There's not really a guarantee, because of the nature of how licensing works. With a streaming provider you fork over a few bucks a month and listen to whatever they have in their library.Ĭloud music without outside intervention? No, not really. This is really a hobby at this point, not a convenience. I use ZFS with redundancy, and take regular snapshots but I also make occasional backups to external drives but I could also use something like S3 as well. If I purchase albums from providers like BandCamp or Ototoy, I then need to make sure the metadata matches what I've decided to go with. It's a little more painful with Japanese character sets e.g. Managing metadata: For example, I've some CDs that were ripped as "TALKING HEADS", others as "Talking Heads". Scanning the CD album art which I've done for some rarer albums in which I could not find artwork for online (or what I did find was blurry and over compressed) Or often there are multiple matches and I have to find the right one. ![]() Also I have no shortage of CDs with incorrect metadata in the CD databases or don't exist in the CD databases. Ripping CDs, then moving files over to the main dataset takes time, not a lot but it is a thing. And Koel is great but, if I ever decide to move to another utility I'll probably lose playlists or have to convert them over. But I like the ability to have them offline as well. I also manage a Koel instance so I can stream the files from wherever I want. As I add new songs to the main dataset, I'll have to sync them over to the phone. I recently copied my library onto an SD card for a new phone, which had a new media player, which then had to re-index them all. There is a non-zero amount of "care and feeding" that goes into it. Spotify is no better as my songs in their library have disappeared a couple of times as well. That got me thinking - Is there a reliable paid service where I could just upload MY music I legally purchased and they wouldn't be deleted just because of some stupid location based licensing or some other reason? I tried it a couple of times and this was still the result.Īpparently some songs aren't licensed for my location/country and/or aren't available in the catalog of Apple music for my country and therefore they were all deleted except the ones that Apple already has in their catalog. In just an hour, iTunes Match (a feature of the paid Apple Music subscription) tried to match the songs and deleted almost all of them and just left 3 songs in my playlist. I also have the paid Apple Music subscription which I pay for monthly. I was very happy and saw to it that all the audio files were uploaded. On the next page we test music search and useful features.I purchased a bunch of audio CDs and Apple Music (the Mac app) offered to rip it and save it into my iCloud library. Ecoute takes an odd column-based approach it's initially strange to use, but we warmed to its iPad-app-like charms. There's no way to jump to an artist or album using the keyboard, making it tiresome to navigate large collections.įidelia's main view resembles real-world hi-fi kit, but the library is a separate window both feel fiddly. Album Flow resurrects Cover Flow but is oddly clunky. The result is ugly but still broadly usable. ![]() The app is fast and responsive, and we liked its track-queuing system, from which you can save mixes.Įnqueue and Swinsian ape older versions of iTunes the former mimics a simplified iTunes 10 with Album List view and is fine, but Swinsian feels like someone described Apple's app to a dev in a hurry. ![]() Albums can be reordered alphabetically, chronologically or by popularity. Its album-centric view is reminiscent of iTunes 11's and is just as usable. Sonora feels like the app iTunes wants to be. Swinsian 1.7.1: 2/5 Test two: Ease of use Enqueue at least managed to import the majority of our test iTunes libraries, but even missing 10% of your music is 10% too much. Meanwhile, Enqueue and Sonora failed multiple times to import everything, often crashing while attempting to do so. Swinsian fared best, pulling in playlists and albums, but it missed a lot of cover artwork. The remaining three all rely on an import function, and all had problems. Album Flow ostensibly also has the right idea, in working directly with iTunes, but, bizarrely, it requires iTunes to be launched in order to access its music. However, there was variation in the way each app dealt with existing iTunes content.Įcoute and Fidelia get it right, directly accessing iTunes library files, the former also optionally enabling you to write metadata back to the library on quit. All apps on test except Album Flow and Ecoute can manage their own libraries of music, with Enqueue also providing the means to monitor specific folders.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |