Crap like this is why, to this day, my collection is digital files, cds, vinyl and streaming only for radio - like pandora
I want the ability to rate music across multiple user-configurable dimensions. Add tags. Create smart playlists that interpolate between these.
I want to be able to pay a fee to subscribe to music discovery, then be able to mix these with my own library. If I really like a track, I'd like to buy it and add it to my collection.
I want an open API so desktop apps can be written to use it. Also, let me export my annotations and music library on demand.
Music for power users. Don't give me a single button. Give me hundreds of them.
I'd pay $30/mo or more for this.
I looked for that when Play Music got shuttered but could not find a satisfactory solution. I even paid for one iOS app but it wanted access to my entire drive, and maybe some other unnecessary permissions.. so hell no. I should be able pick one folder and that's it.
I guess I could have made a separate Google account just for music.
- Rating and tagging
- Upload and download your own stuff if you want to (marketed as iCloud Music Library)
- Works offline
- Discovery services available
- API exists but mostly used to implement web players for some reason, works fine in desktop apps too, on top of that the current state of your music library is always available as an XML file even when you don't use the API at all.
Most of these services aren't ever true uploads and do matching to save time, bandwidth and space.
Edit: well, it's a bit nuanced of course, you can not match and not sync or match and sync but you can't mix and match that configuration. So it's either sync with matching when possible or no syncing.
Fingerprint matching barfs on all this stuff.
I use Airsonic right now, it is basically Jellyfin for a music collection. I use both of these as reliable alternative to Netflix/.../Spotify (where ... is a plethora of other video services such as Disney+).
1. Doesn't use Java
2. Simpler/Quicker to configure
3. More modern webui (though I recently found a good desktop subsonic client, sonixd which somewhat negates this)
Also, I haven't used the airsonic fork, but I was using subsonic before switching to navidrome
I found subsonic to be rather... unreliable. once in a while the database would randomly become corrupted and I'd have to delete the database files and start over. I haven't had any such problems with navidrome, it's been rock solid.
> I want the ability to rate music across multiple user-configurable dimensions. Add tags. Create smart playlists that interpolate between these.
I'd actually pay for a 3rd party metadata service that doesn't actually provide the music at all, but just let's me tag and rate some across all music streaming services. I've even thought about building that (simply for myself to begin with). I want ratings, instrument tags, mood tags etc. Let me search for songs with 'piano + synth + dreamy + weird' instead of throwing some stupid recommendation my way. And use those tags to find similar tracks across genres and decades of time, instead of just saying "Nirvana and Pearl Jam must be the same because they're early 90s Seattle bands".
The software just wasn't as good of an experience of just having my trusty 400gb sdcard.
Amazon used to provide this service, but they shut it down.
And from what I've heard, the fingerprinting algorithm is fuzzy enough that it will often match songs/song versions that are very similar, but not actually identical, like censored/uncensored lyrics, different masterings, differing fade ins/outs, alternate takes and live versions, etc. etc.
It makes me curious though how the accuracy vs. deduplication efficiency trade-off looks like in practice: How much storage is Apple saving with their current settings, and how much deduplication would they lose if they made their audio fingerprinting more accurate, up to a level where even audio buffs would stop complaining
https://www.ibroadcast.com/home/
Is what you are looking for, it has been changed since the last time I've been using it.
Spotify can't even do a Playlist larger than 50 songs on shuffle. It's a garbage web app.