Unauthoritative Pronouncements

Since my previous blog posts on this subject, where I found out that all the streaming services are either bad because of how they treat artists, or bad because how they treat the world, I tried some far less desirable options.

Self-Loathing —I Mean Self-Hosting

PlexAmp

I have been very resistant to using Plex. I used Handbrake a million years ago to rip DVDs for my iPod Video, and iPod Touch. It was a fuss. Plex is a fuss. I don’t want to fuss! However, people kept mentioning it to both me, and to David Pierce, that I tried it for music. After all, music should be a simpler problem than movies, right?

Plex doesn’t read any data from my Music library, or XML files. It looks at the directories and makes up its own database. This means none of my likes, stars, play counts, playlists, etc. go to Plex. I searched and there used to be an iTunes plugin for Plex, but they deprecated it.

The desktop browser interface is bad. Comically awful. They don’t even make an Electron app so you don’t have to look at the localhost address bar stuff.

The really awful part is actually the part people were excited about: PlexAmp. It’s their iOS app that requires a $4.99 subscription. Even though I’m hosting everything, I pay them $5 a month. Surely that means the app is polished? No, of course not.

It’s full of jewel-tone puke gradients. They filled the app with automated playlists that are generated based on moods from some database, and they don’t map to anything meaningful.

That this rose to the level of recommendation is mind-boggling. I can only assume that people have a deep investment in Plex for its other functions, so they are more willingly to go along with this.

Astiga

I have no problem with Astiga in theory, and the developer is a really nice guy. The easiest way to use it is to connect it to your Dropbox, but … that means that Astiga has access to everything in my Dropbox, not just my music. I asked the developer (again, he’s very nice!) and there’s no way to limit the scope like you used to be able to do with app folders for Dropbox. That meant that the next easiest/cheapest thing to do was to use a S3 bucket (not from Amazon, but from another provider) that would cost $4.99, in addition to the $4.99 for Astiga. That’s a lot to self-host music.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work super well for some of the same reasons as Plex. It doesn’t import my library XML, just the files. The web player isn’t very good. For iOS, I used Amperfy, but it also wasn’t a particularly great player, and it all seemed laggy. Either from my storage, or the off-brand bucket.

That’s just too many things that aren’t working for me to continue with it, or to recommend this kind of approach. I know people are very into Navidrome, or Jellyfin with Manet, but this is decidedly not for me.

That Syncing Feeling

I’m back to what I was doing for most of my music listening lifetime and that’s using iTunes Music, but not using Apple Music, and also … doing it in the Finder? That also means I have to deal with large parts of the Music app interface that are just billboards to get me to subscribe to Apple Music.

It’s extremely tacky, and it makes the app annoying. However, it has all my data inside of it, and it works with CarPlay. I just have to have all my music files on my device. Despite paying for iCloud, that’s for files, photos, and data, but not your music library, which is only a cloud product through Apple Music.

It really is a shame about the interface though. I’m not the kind of person that relents just because I’m sick of seeing an ad, it has to be for a reason.

Albums

The other thing that I tried out was Albums, which is not a great name for SEO, but it explains some things about the app’s design. David Pierce had linked to it, and John Voorhees had even reviewed it on MacStories in 2021. It’s really all focused on an album-centric listening experience. For example: The playback timeline is for the album, not just the song you’re listening to (fortunately, you can change that in settings).

It does have little things in the interface to encourage you to pay for a premium subscription ($18.99/year), but not anything like Apple Music does. It also seems to use MusicKit, so it interacts with my Music library without having some other method for syncing or playlists. It does have its own Collections interface if you decided you wanted to invest in that for organization, but good luck getting that data out. I’ll skip it for now.

Albums is much better than Music if you want to browse a non-Apple-Music library without being constantly pestered. It’s what I’m sticking with right now.

Purchase or Stream

As I mentioned at the start of this whole thing I don’t really listen to new music constantly, I will eventually want to listen to new music. That’s one of the things about Apple Music where I could just hit play and there it was. I also still have two subscription services (YouTube, Amazon) that stream music if I’m trying to decide to buy it, they’re just not places I want to keep a music library. As for purchasing music, Amazon still sells unencumbered MP3 files, but I’ll probably try the Qobuz store.

The unexpected thing about this whole experience of having to do library maintenance, moving around files, downloading, uploading, etc. is that I have an experience that’s centered on my library again instead of trying to get me to check out what’s new. I’ve rediscovered a lot of purchases that I had not listened to in a long while, like American Prince’s Other People, Bodies of Water’s A Certain Feeling, or Interpol’s Our Love to Admire. It’s like I cleaned out a closet and found them, except the closet was digital albums I hadn’t scrolled through recently.

Anyway, I saved $10.99 a month, or $131.88 a year which isn’t going to Apple, which is the grand total of my meager protest. I’m still paying them for iCloud+, and AppleCare. They still skim off all the app subscriptions I have (although I have moved everything I could to direct payments). I would still buy Apple products if I had to buy new hardware. There’s no chance that this amounts to anything at all, but didn’t we learn some fun stuff?