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--- music_management [2023/09/24 03:17] – qlyoung
+++ music_management [2026/05/19 03:37] (current) – [Phone] simplify qlyoung
@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-I'm a big music enjoyer. What I'm not a big enjoyer of is streaming services. Maybe I'll write another article about that, but the short of it is that instead of paying a tech company to rent temporary access their music library which they pay to license from a label who gives some tiny fraction of their revenue to the artist, I prefer a more traditional model where an artist makes some music, you pay the artist for a copy, and then you own that copy. That way the artist gets the money and you own something in return for your money.
+====== music management ======
+I'm a big music enjoyer. What I'm not a big enjoyer of is streaming services. Maybe I'll write another article about that, but the short of it is that instead of paying a company to rent temporary access to their music library,  which they pay to license from a label who in turn pays only some tiny fraction of their revenue to the artist, I prefer a more traditional model:
-One of the benefits of owning music is that you can put it on whatever device you want and use whatever program you prefer to play it. However, if you have multiple devices getting your music collection synced up on all of them can be a little daunting. This article roughly depicts how I do that.
+  - you find some new music
+  - you listen to it a few times to see if you like it
+  - if you like it, you pay the artist for a copy
+  - you own that copy
-====== Methods ======
+That way the artist gets money for making art and you pay once to own a copy of it instead of renting temporary access.
+Streaming is good for the first two steps. Finding new music is hard, and you have to listen to it a few times at different times, since it might only hit in a certain mood. Starting from music you already like and letting the recommender algorithm drive discovery is a good way to find new music. After that though, I prefer to pay the artist for their work instead of paying rent, and prefer to download the data once rather than every time I want to listen to it. Bandwidth is a limited resource!
+One of the benefits of owning music is that you can put it on whatever device you want and use whatever program you prefer to play it. However, if you have multiple devices then getting your music collection available on all of them becomes an exercise in file management. Music also has its own inherent taxonomical structure (artist, album, label etc) that benefits from specific treatment in terms of organization. This article roughly depicts how I do all that.
+===== Methods =====
 Here's a chart that shows a rough outline of data flow:
-<code mermaid>
+<mermaid>
-flowchart TD
+flowchart LR
-    Source -.-> |download| staging
+    Source -.-> |download| beet["beet import"]
-    W["Windows VM"]
+    beet --> laptop(("fa:fa-laptop laptop"))
-    subgraph server["__server"]
-        staging --> |beet import| library
+    laptop <-.-> |syncthing| desktop(("fa:fa-computer desktop"))
-        library --> W
+    laptop <-.-> |syncthing| W["Windows VM"]
-    end
+    desktop <-.-> |syncthing| W
-    subgraph devices["devices_____"]
-        library -.-> |nfs| desktop(("fa:fa-computer desktop")) & laptop(("fa:fa-laptop laptop"))
+    W -.-> |tunefusion| phone(("fa:fa-mobile-phone phone"))
-        W -.-> |tunefusion| phone(("fa:fa-mobile-phone phone"))
+    W ~~~ phone
-    end
     click phone "https://www.dbpoweramp.com/tunefusion.htm"
-</code>
+</mermaid>
 In short:
-  - Acquire the music from somewhere; for me, I usually buy it on [[https://bandcamp.com/|Bandcamp]]
+  - Download the music from somewhere onto my desktop or laptop; if possible I buy it on [[https://bandcamp.com/|Bandcamp]]
-  - Download it to a "staging" directory on my [[personal infrastructure|home server]]
+  - Run ''beet import'' on the downloaded music; [[https://beets.io|beets]] cleans up tags, pulls and attaches album art, and copies the cleaned files into my "Artist/Album/<files>" library directory structure, applying my file naming scheme.
-  - Log into the server and run ''beet import'', pointing it at the staging directory. This adds the music to my library database, cleans up tags, pulls album art, properly names the files and copies them into my "Artist/Album/<files>" library directory structure, applying my chosen file naming scheme. [[https://beets.io/|beets slaps]].
-The rest of the diagram depicts how the 3 devices I play my library on end up with access to my music.
+Since my music library is just a directory, it's then synced to all other devices using my [[syncing]] setup (except my phone; see below). This way it doesn't matter what device I download the music on. The arrow goes to laptop in the chart but it can go to any of them.
-For my desktop and laptop, they have the filesystem where my music library resides mounted using NFS. For my laptop (well, all my devices) this works even when I am on the other side of the planet because network access is via [[https://tailscale.com/|Tailscale]]; see [[personal infrastructure]] to read more about how that is set up. Latency has never been a issue, but when I'm traveling I'm using my phone for music anyway. My desktop is also on Tailscale but thanks to [[https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/|insane magic]] it routes over LAN, so there is no latency penalty.
+==== Playback ====
-The phone is a little trickier. Ideally I would like to run a sync daemon in the background on my server and phone that syncs the music directory to the device, but that's not how things work on iOS. For one, background daemons cannot really exist on iOS (there are exceptions to this - iCloud for example - but nothing worth using). For two, there is not really a place to put the music. Due to how sandboxing works on iOS, you need to pick an app to put the music "into". Since only apps can write to app filesystems, the upshot is that you need an app that also has its own syncing service built in. This is heretical, as a music player should be able to focus on playing music and allow a syncing application to handle data sync, but that's how Apple designed it. That is why the app store has a bunch of terrible apps with names like "Network music player ULTIMATE" that have various support for playback and/or sync to/from NFS, Samba, WebDAV, and whatever else you can think of. I've tried most of them and they all suck.
+For playback on the computer, I prefer [[https://tauonmusicbox.rocks/|tauon music box]].
-I can already hear you saying, why don't you [[just]] play back your music over the network using a network player? There has to be a good app! The answer is that in addition to what I just said about the apps sucking, network conditions on mobile are variable enough that the experience of streaming from a home server sucks. The only reason it works so well with Spotify is that - guessing here - Spotify has global datacenter and edge presence all over the world, like any major web service, which papers over the network. Also, you can't play your music on the airplane. Pinning is not acceptable because I don't want to choose what music to listen to in advance. I don't listen to music like that?
+On my iPhone, I use [[https://apps.apple.com/us/app/foobar2000/id1072807669|foobar2k]]. Although, it has a few drawbacks (okay just one - it doesn't support scrobbling) and in the age of AI I'll probably end up making my own when I have a few spare hours.
+==== Phone ====
+The phone is a little tricky. Ideally I would use the same approach as for my desktop and laptop - run a sync program to keep the music library up to date on my iPhone disk. Unfortunately, that's not how things work on iOS, for two reasons:
+  - background daemons cannot really exist on iOS
+  - the concept of a filesystem that is shared between apps does not exist on iOS
+Regarding backgrounding, in general iOS is very strict about apps performing any work in the background. Since sync programs are designed around running in the background, this more or less precludes the file synchronization strategy. This could be worked around using iCloud, but I don't use iCloud.
+Even if a sync program was viable on iOS, we would hit another blocker. iOS does not have the concept of a shared filesystem. Apps may only write to their sandboxed filesystems. Consequently any files downloaded by a sync app would not be accessible by a music player app.
+The upshot is that to solve this problem you need a music playback app that also has its own syncing service built in. Obviously this is [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy|heretical]]. A music player should focus solely on playing music, while a syncing application should handle data sync. The result of that being impossible is the app store has a bunch of terrible apps with names like "[[https://apps.apple.com/bf/app/music-player-tube-mp3-player/id1572190372|Network music player ULTIMATE]]" that have varying levels of support for playback and/or sync to/from various data sources - Samba, WebDAV, whatever else you can think of. I've tried most of them and they all suck.
+I can already hear you saying, "why don't you [[just]] stream your music from home using a player"? In addition to the available apps sucking, network conditions on mobile are variable enough that streaming from a home server results in a generally poor experience. Industrial streaming services like Spotify have to go to [[https://engineering.atspotify.com/2020/02/how-spotify-aligned-cdn-services-for-a-lightning-fast-streaming-experience/|extreme lengths]] to paper over the network enough to deliver a good experience. "Pinning" - where you stream but select specific items to keep locally on disk - doesn't really work for me because I don't want to choose what music to listen each time I anticipate a no-network scenario.
-Anyway, as luck would have it, the [[https://apps.apple.com/us/app/foobar2000/id1072807669|best music player on iOS]] also has the [[https://www.dbpoweramp.com/tunefusion.htm|best sync solution]] I've seen. The downside is that the companion program that runs on your server is 1) Windows only, 2) closed source and 3) costs money. However, it is surprisingly full featured and works very well. Since it's Windows only, I run it inside a windows VM on the same server that has my music library and mount the share with the music into the VM.
+Anyway, as luck would have it, the [[https://apps.apple.com/us/app/foobar2000/id1072807669|best music player on iOS]] also has [[https://www.dbpoweramp.com/tunefusion.htm|the best sync solution]] I've seen. The downside is that the companion program that runs on your server
+  - is Windows only
+  - is closed source
+  - costs money
+However, it is surprisingly full featured and works very well. Since it's Windows only, I run it inside a windows VM on my hypervisor (which also hosts the file server with my music library). The VM has the music directory mounted from the file server via Samba.
 The end result is that every time I open the foobar2000 app on iOS, any new music in my library downloads to my device. After that it's available for local playback. Since my phone is also on Tailscale, this works anywhere.
@@ Line 135: / Line 165: @@
 </code>
-{{tag>from_blog}}
+{{tag>from_blog technology self-hosting}}

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