Hacker News Reader

Comment by blacklion | Hacker News Reader

You are very good collection curator! Only ~25% of my collection is FLAC/APE/ALAC/WavePack and still I have more than 3TB. It is what stops me from listening music on the go — I cannot choose what to put in mobile device in advance :-)

View on HN

I solved this by running a music stream. All songs i "like" are in a collection, and ices/icecast randomly select one song after another (i can also request things via discord bot) and i just fire up VLC and listen when i need music. Yeah its a little too random at times, but its also fun.

I have a Pi in my kitchen that I use as a Navidrome server. Of course, this only works so long as my phone has data reception.

I've tried many media servers (but not Navidrome, though, I'll try it too!) and all for them mangle my collection. Albums shown twice (because there is FLAC and CUE files, for example), albums splitted into to tracks (each track seen as its own album, I don't know why), problems with non-unicode tags in old files, 6 ways to spell "Bjork", some don't understand FLAC with embedded CUE (and don't show tracks in such files at all), and, as a cherry on the top, none of them understand such abomination as ISO image with WavePack and CUE files inside (format which was popular on one big tracker some time ago). Files without tags are also a problem. So, each of these servers show 75% of collection Ok and 25% as hot mess. Each software has its own 25%, of course.

And I don't have any willpower to fix all tags and formats in 3.5TB collection (for example, to re-code all lossless zoo to FLAC and fix all MP3 tags for IDv2.4 format and Unicode).

I understand that pain. So many duplicate files, etc! Two or three laptops ago, I had a well-curated iTunes library, but now those same files are a tangled mess on the media server, as I'd overfill local storage on laptops & iPhones with the collection.

There are DAPs with two SD card slots such as [1]. There's now also 2TB sd cards, be it they're not cheap yet.

[1] - https://hifigo.com/products/hiby-rs2?variant=43134031167727

Reply on news.ycombinator.com