I have all my mp3s on my NAS. Over the years, I’ve been rating the tracks, standardizing the id3 tags, etc. I love my music collection. But the era of the single device experience is over and as such I need a little more. Up until now, I’ve been copying tracks over to my phone every time I need new portable music.
At one point I was using Clementine Music Player on my laptop and using Clementine Remote on my phone. But Clementine died and hasn’t received an update in years.
I tried Plex but holy fuck, it made a mess of my collection. I couldn’t search for tracks by rating and I couldn’t do searches like “(genre: hip-hop OR genre: rap) AND rating>4)” which made it double useless for me.
So I guess my question is, is what can I point at my NAS music directories, which can allow me to stream music from my server when I’m in the house, will allow me to filter by ratings and anything else I like, fucks off the money grab which is the artists (plural) id3 tag, will allow me to update ratings from my phone or laptop and will allow me to copy to my local device for when I’m ready to leave out?
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If you’re just looking for a music solution, check out Navidrome. It’ll run on basically anything, and there are plenty of compatible apps for playback (Subsonic API).
Jellyfin can handle music alongside movies/shows, but the music side isn’t as feature-rich. Great for basic playback though, I run both.
So I’ve been looking up Navidrome and it turns out it runs on everything except my NAS, an original Western Digital My Cloud EX2. So now I’m considering how to get around that, I’m planning to get a RaspberryPi 5, so maybe I can run it on there and point it to my storage.
Have you tried Plexamp with Plex. While my music collection isn’t as cleaned up as it sounds like yours is, but I just checked and you can create playlists with rules such as genre and ratings and other options.
While not FOSS, I do really enjoy Plexamp.
I didn’t, basically it keeps hanging in addition to the abortion that is the mangled tags support on my NAS and so I turned it off.
Jellyfin? Or SubSonic? I don’t know if SubSonic is still around, but I’ve heard good things about Jellyfin.
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Subsonic has also become a sort of de facto standard which has been reimplemented by many servers and players so there’s lots of choices.
This reply lead me down this rabbit hole!
Thank you!
Jellyfin is great but has some issues that can make it annoying. The 3rd party clients are often better than the normal interface. The server is easy to set up. So I can recommend all of it.
Honestly though, just because it isn’t updated doesn’t mean it is not great. I always revert to Clementine myself. Still use it daily and love it. There is an updated variant called strawberry which is updated and works great, but the remote doesn’t work.
I love Jellyfin for Movies and TV, but for music I find it…weird and unintuitive.
Love seeing other Clementine users in the wild. Basically I was loving Clementine, but Android broke the remote and so that basically ruined it for me.
As for Jellyfin, like Navidrome, I can’t get in installed on my NAS.
What type of client problems have you run into? I’ve only recently started to use it, so I am looking to avoid any pitfalls if I can.
Check out Navidrome. Also the audio streaming section on awesome-selfhosted
It seems nothing runs on my antiquated NAS. I really am going to have to look to upgrade it.
Bummer! Best of luck with the new one.
…fucks off the money grab which is the artists (plural) id3 tag…
What is that about?
The artists tag is a by-product of the streaming era whereby in order to try and get as much money as possible, artists needed to elevate their prominence and so the artists tag was born, an easy way for streaming service to cash in on users searching for featured artists.
Of course the artists tacitly agreed to this, as this meant they could get more money and more exposure, even though services like Spotify should’ve been indexing features anyway.
Ultimately, this is aimed at eroding the position of artists in the music industry and in particular in hip-hop and rap where the artists generally collaborate more than in any other genre of music, because in order to try and get a fair payday, you have to undermine the actual work of the primary artist.
Put it like this, you wouldn’t see a film advertised as a Scorsese and DiCaprio film. It’s always a Scorsese film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and for good reason. But in music, they diminish the role of the primary artist as much as possible in order to ensure that things stay the same and the streaming services and labels get the lion’s share of the revenue.
Even the fact that the composer tag exists rather than the producer tag shows how skewed things are and how little respect hip-hop garners, despite generating so much culturally and economically.
To go back to the film analogy, the artists tag is essentially a cast tag and I won’t deny it has its place, but the director, producer, writer far outside the role of someone who is just making a cameo and thus they shouldn’t be on the poster outside of a gimmick.
I agree with most of your points but the artist tag in ID3 tags existed way before streaming music services was a thing. Hell it existed in versions.
So what’s that about?
The artist tag (singular) has rightfully been around forever, the artists tag (plural) is relatively new. You’ll see it as “Artist 1;Artist 2” or similar.
Oh, missed the plural, sorry about that. But is that one the same as “Album artists” or yet another one then?
Different to album artists, which is good for compilations and producer lead albums.
Alright, thanks. Sounds like the existing fields could have been leveraged for that tbh, seems given that the newer field would be overused/misused
Exactly. The only reason this was added was to confuse our music libraries.
Let me know when you land on something. I have similar issues and am looking to divest from Spotify.
I like the functionality of Spotify, but the payment is painful.
Landed on Navidrome. The UI is nice enough and the third party app support is cool. My only bit of disappointment is that Musicolet doesn’t support it natively.
