I'm rebuilding my offline, non-streaming music library.
Linux peeps, what do you use for library management and player? #asknostr
Discussion
audacious is my daily driver, but the ui feels clunky. so not pefect, but so far the best I've found.
I still keep an installation of Windows 10 on an external drive just so I can keep using iTunes. If there's a comparable Linux app, I wish I could find it so that I can officially dump Windows for good forever.
Maintaining my music library is a cherished hobby of mine. My end goal with my mp3s is to use a rust script I developed that will create playlists for me using a combination of predefined genre, intensity, and rating selections. I don't use any prebuilt solutions for this beyond individual utilities.
Overall, the process looks like this. But sampling each track to choose whether to keep it or not and then adjusting the ratings over time is an ongoing process of music appreciation:
- Soulseek to download flacs
- Ffmpeg converts flacs to mp3
- Mp3gain normalizes audio volume using ReplayGain tags
- Mp3s are moved into the library under Artist > album directories
- I manually massage the tags to confirm with the rest of my library
In Linux, I listen with Clementine because it lets me edit genres and ratings, as well as a random mp3 tag that I've repurposed as the intensity of the song, from soft to very heavy.
- For unrated songs, I'll go in and sample the tracks from about a quarter in and decide whether to keep or delete. If I keep it, I'll set the intensity and give it a one star rating.
- My playlist creation script regularly reads a JSON file with all the playlists I want and places songs that match the criteria into m3u files. The playlists mostly change when I change song ratings or add/delete songs.
On mobile, I use Poweramp or Retro Music, but I've always wanted to develop a player that will let me edit the tags I use for my playlists. Right now, all I can really do is listen to the playlists I autocurate on desktop.
Oh and syncthing to have the files in mobile and backed up.
Though, the library is growing and size, and I need to filter out unrated/low rated songs from being synced to my phone to save on storage space with a live .stignore file.
Sensei!
*Kid3 for batch tag editing and renaming the files
What are the boundaries of non-streaming for you? Straight up one machine or local network?
Subsonic ecosystem + Tailscale is a match made in heaven for me to share NAS library across desktop, laptop, and car.
A fine point. I mean music in my control. Big fan of Tailscale w/ nostr:npub168euw93e4cam59llcmydav0akwjk2p4nfy3p85pn22xv9y2jxuzq4s9uaw
I hadn't seen Subsonic. Will dig in. Cheers.
The original Subsonic was written in Java and has pretty much been abandoned. The API, while not exactly great, became the least worst standard and now there are compatible servers/clients for every platform.
Assuming you are Android… you have options like
For desktop, this guy wrote a really nice app. For some reason then started over, but left the old version up. I would use this one:
Slick! Thanks again.
FOSS Moood audio player and streamer made for Raspberry Pi, loving it! https://moodeaudio.org/
cmus rules
fs and anything that plays it
Setting up this with HA when I move soon, fun little project.
I already run HA, but hadn't seen this. Thanks!
VLC
Navidrome
Guessing you want more than just files on a drive and a player if you're looking after a large library.
Well it's a bit more involved, but I use Plex (with lifetime pass, it goes on sale) and then I have access to the awesome Plexamp app. It's a great music player where I can download my music onto my phone or just listen to it locally and it's got great file organization and features like artwork downloads. Then I can also access my own library from anywhere or give others access. Management is top notch.
Evolution of my huge music library management tools: Real Player Plus, Google Music (had to move when they swapped to the garbage that is Youtube Music), Plex. Management has always been the hardest thing to find! So many players with horrible management for large libraries.
nostr:npub1v5ufyh4lkeslgxxcclg8f0hzazhaw7rsrhvfquxzm2fk64c72hps45n0v5 is not bad idea if you found your favs…