (or + something else?)
Yeah, it’s bad. And once you get to classical albums it’s far, far worse since you’ve also got Composer/Orchestra/Performance Date/Conductor/Soloists/etc etc.
