How do you listen to your live recordings?

[Sumant Ranji]

Hi all,

My iPod classic has finally died after 18 years, so I’m trying to figure out the best way to listen to music outside the house. Of course there are streaming services but I want to be able to listen to MP3’s I’ve purchased as well as live recordings. The obvious solution is to just use my phone but my MacBook refuses to reliably sync music with my iPhone - songs will not get transferred or the tags get messed up, so everything winds up disorganized. This seems to be a common problem and I’ve tried several solutions without success.

So I’m curious what you all do, especially if you collect live recordings. I could get another iPod (they’re having a resurgence) but I’d rather just put everything on my phone. What’s the best way to do that?

Sumant

[Mark Sblendorio]

I use a plex server for all my owned/downloaded music. I have an old laptop with an external drive attached. All the music is on the drive, and the laptop only is used to run the plex server. Plex can be a little confusing sometimes to set up, and a little inconsistent in its connection. But for someone who isn't computer savvy like me, it's easy enough and worth the investment.

You can also use plex for TV, movies, etc. But I only use it for the music streaming. 

[saget] 

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[Cameron Metcalf]

Mark's solution as outlined, is pretty foolproof and reliable.

I continue to use a NAS (Synology), but its native apps have expired over time and network settings tend to stop connecting and have to be reset, when you "just want to play the damn song, already". -  so I like the idea of an external hard drive in combination with a dedicated laptop.

on the iPhone itself, you may wish to try "Foobar 2000" (which allows you to navigate via file folder and may bypass the syncing/file-tags problem). "VLC" can be used as well.  Neither are great interfaces for playing music, but I find they at least let you have more control over file location either in iOS or Android platforms. For example, you could set up a local folder in iPhone "Files" app, to download and store those exceptional, but favourite live show tracks, and then add it to Foobar as a media location, or navigate to it, with "Files" itself, to play the music in VLC, or whater. Then use the default iPhone "Music" app, for mainstream listening.

I have not found a single solution that covers all bases and sources. I'm sure there is criticism over the various apps and approaches, but for me I have had to settle with a hodge-podge of choices, depending on the source or type of music. I'm still symied how bad "newer" (players/streaming) apps are at navigating music collections/folders.

I have colleagues that continue to happily use older mp3 players to have full control over their music management (refusing to stream or buy into any particular tech ecosystem). There's no harm in going that route, as you originally hinted, Sumant.

As total aside, I had minimal success with PLEX b/c the player would not work with certain filetypes. I went with Emby (after trying SEVERAL other solutions): it's only downfall is to not always pick up on newly added content, but as long as I re-index the NAS manually, on its separate indexing service, the files are found properly and play well.

I hope this potentially saves you some time; I totally share your frustration.

Cameron

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[Sr Tapeworm]

If you have any sort of cloud storage like Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox, PCloud etc, there is an iPhone app called CloudBeats which let's you either stream from those places, or download to your iPhone for offline playback.

Paul

[Peter Bissinger]

That app sounds great. I typically upload any music files I get to music.youtube.com. I think there's a limit, but I haven't hit it yet and it doesn't seem to count against space on my other google services (drive, email, etc.).

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[Mint Condish]

We actually gotta listen to all this shit we download?

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Subject: Re: [sugarlist] Re: How do you listen to your live recordings?

 

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[Sumant Ranji]

Thanks, Cameron and everyone else who had suggestions. It's kind of maddening that there isn't a simple solution, especially since the circa-2010 Apple iTunes-->iPod interface worked just fine. Enshittification, etc.

Sumant

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