Unauthoritative Pronouncements

David Pierce apparently ran a parallel music app project while I was doing my own. He has a much wider pool to draw from at The Verge so he has services I’ve never heard of, like Astiga, which can stream your music from any cloud storage source, but they do charge a monthly subscription for that.

David got the same feedback I did, that people love Plex for music with the Plexamp app.

Plexamp and Roon both came up a _lot _as a way to manage and access your music collection from anywhere. (Supersonic also has some fans.) Plexamp in particular was probably the most-recommended piece of software in my inbox this week.

I don’t run a media server, so it doesn’t work for me without buying additional hardware, and managing that hardware as another project in addition to managing the music library itself. I could do that, but I could do a lot of things. Something like Astiga sounds more appealing on the surface, but the screenshots of compatible apps don’t look great, so I’m not sure it will service my needs.

David didn’t mention Deezer, which was one of the apps/services I tested, and liked the most of the three. That’s fine though, because I updated that post to mention that I’m not using Deezer after I found out more about who owns the company that has a controlling interest in it.

My Apple Music subscription is still going to lapse 2/26. I will use David’s list to test some other alternatives.

I was right that Apple Music isn’t special, and I do fee like they take users for granted — as there are a plethora of options. However, the ownership of nearly every one of these is shot through with people that support major anti-democratic politicians, or strong anti-artist policies.