Hacker News Reader

> Apple can add feature after feature, but if Music continues to [random issue most people have never encountered], it's close to useless.

I've started to feel like "Apple Music as a music library" was really only intended as a bridge for people like you and me that were reluctant to abandon their obsessively curated their music library for the brave new world of streaming music. After a few years of it my listening habits have changed and I've more or less let go and stopped worrying about the drudgery of maintaining "my library".

I abandoned my music library after I went to Apple Music. But 5 years later I'm going back. The licensing issues and split albums OP mentioned have basically annoyed the hell out of me. Quite a lot of old music from my childhood is basically gone for good from Apple Music/Spotify. I have a smart playlist which basically lists all tracks which are no longer available on Apple Music and it has a 7 day playtime. Quite a good chunk of my library is basically greyed out and when these albums return they are basically messed up, if not outright replaced with other versions.

The reliability and simplicity of my own music library can't come back soon enough. I'll still keep AM and Spotify for discovering new music though.

> I abandoned my music library after I went to Apple Music. But 5 years later I'm going back.

How do you deal with the cost? I pay $18/month for Apple Music (Family) and I can listen to thousands of tracks in a single day if I wanted to. That same experience would cost me thousands of dollars up front to kick start it.

This also isn't to mention the fact that not all music is available to buy legally online. Dimmu Borgir, for example, use Nuclear Blast and I struggle to find retailers online that can sell me MP3s outside of iTunes. I don't want to have to deal with (read: rip) CDs and vinyl is a joke at 3x the price (not to mention simply being a dead format.)

So how are you going to curate a library, legally, so that the artist is supported, assuming you have at least 20-30 artists you like.

You consume in a slower manner.

You use an example of your ability to stream a thousand tracks in a single day if you wanted to, I don't have the same aspirations, so I'd also not pay thousands of dollars up from to kick start it.

To answer your question of how do I curate a library, legally, is just over time. I have a lot of musicians I like, and when I find them, I purchase their music, and I listen to it.

I do it less than a thousand times a day however. But I've been at it for thousands of days.

> You consume in a slower manner.

> To answer your question of how do I curate a library, legally, is just over time. I have a lot of musicians I like, and when I find them, I purchase their music, and I listen to it.

I guess I can just start buying their albums today, slowly, but I often found it difficult to even find a vendor of their stuff online.

Thanks for the response.

Have your tried Bandcamp, Qobuz, Boomkat, Bleep and others?

Personally I buy and find all my music in lossless digital formats. Any release I want to have. Interestingly you may have a harder time finding very popular mainstream music in a lossless format.

> Have your tried Bandcamp, Qobuz, Boomkat, Bleep and others?

I haven't. I'll check them out now :-)

> Interestingly you may have a harder time finding very popular mainstream music in a lossless format.

Oh I don't care about those things, actually. It's more availability and cost.

As someone else stated, you consume in a slow manner. The library is built up over time.

You should be able to upload your library to Apple Music (visible to just you). It used to be called iTunes Match, but my understanding is it’s integrated to Apple Music now.

I did but those files are not immune to Apple Music's licensing issues or bugs. If the track was matched and not uploaded, then those albums can still be greyed out when they are pulled from the catalog. And iTunes match still is not accurate. A lot of times tracks in one album are matched to individual singles on apple music.

Uploading your local collection directly into your iCloud Music Library should prevent Apple from messing with the data. I uploaded some albums months ago and they've been untouched by Apple so far.

I've certainly grown less particular about maintaining "my library". But when I hit shuffle, encounter a great song, navigate to the album, and find it mangled, it's... frustrating.

I wish Apple would provide an API that can upload to iCloud Music Library

100% agree. I still have a curated music library. Somewhere. I’m sure it’s still on that one hard drive.

But I’ve not thought twice about it in several years.

I miss what.cd

Despite what anyone thinks about music piracy, what.cd had hands down the best music organization I've ever seen. I wish they had just dropped the torrents and kept the indexing features

Yeah good times, I’m nostalgic about managing my own music collection using directory structures, everything consistent and well-organized. Tagging metadata using musicbrainz, listening with foobar2000.

Nowadays I’ve been sucked into the Spotify vacuum because of convenience, but I do miss out on more obscure music. And I have no idea how to find that, except from sites like SoundCloud and mixcloud, but their UX is horrible for this purpose.

Bandcamp is great for this. You can buy albums from indie artists and download in your preferred format, DRM free.

In addition to 99% of artits providing the download version when physical media is purchased. I really appreciate the ability to flip between digital and vinyl media when DJing for many tracks.

Double agree.

I’ve kept my library on an external hard drive and recently abandonned Deezer and Spotify because of the same issues mentioned in this thread. Plex (on a VPS) has been a godsend, and hype machine for discovery is top notch, check it out if you want to find obscure but great music

I miss Waffles.fm but even more so, Oink. I did What in the end.

These were rich, music-minded communities focused entirely on music.

They were made up of people who went against great friction to discuss artistic works with others willing to do the same.

I've paid for Apple Music since the onset and it has never come close to the weekly top seeded albums of these communities.

The audio world lost big when what.cd went down. Even non-members benefitted because what.cd fed so many people who went on to share the track lists, and albums, and “did you know this artist was in the background of this”, and so on.

They could have open-sourced the whole thing, put a paid API endpoint on in, and kept on.

This bug is so old it predates Apple Music! I was an early iTunes Match subscriber and the same damn thing happened. I believe music is "moved around" on the back end as rights change hands, contracts expire, and new versions of albums become available. Which then just wreaks havoc across your library, as evidently whatever system attempts to keep things in line is pretty awful at it.

All it needs is a toggle for "do not replace tracks". I would much rather see a message saying "this track is no longer available" and then make the decision myself than have to spend time unpicking whatever chaos it caused.

I agree so much! I switched to Apple Music 2 years ago when my hard drive failed. At the beginning it was alright, very convenient to have (almost) everything available on hand, in the same app as before. But now I can't stand it anymore. I have so many albums that randomly split all the time, version of tracks that change or become unavailable altogether. I'm moving away from streaming and am working on building back my music library (that I will be owning for good).

What's your plan for streaming? Funkwhale?

Still not sure.

Indeed I have Funkwhale on the radar, but tbh I don't have a strong use case for streaming at home. Was thinking about putting it on my rPi -- but in the end it's even easier to just stream from my iPhone through Bluetooth (or a good old jack).

My priority is to build a clean library with beets, transcode it in mp3 and feed it to iTunes, to have it on my iPhone & iPod.

Honestly, the Plex app is very decent for music libraries these days. Except for oddball VA releases and obscure mixtapes I find Plex to often be terrific at library management.

Second about this. I thought Plex would be overkill at first, but Plex is fantastic for streaming personal music library over internet (especially with Plexamp). One of its best feature IMO is you can make it automatically transcode music to Opus when streaming over cellular or download them locally as-is, saving all headaches of syncing to iDevices.

I've avoided using it because of concerns about library size. I want to move off of iTunes (launch a VM just for this) but nothing else seems to really handle managing a library. Currently trying out Airsonic but it is kind of slow and I can't edit tags with it.

Maybe time to give Plex a try for this.

I use LMS (Lightweight Music Server), which is xSonic compatible: https://github.com/epoupon/lms

I run all songs / albums through MusicBrainz Picard before putting them in the music directory structure so they're fully tagged. It only misses some of the more local / esoteric stuff I've got.

ive been looking into similar things like jellyfin, mopidy etc for a long time, but i find syncthing to be a lot easier to get my head around and i can use whatever audio player on each app or platform. as long as it can play m3u playlists then im good to go.

only downside is that if you have a really large music library you will have to use syncignore filters to stop some things syncing to devices that don't have enough space.

How do you deal with the cost of building a library of legal music? I pay $18/month for Apple Music (Family) and I can listen to thousands of tracks in a single day if I wanted to. That same experience would cost me thousands of dollars up front to kick start it.

This also isn't to mention the fact that not all music is available to buy legally online. Dimmu Borgir, for example, use Nuclear Blast and I struggle to find retailers online that can sell me MP3s outside of iTunes. I don't want to have to deal with (read: rip) CDs and vinyl is a joke at 3x the price (not to mention simply being a dead format.)

So how are you going to curate a library, legally, so that the artist is supported, assuming you have at least 20-30 artists you like.

Buying direct from the artist can be as low as $1 per album. Buying CDs and records used, then posting (edit: photos/hype about) them on social media is a form of social currency that supports the artist (as well, in some countries there are viable legal arguments for downloading pre-ripped files as a form of media shifting when you own the original, which means minimal hassle for turning a CD in to a FLAC)

> Buying direct from the artist can be as low as $1 per album

Not the artists I listen to. They're all signed with big labels, thus you can only buy from that label.

> Buying CDs and records used, then posting them on social media is a form of social currency

And criminal currency known as Copyright Infringement. I'll pass.

(shaking my head and laughing at myself)

I edited the post, as I meant promoting the artist by posting photos or why you love the music, and not posting the music itself.

HAAAA! Nice.

Alright, THAT makes more sense ;-)

I've definitely seen this happen as well. It's extremely frustrating. Looking at your screenshots, I'm guessing these were all albums that were matched to your existing library?

Just curious, looking for them, I see this:

[1] seems ok here: https://music.apple.com/us/album/yung-gravity-ep/1500799523

Is there another version of it on AM?

[2] I can't find on Apple Music - I'm guessing it's also an upload from your library?

[3] seems ok here: https://music.apple.com/us/album/outrun/1440873249

[4] Does deluxe version have more or different tracks? I see explicit and normal version, but they seem to have same tracklist? https://music.apple.com/us/album/camp/1450829373

Nah, these aren't matched albums. They're directly added from Apple Music. And that's the thing, the albums are fine!

For [1] and [3], I added the album to my library as you see them in the links you provided. Then one day—poof! Albums are mangled, songs have been pulled out into "singles", or I find a new "compilation/greatest hits" version of the album in my library with a subset of the songs, and another subset in the original. Now I have to find all loose tracks, delete them—if I can find them all—then re-add the complete album.

The deluxe version of [4] has an extended track list, but I didn't add that version to my library. Apple Music thought it'd be a great idea to add the deluxe version, and split tracks between both albums so neither version is complete.

I've been thinking about switching away from Spotify specifically for this feature. Thank you for the warning.

I wonder if it is specific to the country. I am accessing the US store and out of all link you posted I have no issues. All EPs and albums are complete and no tracks are missing.

That's right—in Apple's library they're completely fine. You can add them to your own library and they're fine. Then one day the copies in your library have their metadata messed with and everything is scattered with incorrect tags