Ask HN: Is there a cloud music library that doesn't keep deleting my music? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a cloud music library that doesn't keep deleting my music?

92 pointsneya123 comments

Long store: I purchased a bunch of audio CDs and Apple Music (the Mac app) offered to rip it and save it into my iCloud library. I was very happy and saw to it that all the audio files were uploaded. I even saved it into a new playlist. I also have the paid Apple Music subscription which I pay for monthly.

In just an hour, iTunes Match (a feature of the paid Apple Music subscription) tried to match the songs and deleted almost all of them and just left 3 songs in my playlist. I tried it a couple of times and this was still the result.

Apparently some songs aren't licensed for my location/country and/or aren't available in the catalog of Apple music for my country and therefore they were all deleted except the ones that Apple already has in their catalog.

That got me thinking - Is there a reliable paid service where I could just upload MY music I legally purchased and they wouldn't be deleted just because of some stupid location based licensing or some other reason?

Spotify is no better as my songs in their library have disappeared a couple of times as well.

Thank you in advance.

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The Pirate Bay (https://thepiratebay.org/index.html) is one of the best cloud music providers, they've been around for two decades and have never deleted anything. Depending on your genre preferences they might not have everything you want, in which case there are some other competing cloud providers[0] that specialize in specific genres:

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/music/

The Pirate Bay may never have deleted anything, but they also don't host any of the music. Just because a torrent exists doesn't mean anyone is seeding it.

You might as well say no, because that’s not a cloud provider. I’m not sure stealing is the right solution. Most artists struggle to make ends meet and have little control over their own music rights.

Album sales haven't been how musicians have made money for over a decade now.

It's cute that you care, but money is a lot better spent on merchandise from the band's store than on records if you're trying to financially support the artist.

So you’re entitled to music for free because you buy merchandise?

What deterred me from becoming a professional musician was this (paraphrased) quote:

“Your job is not to sell music. Your job is to sell merchandise, and your music is just advertising for your merchandise.”

If I were to rationalize it, I would say “stealing music” is essentially “stealing advertising”.

(By the way, I don’t think you should be downvoted so much. I believe in good-faith discussion, even if I disagree)

You know what, sure! If you feel better than me because you gave some record label execs money to listen to that music then by all means, feel better than me.

I'll buy a vinyl from the merch booth, maybe. But I have no reason to purchase digital content. And I certainly don't feel bad about entertainment piracy.

I play music. I don't care if people copy my music and share it. Every musician I personally know feels the same.

i'm entitled to music for free because it's asinine to threaten me with fines and arrest for redistributing information (it's called sharing and where i'm from they teach it in kindergarten)

If you use a cloud service, then playing ""your"" music from it is going to incur license fees. Or get deleted if they don't want to take your money in that country.

If you want a cloud service that keeps your CDs and doesn't fiddle with them it'll have to be an encrypted S3 bucket.

My perspective on this was formed when I sold a chemistry program I wrote on a TI-85 to another student in 1997. It felt ridiculous to charge a lot for something I still had after selling it so I charged $1. Inadvertently beating Apple to the $1 mobile app market by 8 years, but I digress...

> It felt ridiculous to charge a lot for something I still had after selling

Access to a physical item isn't the only reason we need something like copy right.

We also need it to successfully amortize the creation cost of things across many buyers, else you'd have to sell copy for the full creation cost else it'd become a first mover disadvantage.

Soulseek beats TPB in terms of variety and has been around for far longer

Youtube Music actually does have a option to upload up to 100,000 songs. This was one of the biggest selling points of Google Play Music and the feature was mostly carried over. The difference now is that uploaded files aren't automatically added to the library, they live in a different section. You can make a playlist that includes uploaded songs and songs on youtube music, but the song suggestion/radio feature does not combine them. But there are no limits to listening like you experienced with Apple music. Youtube music premium can be bought standalone or bundled with youtube premium.

The other alternative is self hosting, plex and plexamp are popular.

https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/thread/52908732/faq-...

The other concern here is that, as an Alphabet product, you need to try to guess when it's going to be canceled, which basically means having an alternative already on day one of use. And if you have an alternative, why use the product that's going to be canceled?

I would be very surprised if user uploads aren't shelved in YouTube music within the next 2-3 years.

It's purely a loss for them financially and is a giant thorn architecturally for YouTube's backends since it's very different rights- and lifecycle- wise than their other content.

They pretty much only brought it over from GPM because they were worried about the user outrage if they didn't, so as fewer people care about curating music files they will eventually decide pulling the plug is worth it.

(You have an Indian-sounding handle, so you might identify with this problem!)

I'd uploaded all of my offline library to Google Play Music, back when it was relatively easier to do so, and before it became YouTube Music.

Unfortunately the service seemed to do some sort of acoustic fingerprinting to make uploads more efficient, and I ended up with the wrong language versions of several of my film soundtrack songs! Loads of them got randomly converted from Tamil -> Telugu, Tamil -> Hindi, Hindi -> Telugu, Hindi -> Tamil, etc.

I did not have that experience with Google Play Music, but I have run into a different struggle with metadata. The new Youtube Music doesn't allow editing metadata online, you have to download the file, edit the tags, and then reupload.

My tags for Hindi songs were always in English. Because of the way Hindi songs are credited, searching by tags like artist was always annoying, but that's not a problem specific to google music. I did have times where Japanese track names got translated to English in the old Google Play Music, but I haven't experienced that with Youtube Music.

FYI this doesn't happen on YT music at all; the user uploads are completely segregated from the YT catalog for licensing reasons so your files are stored exactly the way you upload them.

I made the mistake if uploading all my mp3s from the 2000s to Google Music then deleted them locally to "save space". Missed the memo on Google Music getting sunset in 2020 (there were other things going on at the time) and rolled into Youtube Red Music Plus (or whatever) and they are now lost and gone forever.

Now I either buy music via Bandcamp and download the FLAC or replace the ones I lost via other methods and store them locally in Plex and play with Plexamp + Tailscale. That should avoid them getting googled again from any service.

I felt like the grace period to recover your files was okay and if you logged into Youtube Music, there was a way to transfer them for free. They kept the original file, no transcoding. The feature parity is not perfect between the old Google Play Music and the new Youtube Music, but I have not lost any files. Some of the metadata was incorrect, but nothing else.

Your music is still there (I hope). Did you check here: https://music.youtube.com/library/songs

I have songs purchased in 4 different mediums, sometimes more than once.

Pretty irritating, tbh. I haven't bought a license to listen to a song, I've bought a license to use destructible chunks of plastic or bits...

Even if not in YouTube Music, it's very likely still available in Google Takeout.

I ripped and uploaded my Tool CDs to Youtube Music before they got the license deal fixed, and it was a good experience. Even though Tool wasn't allowed in the streaming subscription, there was no issue me listening to it with my uploads. I also have a few other albums that aren't available on streaming that I uploaded, and those likewise work great.

I can also recommend Youtube Music for that.

I had an album in my library mysteriously vanish from Google Play, a service I had used for years. So I switched to Apple Music. A few months later, the same album vanished as well as a single.

Possibly the final straw was when I wanted to purchase an album that existed in iTunes, but only in the iTunes "store" of another country.

Since then, I've just went back to maintaining my own library. I purchase lossless music from Bandcamp and Ototoy. I also rip CDs. I had been importing my files into VLC on iOS but recently switched to Sailfish and just copy my files onto an SD card. For streaming I setup my own instance of Koel.

Does it suck to maintain almost 200GB of audio files? Yes. Have I lost a single track since doing so? No.

> Does it suck to maintain almost 200GB of audio files? Yes.

In what way does is suck? I have about 1TB of audio files on local disks, which I manage with beets + mpd. No troubles at all.

Once they're there, they're there.

I don't know what ongoing maintenance there would be after the initial import.

Backups? Automate them. Integrity checks? Use a better file system.

It sucks having to maintain the drives, prevent the bit rot, restoring them from backup when the drive(s) fail, paying for, installing, maintaining the technology black hole that you fall down into trying to mitigate all of the above from happening in the first place.

Right now, for me, its an external SSD drive and I have a Blaze backup that, in theory, when it works, when it hasn't decided to not backup for a week, preserves it all up in the cloud for me, while my Time Machine manages my main system drive locally.

I dread the day I'll have to restore all of this when the inevitable disaster strikes, but I SHOULD be protected (knock on wood).

> It sucks having to maintain the drives, prevent the bit rot, restoring them from backup when the drive(s) fail

It fits on one drive, so you can do all that with a few minutes of effort once every two or three years. Or just when you change drives, even less often.

> paying for, installing, maintaining the technology black hole that you fall down into trying to mitigate all of the above from happening in the first place.

Is that more than having a backup? You'd better be doing that anyway.

You could go fancy and set up Z-RAID but if you're really inclined to do that you'd probably already have it set up for your main files and then dumping the music on top is near zero effort.

> In what way does is suck?

There is a non-zero amount of "care and feeding" that goes into it.

For example:

Moving them around and re-indexing. I recently copied my library onto an SD card for a new phone, which had a new media player, which then had to re-index them all. As I add new songs to the main dataset, I'll have to sync them over to the phone.

I also manage a Koel instance so I can stream the files from wherever I want. But I like the ability to have them offline as well. And Koel is great but, if I ever decide to move to another utility I'll probably lose playlists or have to convert them over.

Ripping CDs, then moving files over to the main dataset takes time, not a lot but it is a thing. Also I have no shortage of CDs with incorrect metadata in the CD databases or don't exist in the CD databases. Or often there are multiple matches and I have to find the right one.

Scanning the CD album art which I've done for some rarer albums in which I could not find artwork for online (or what I did find was blurry and over compressed)

Managing metadata: For example, I've some CDs that were ripped as "TALKING HEADS", others as "Talking Heads". It's a little more painful with Japanese character sets e.g. "Tatsuro Yamashita" vs "山下達郎".

If I purchase albums from providers like BandCamp or Ototoy, I then need to make sure the metadata matches what I've decided to go with.

I use ZFS with redundancy, and take regular snapshots but I also make occasional backups to external drives but I could also use something like S3 as well.

This is really a hobby at this point, not a convenience. With a streaming provider you fork over a few bucks a month and listen to whatever they have in their library.

Have you taken a look at Syncthing? I use it to sync the desktop music directory (~300Gb) with the phone's microSD card. For external storage or cloud backups, I just use rsync. It's all pretty trivial once it's setup.

"Does it suck to maintain almost 200GB of audio files?"

Having a song silently removed from your "collection" after you discovered it on a streaming service and because it is streaming you only marked but don't remember the name is the most infuriating sucking thing ever.

Ever had a song you heard a long time ago and you never knew it's name then one day you find it? It's a gem, and then Google takes it away from you and you don't know the name and can't ever listen to it again. It's lost again...

I've been using Plex for this purpose and it's been great. I self-host it on a NAS server, but I'm noticing a number of consumer products coming out with the server pre-installed (Namely the NVIDIA Shield).

If you're willing to pursue the self-hosted root, there are loads of options beyond just Plex:

https://jellyfin.org/ https://funkwhale.audio/

Plex with Plexamp might be right now the best music streaming setup for music you own. Works great, and does stuff like encoding to 128 kbps Opus if using a connection with limited data.

I'd like to add Roon and Roon ARC to the list. Some people seem to like it a lot, but they do not support FreeBSD for their server, meaning it's quite tricky to install to my NAS...

https://roonlabs.com/

Yup, Roon is great. They just a big 2.0 release that improved mobile streaming support.

I did this as soon as google music transitioned to youtube music and I saw how bad the experience is. Extremely easy to get up!

I ended up uploading my music library to S3 compatible cloud storage (DigitalOcean Spaces) and creating[1] a minimalistic audio player that plays music straight from S3. S3 serves as a live audio library and as a backup at the same time. The web interface lets me listen the music from a desktop or a mobile web browser.

[1]: https://github.com/akrylysov/bsimp

Nicely done!

can this be integrated with subsonic like servers?

https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome

https://github.com/sentriz/gonic

these have good app support so this could be nice

I'll take a look, thanks for the links! As for apps, playing from the web browser doesn't require additional apps and works surprisingly well. Bsimp is integrated with the Media Session API which lets you control the playback from the notification bar or the lock screen.

Why upload anywhere instead of buying one sdcard?

Why not do both?

My iPhone doesn't have an SD card slot. It sounds like it would be a useful feature to have - perhaps they could add a headphone jack as well.

I've heard a lot of argument about the headphone jack. For my iPad, I bought an apple plug (i don't even know what they call it, is it a lighting port?) to 3.5mm phone jack. Can you explain what that solution doesn't work for everyone? The only thing I can think of is that you can't listen and charge at the same time.

Thanks!

Dongles are ugly, inconvenient, flimsy, and they use up the single port on the device. The apple dongle's cable in particular is so thin, I feel like it's about to break every time I use it.

When you have a USB A socket, dongle flash drives are a valid permanent solution.

On a phone's tiny port, storage will stick out very far, snag constantly, and something is probably going to break.

So external storage is just not viable if you're going to be plugging it in for more than a few minutes at a time. And buying more internal storage won't be reasonable until someone puts out a phone where it's "only" twice as expensive as high-end microsd cards. (Right now iPhone storage costs 8x as much, Pixel storage costs 8x as much and requires buying the top model for larger sizes, and Galaxy storage costs 6x as much and requires buying the top model for larger sizes.

Well, that’s one reason. Another is that sometimes my headphones run out of charge while I’m away from an electric socket and would like to keep listening - a 3.5 mm socket allows me to do that.

Its almost like you gave money to someone treating you like a walking talking MRR.

The alternative is to use a phone OS that has become so unbearable to me after 13 years of being a loyal user, that I decided to switch to iOS. So yeah, I gave them my money but am reluctantly satisfied with the trade-offs… for now.

The problem with this is that I don't want to maintain an iOS app. I've considered RSS feeds, etc. But at the end of the day holding onto a song you love that you paid for shouldn't be this hard.

For subscription services, I get it. I don't love it, I think the contracts they've all negotiated are stupid, but fine. I get that a bunch of lawyers leads to me not being able to play almost any of my music while I fly over the Pacific.

But the combination of locked-down-OS (something I'm actually for) and legaleses / constant access negotiations means the effort I would have to go through to legally pay for music and actually hold onto it for good and then play it from my phone is too hard.

Unless you add a layer of encryption S3 is unwise to, the files are still at a risk of eventually being identified as music and deleted without your consent.

What is the cost per month for running something like that?

It costs me $11/month. $6 for a small DO droplet instance[1] and $5 for DO spaces storage[2] which gets me 250GB of space. I use both the instance and the storage also for other purposes. E.g. I also host my personal blog and store backups there.

If you want to save a few dollars, you can get it close to $5/month if you go with cheaper S3 compatible storage from Backblaze[3] or Cloudflare[4] + the cheapest $2.5 instance from Vultr[5].

[1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets

[2]: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/spaces-object-storage

[3]: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037814594-B2...

[4]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/platform/pricing/

[5]: https://www.vultr.com/pricing

This used to be a really common service about 10-12 years ago. Amazon, Apple, etc, all offered 'digital lockers' where you could upload your songs and stream them.

These are no longer popular, so not many services are doing this anymore. It's such a wasteland that Wikipedia has a page for closed services [1]

A few small services like medialeap.com still exist, but it is anyone's guess how long they will stick around or how good they are. But I guess you could try that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_music_loc...

This doesn't appear to be mentioned in their Wikipedia history, but Spotify also started as a digital locker/music matching. You would install the client and point it to your iTunes library and it would build the online playlist from that.

4 years of Spotify pivots is missing from their[0] Wikipedia page (2006-2010). I signed up in 2007 and stopped using once I got annoyed with them removing songs from my playlist. They then pivoted to music streaming subscriptions, with the recording industry becoming a "partner".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#History

This kind of experience is exactly why I bought a bunch of old iPods and loaded them up with music and favourite playlists. You can mod certain iPod classics to take micro SD cards and upgraded batteries too.

Yes it’s a hassle to sync them but I retain control, and there’s no tracking and no ads. One iPod for out and about, one for the car. They’re dirt cheap for certain models nowadays.

Which models do you like for this?

(I've never had an iPod)

iPod classics.

Iflash boards are probably the best way of enabling micro SD cards, there’s a list on their site:

https://www.iflash.xyz/store/iflash-compatibility/

Sometimes, you gotta do things yourself. My music library is a bunch of tagged files in a large music folder. I set up a Funkwhale[0] instance for myself, but I rarely use it. I mostly play transcoded files on my phone, tablet, or MP3 player (Sandisk Sansa with Rockbox).

[0] https://funkwhale.audio/

Funkwhale is a really nice project. OP asked for a reliable paid service, which most comments about just using S3 don't cover.

Luckily, unlike many open source projects, there are a couple of (niche) managed service providers for it:

- https://cloud68.co/instances/funkwhale

- https://weingaertner-it.de

Many of the providers of managed Plex services will also offer audio streaming apps, like Funkwhale, Subsonic, etc. You can hit any price point you want from $5/month and up, with much more storage than those two particular providers.

If you're willing to check out self-hosting, Navidrome is fast, slick, and under active development. It provides a Spotify-like experience from your local collection and is compatible with dozens of clients for different platforms.

https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome

I'll second navidrome -- moved to this after airsonic seemingly slowed down/stopped development.

I'm using DSub on my android phone to get a nice mobile player, which also sync's tracks locally to the phone if I wander into an area with low or no signal. Navidrome being compatible with the Subsonic API means there are several players on all platforms that can hook into it.

Is there an option to download to the local device, too?

I drive through areas with no service for a few hours per week.

If you use a *sonic app, you can cache locally, yes.

Not cloud but I recently bought one of these

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/248440-REG/Sony_CDPCX...

on Ebay, connected it to my home theater through a TOSLINK cable, and I've been loading it up with DTS encoded 5.1 discs. Also I got into the minidisc hobby

https://www.minidisc.wiki/

Like cryptocurrency, cloud music always ends in tears.

Cloud music without outside intervention? No, not really. There's not really a guarantee, because of the nature of how licensing works. If there is a service that would support this in the way you're asking, they would probably be in violation of some sort of agreement. All of these popular cloud services are untrustworthy precisely because they are following the licensing agreements. The ones that don't follow the agreements are probably illegitimate.

Assuming you don't want to steal via TPB, etc. I would recommend going with a service that allows you to locally download the music you pay for. I like using 7Digital [1], but they do make a point of warning you that anything you buy, you can listen to on their cloud player, but might be taken off due to licensing reasons. I feel it's a decent offset of clarity by the site owners, high quality audio, good selection, and reasonable prices. I would prefer to not have to worry about keeping multiple backups locally, and instead just be able to listen to whatever I pay for online, but the only true solution to getting the licensing issues fixed is through the court system, and that doesn't look like it's going to be changing any time soon.

Basically, your choices are:

1. Break the law and steal directly from artists and audio techs

2. Use a streaming service and be stolen from by record labels due to stupid licensing issues

3. Take control of the situation by hosting your legally purchased content locally

Each option sucks, but the third option is the one that bothers me the least.

[1]us.7digital.com

Youtube Music (which replaced Google Play Music) allows you upload your own library of songs. The app UI makes it fairly difficult to find them and play them, but it does work. If you can tolerate the app's UI, that's one way to go.

I toss everything on the NAS and interface via Swinsian [1]. Bought a license many years ago and haven't looked back. Closest thing to "old itunes" UI and rock solid, low-latency playback and browsing across a large library over the network.

[1] https://swinsian.com/

I chose to cut out the middle man. I'll only buy mobile devices with SD card slots and headphone sockets. Loading all my music onto an SD card is an order of magnitude quicker than uploading it to the web. And I have all my music everywhere, even when there's no internet connection.

I'm a lazy person so I just connected a Raspberry Pi with a large hard drive to my local network and installed NextCloud on it. There is a small app called "Music", that's more or less enough for my needs:

https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/music

There is no way I'd give the music I purchased over a few decades to some online "library" that tries to be too smart.

No. That's the risk you take with a cloud service. Even if they don't do it now, if they ever become popular enough they eventually will.

That's the price of convenience. Either you have your own storage (preferably on hardware you own, such as a home NAS) or you have the convenience. You won't have both. My nextcloud server hosts my music. It doesn't host anything that I didn't buy, but I'm pretty sure the music I once bought won't disappear...

i use google drive and use drive sync on my android to push updates

I keep my ogg and mp3 on my phone. 45GB and growing. Just plug it into the computer to copy, same for listening on the big boxes.

I still have a phone with a headphone/mic jack 3.5". I have never tried to plug the spdif cable into the phone. Changed to spdif after the copper cable became defective.

Anyhow, plug the phone into the computer's USB and mount it like an external drive. I really try but apart from the music library, it uses 32GB at most, including OS. The photos and videos are on a mini SD card, 128GB in size.

But I'm not sure if Apple lets you export the bought songs as mp3 or other formats do you can share or upload or copy them somewhere. Wasn't that a big issue with iTunes?

I ended up self-hosting all my music via https://funkwhale.audio/. I use S3-style object storage to store the music files so large libraries are no problem!

Nothing you store in the Cloud is yours.

If you want something of yours in the Cloud to remain safe, you have to host it yourself in a computer that you physically control.

It's the same advice I give others about wealth. If you can't hold it in your hot little hand or touch it, it is not yours. Electronics numbers in somebody's else's computer, doubly so.

I learned a hard lesson many years ago when DropBox and I were both a lot younger. Probably (almost certainly) my fault, but I lost several gigs of files when those files were deleted from my 'master' computer instead of being copied to an 'underling' computer.

Build a local library, using DRM-free FLAC files.

Use your favorited encrypted (with a key you have and they don't) cloud backup solution as a safeguard in case you lose your local files.

Amazon did the same thing to my music library almost a decade ago. Their app even deleted some of my locally stored music.

It's best to just store it all locally (and make it read-only).

I uploaded all of my CDs to Google Music (now YouTube Music) over 10 years ago. They are still there and I still stream them regularly. For me, I needed to have access to songs that are not available on streaming services (I wish all music was available, but it simply is not). I can't use Spotify because I can't add certain songs to playlists, and what's the point of using a music service if I can't listen to all of the music that I like?

Roon is my weapon of choice. It has all my lossless CD rips, the Roon ARC app gives me access to my library remotely and for everything else there is TIDAL integration.

I don't think any company would ever get into that space. RIAA (etc) will come after them for not verifying that each user has a license for everything song uploaded. The best the community could probably do is have a 1-click AWS instance that is already setup for running your own streaming server and then you just push your music up there. Could even have a lightweight open-source mobile apps to use the APIs of this server.

> I don't think any company would ever get into that space. RIAA (etc) will come after them for not verifying that each user has a license for everything song uploaded

Why should that matter? As long as you're not making songs uploaded by one user available for another user to listen to without them also uploading the same song, it's fair usage. You're allowed to store the bytes wherever you want, it's the (re)distribution that is illegal.

Read about the company Aereo. That should have been legal too under fair use. The argument will be that this fictional company isn't licensed to be a transmitter because they are transmitting unlicensed content.

YOU can store your bytes wherever YOU want. This would be someone else storing your bytes for you. You could get around it by using Dropbox or something but if you want a good streaming music system/app/experience, then you are locking into "knowing" that it is music, not just a user's files are a user's files.

The RIAA has a very different take on that and no music service wants to get involved in an expensive protracted legal battle against the RIAA which it is very unclear you would actually win.

This isn't an application of fair use. That doesn't allow you to make bulk copies of media with impunity. Lack of distribution only reduces the damages that can be claimed.

For audio this is covered under the format shifting permission provided by the AHRA.

On a similar vein and as a PSA...

I was recently disappointed to find out that IG saved stories / highlights can have their music removed. I found a bunch of memories now have a "song unavailable" on them (and still the original audio silenced)...

What's even more disappointing is doing a search for some of the tracks and seeing they are still available. Presumably under a new primary key in their DB.

Get a Synology NAS with the DSAudio app. I stream music from my NAS wherever, super simple classic interface, and it caches songs too.

Recently Amazon Music stopped allowing me to play my own uploaded music from many years ago in playlists. It says to access my songs via playlists I have to subscribe to Amazon Unlimited Music. It is my music, why can't I play it via playlist anymore? I can still play albums I uploaded, just not playlists.

I use Dropbox and Dropsync on Android, keeps my music synced across all devices and I just use a regular music player with it.

Aside: I've gotten so burnt/paranoid from having this exact same thing happen to me many times over the years. No joke, if I really love a song/albumn then I get it in vinyl. That way no format/codec/law/whatever can change the song and 'steal' it from me. I'll have it for the rest of my life.

I saw Plex mentioned, but personally I like Subsonic better for music specifically: http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp

If you're already hosting Plex, what's one more Docker container running Subsonic? :)

Jellyfin is a good option too, the FinAmp app is a pretty good music player.

At least Navidrome (what I consider to be the most interesting Subsonic system) is kind of tricky to use with FreeBSD. I'm probably using my Plex until I convert my NAS to TrueNAS Scale (based on Linux), or get myself a small PC for Proxmox, which can then run it with less friction.

Consumer-grade SaaS won't cut it. You need enterprise level storage like S3, or you self-host it yourself.

Google play music was this exactly. And it worked beautifully. But alas, someone at Google needed a promotion.

How about your own computer? How about a network share? How often do you need your music outside of your own home network? How often do you need all of your music and you wouldn't be able to manually copy files to whatever portable device that you have?

You have all the pieces.

I use the Synology DS Audio app and works great. That's where I host all my music.

Yep, same here. I have a collection I’ve built up over many years that became too large for an internal drive.

Kept it for years in Google Play Music, but when that shut down I moved it to my Synology and haven’t looked back since. DS music is slow with a large library, but does the job.

It’s also possible to connect as a shared iTunes library which is handy too.

Buy a PCloud subscription. Upload your music, mount over webdav or rclone and enjoy.

This hasnt been my experience with Apple Music. I have added a lot of music that isn't in their catalog and I can play it on all my devices. Would like to understand what the difference is here. I'm in the US.

You can host your own private FunkWhale instance (https://funkwhale.audio/) and use any Subsonic-compatible client to listen to it.

I have one, but only because it's a computer in the closet in my house. :)

I like mstream lately, it's very simple as compared to e.g. MPD.

https://mstream.io/

I use pCloud. They're not (only?) a "cloud music library", but you can certainly use them like that. They have a music player built into the web and phone interface, but I just use VLC.

There's a setting along the lines of "don't delete". People were burned by this, it boggles my mind that it's not the default...

Nextcloud has a good streaming player of uploaded music.

I use Github. Am I the only one?

I'm sure it's not Github's ideal use case, but if they bin off my account, at least I have the files locally, and I take periodic backups to a physical drive that I store. Can't say it's particularly fast to clone to a new machine though and it's not streamable like e.g. S3.

'Sourcing' new music? TBP, Google dorks used to be good a few years ago but clickbait-farmers cottoned on and now they're unusable. If you have the misfortune of being in the UK, you'll need a VPN.

I've given up and just use a NAS as kind of a cold storage solution. I rotate tracks from it on my cellphone whenever I feel like it.

Same here. I have songs ripped from CDs in the 90s and I’ve never had a problem with losing music.

Every other music service I’ve used-free and paid- has problems with songs no longer being available.

It’s kind of funny because it’s the only data that made it from that time of my life.

This is what I've moved to:

https://www.navidrome.org/

You can ge an awful lot of music onto a modern MP3 player, and have a backup of it on a hard disk or two at home.

What's the point of uploading the music somewhere, and even more so paying for that?

iTunes match. But I don't think you can get it anymore. Been using match for a really long time, no issues.

Amazon Music whacked my concert archive at some point, which was unbelievably aggravating. Never again.

You probably got hit with whatever they're calling iTunes Match now.

It's still available (in the US, at least) for $24.99/year. 100,000 song limit.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146

Mega?

Host it yourself using Plexamp?

Its not your music.

FLAC files/iPhone 256GB/foobar2000

Jellyfin works great for me.

Rpi, tailscale, ampache?

Your hard drive

No.

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