You can still own music
ergaster.org
ergaster.org
Poor interfaces and user controls. The ipod style touch wheels were frustrating, no velocity, dead spots.
Every single one displays filenames instead of tracknames. They have mp3 tag support for albums, genres, etc. I don't know if it is a Chinese thing to use the filename, but it was so weirdly consistent across every brand I tried.
They'll have tons of storage that may or may not work (bad usb storage implementation, bad flash, who knows). I would copy new stuff, and old tracks would disappear. Transfers were extremely slow, and it would disconnect. It doesn't matter though, because some can only index about 5000 tracks. The SD card expansion may not be indexed at all, file navigation only.
I was getting them free for reviews, and I just gave up trying new ones after about the fifth attempt. Nothing came close to even basic players like the sandisk clip series. They are awful to interact with.
In Plexamp, browsing is heavily restricted in offline mode and very "flat." Downloaded albums, artists, and playlists are respectively grouped in a single list in the downloads tab. Clicking on any collection gives you a big list of songs with no further filtering or searching available.
Independent apps like Prism for Plex and Manet for JellyFin offer more iPod-like offline experiences with multiple layers of browsing and searching downloads. Prism syncs back changes (ratings, playlists) to Plex once server connectivity is restored. Though, Prism does not offer transcoding to save storage like Plexamp does.
I think these companion apps solve the major weakness of server based music hosting and offer an easier and more flexible alternative compared to the set up in the linked article.
> There is no good reason why my iPhone shouldn’t let me play local music.
I imagine this is a combination of low user demand, Apple's "walled garden" mentality, and Apple's perverse incentive to nudge people into paid Apple Music subscriptions.
I’ve had a similar adventure, price shopping albums between Qobuz and eBay, roping when it was cheaper. If I still lived in a town with a proper library I’d be ripping CDs everyday.
I like jellyfin for accessing a central library, as opposed to keeping multiple devices in sync. Finamp is a good app companion that lets you pick albums to store offline (same as Apple Music so I found that an odd complaint by the author, you can listen offline, you just have to pay the subscription for the rest of your life…)
I also found the play-from-thumbdrive feature of my Toyota to be not that bad, at least it indexed the library via metadata and displays song titles properly, something that cannot be said for all Bluetooth devices. Nice to have my library on a road trip well outside of cell service.
I have no problems listening to them on my iPhone, Mac and Amazon devices using Apple's "iTunes Match", a bargain (to me) at 25€/year.
Literally the only limit I've found is that the Echo will play a playlist of my MP3's, but can't find them by name. Not a big deal.
I have read that it works fine without an Apple Music subscription but have not personally tried it.
For just music Jellyfin is overkill imo
2. They can also replace one version of a song for another, like a remastered version. Especially remasters from the "loudness war" era are often worse in quality than original releases. On a streaming service, you often don't have the choice of which version you can listen to (and if you have the choice, point 1 is still a danger). This is also a problem with songs that contain explicit lyrics. The streaming version may force you to listen to the version with those lyrics removed (e.g. US release vs. EU release). Again, you are not affected by this if you have the physical media or a copy on your computer.
Having a copy of the music that noone can take away from you is important. Tons of music keeps disappearing from streaming services. This is not just a made-up scenario. Yes, technically speaking you only "own" a license to the music. The important thing is that this license is practically irrevocable.