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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I want a service where I can upload my own files and easily access them from a player interface in the browser, mobile, etc.

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.

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Check out Navidrome [0]. It's the closest one that I've found. It supports the Subsonic API so there are plenty of mobile apps and probably some desktop ones that work with it. I use play:Sub on iOS.

0: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome

Unless I'm mistaken, this doesn't fulfill the requirement:

> 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".

What's the advantage compared to Airsonic?

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+).

For me the advantages are:

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.

This looks really nice, thanks for sharing!

Apple Music does this for half that price.

- 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.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applemusicapi/

Is it a true upload or some crappy file/fingerprint matching?

Most of these services aren't ever true uploads and do matching to save time, bandwidth and space.

It's fingerprint matching, and yeah it's poorly implemented. Most recent complaints I've seen on this were for the fan made explicit version of Kanye's Donda. It was basically impossible to upload since it would just get matched to the clean version.

Matching is optional. If a song cannot be matched, your own copy gets uploaded instead to your private iCloud library.

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.

I have a lot of rare stuff. Demos, live albums (grateful Dead, dmb), live captures of daft punk at Coachella, underground hip hop mixtapes, CDrips of local punk and Ska bands from the 90s

Fingerprint matching barfs on all this stuff.

I haven't had an active subscription for a while (when iTunes was the desktop app instead of Music being the desktop app) but I distinctly remember being able to set metadata in the Info panel on a song or multiple at once that prevented fingerprint matching.

> I want a service where I can upload my own files and easily access them from a player interface in the browser, mobile, etc.

Amazon used to provide this service, but they shut it down.

iTunes still has it, I think, as iTunes Match.

But as the name already implies, that one preferentially tries to match your files to the ones already available in Apple's music catalogue, with file upload only serving as a fallback if it can't find any matches.

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.

Well, so did the Amazon one.

Oh interesting – somehow in my mind I've mainly associated this phenomenon with Apple, but of course in a way this make sense and saving storage space that way is a tempting target for that kind of service I guess.

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

I used iTunes Match for years and never noticed anything off, to be honest.

Google Drive with a custom media player UI?

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.

I bought a jelly pro (miniscule phone), rooted it, added some automation to autoload a music player on boot and activate airplane mode. I added a 256gb memory card with a lot of tunes. It's now my mp3 player. When I deactivate airplane mode it scrobbles my played tracks and 15 minutes later it automatically reactivates airplane mode unless the phone is charging, in which case it's available for wireless music sync from MusicBee. It also powers itself off after 30 minutes of being idle. Best damn mp3 player I've ever had.

>I want a service where I can upload my own files and easily access them from a player interface in the browser, mobile, etc.

https://www.ibroadcast.com/home/

Is what you are looking for, it has been changed since the last time I've been using it.

My service, Astiga, does this. You can upload your files to any supported cloud storage service, pair it with Astiga, then play either via the Web, our apps or any other client that supports Subsonic.

https://asti.ga/

I used to host my own Java based one for a while out of my house. Worked OK on my phone.

The software just wasn't as good of an experience of just having my trusty 400gb sdcard.

funkwhale has the web interface, the subsonic api (dunno how well that works i dont use it), you can create your own "radios" based on genre and artist

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