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--- music_management [2026/05/19 03:36] – [Phone] simplify qlyoung
+++ music_management [2026/05/19 03:37] (current) – [Phone] simplify qlyoung
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 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 are only able to write to their own sandboxed filesystems. Consequently any files downloaded by a sync app would not be accessible by a music player app.
+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]] play back your music over the network using a network 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.
+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 [[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

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