Is there a jitterbug for home music management?

September 18, 2018 12:07 PM

I have researched on askme and reddit and have only found answers that are over my head or don't sound like what I want. I am so fed up I am looking around my house thinking where can I shelve 500 cds? In 1995 I never had any problems listening to my music. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have had my music electronically stored for a long time and it's never been great. I have tried managing it with itunes, and more recently have subscribed to apple music and spotify. Everything I have tried makes me ragey. I need to start over and get a new system and have no idea what to do. Specs below but if I can clarify anything I will. If you hadn't guessed, I am pretty dumb when it comes to this stuff so assume I don't know anything about anything.

What I have:
Macbook Pro with IOS 10.11.6 and 8gigs of memory
Iphone X with 256gb
Apple Time Machine-I think this is spoken for with backing up computer.
Home Wireless Setup: we have it
Living Room Stereo: Old Sony STR-D590
Kitchen Stereo: Tivoli Model Two
Echo Dot that is connected to the Kitchen Tivoli
Google Home that has no home and floats around house
Hard Drive: GoFlex by Seagate USB 2.0, 1TB with 161g of music on it
Music: files in both mp3 and m4a. I also have been getting more discs that haven't been put on the drive yet. I expect to add music to my library until I am dead.

What I want:
-Easy way to access my whole library. It can be from laptop or phone or ideally both. I don't care how ugly it is as long as it works.

-Easier way to get discs added to library as I get them.

-Ideally this wouldn't cost much, but I want to hear any ideas no matter the cost.

What I have tried:
-Itunes: I can't even start on all the ways I hate it.

-We have subscribed to apple music and spotify. I was told it has 'everything' I have and I quickly found that not to be true. I resent having to pay for a subscription to listen to music I have already purchased. So please no recommendations for subscription services.


Thank you for reading all of this-hugs to all. This is my first question. I won't thread sit but will try to clarify as needed.

posted by 58 to Home & Garden (16 answers total)

If you're not turned off by needing to do some stuff in a terminal:

Raspberry Pi running Plex with your portable hard drives attached. You basically create your own streaming service. I think it'll even stream painlessly to Echo devices and Sonos. Walkthrough here.

You should be able to use the SMB share to copy over new music pretty easily.
posted by supercres at 12:25 PM on September 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

If you want a good (OSX/macOS-only) iTunes replacement, Swinsian is worth a look. It's $20 and has a free trial. If your issue with iTunes is that it's choking on a large library, try this for sure.

On the very expensive side of things, check out Roon. It's very impressive and priced to match at $120/year.

I also urge you to consider ripping you music in a lossless format! FLAC (or ALAC if you want to stick with Apple stuff) will be bigger than MP3s but that's just about the only downside.

Unfortunately once you get past a certain amount of music (tens of thousands of songs), "regular" software doesn't really cut it anymore. Software like beets can be incredible for organizing music automatically by metadata, but it's pretty technical.
posted by reductiondesign at 12:27 PM on September 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

I'm not aware of any good solutions for managing/playing audio collections and then playing them on stereos.

I used to use the SlimDevices Squeezebox ecosystem. Basic idea is that you run the management software on a home server and manage it with a local web app. Squeezeboxes were small, inexpensive units with a display and remote control that would pipe music to your dumb stereo components. Logitech acquired the company and it's basically dead as a consumer product. The server software is open source and still maintained, though I can't vouch for how well it holds up 10 years later.

Personally I have settled on using MusicBrainz for tagging and completely given up on any kind of library management software. Music just goes into a directory structure on a NAS at home and if I want to put music on my phone/laptop, I just copy it.

I use Volumio on raspberry pi to play music on the stereo, using my phone or laptop as a controller.
posted by tuffet at 1:29 PM on September 18, 2018

Sonos does this. It is expensive.

Logitech’s Squeezebox used to do this, but the product was discontinued several years ago. The software that manages the music and drives it to players (dedicated, phone app, pc) is still supported and maintained by volunteers.

Info.

(For years I had a Squeezbox plugged into a Tivoli Audio radio + speaker + subwoofer set and it was the coolest little thing. I’ve since switched to Google Home + Play Music and uploaded my library.)

I’ve still got the Squeezebox and associated cables (I think). If interested, pm me and you can have it.
posted by notyou at 1:32 PM on September 18, 2018

I have about 500 CDs worth of music on my hard drive. And I have Plex on my Roku, which allows me to stream music through my TV. If you don't want to mess with a Pi I think a Roku is less than $100. For $5 a month more you can get the Plex mobile app that will you give access to your music collection on phones, even outside of your house. The Plex watches my music directory and auto adds new music anytime I add something to the directory.
posted by COD at 1:50 PM on September 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I have a SONOS pointed to my music library (1500 CDs) in MP3 format on my NAS (WD MyCloud).
posted by matildaben at 2:02 PM on September 18, 2018

It sounds like I may be using an an old Roku XDS as a Squeezebox. The old Roku has hdmi out and YellowRedWhite RCA connectors. Red and white connect to the LaserDisk inputs (heh) of my old stereo amplifier, HDMI to a small surplus monitor. My mp3 collection is on a 256Gb thumbdrive stuck in a Dell Lattitude D420 in the attic (on my network) running Plex server 24/7. Plex plays nicely with the Roku and a lot of other devices. File management is basic Win7 file manager drag and drop.
posted by klarck at 2:06 PM on September 18, 2018

Another vote for Plex. I have an older laptop running Plex that I can access through the house and over the Internets via Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. (Yes, I use all of those platforms. It's complicated.)

Basically I rip CDs to FLAC, or acquire FLAC music via Bandcamp or Internet Archive, and then copy it over to the external drive I have hooked up to my Linux-based laptop running Plex.

Plex has clients for all the OSes I listed above and you can sync to them via the client as well - so create a playlist in Plex, sync to your phone, you've got music to go. Install the Plex app on Roku, you can stream through your TV/home entertainment system. You can even give other people access to your Plex server for streaming/sharing.

As a bonus, you can also use Plex to manage movies and TV shows.

Also also - Plex lets you manage multiple libraries, so I can organize my music into my main library, a Classical library for classical and jazz, a Sampler library for all the label sample collections I've acquired over the years, and so forth. Here's a view of what your library might look like.

It handles pretty much any music format I've thrown at it. MP3, Ogg, FLAC, and m4a. I've got about 500-600GB of music and another 200-ish GB of movies & TV shows, and it's relatively snappy.
posted by jzb at 2:24 PM on September 18, 2018

Response by poster: Thanks everyone! I have been googling and looking at youtube videos based on your answers. Plex or Volumio on a Raspberry Pi looks very promising and I will check out Roku and Sonos too.

Can anyone recommend a good device to rip cds? I have one but it's old old old.

I wish all this were easier-I am not very computer savvy-but it looks like if I take the time to set it up, it will do what I want and that is great :)

notyou-thanks for the super nice offer! That squeezebox looks amazing and I am sad they aren't made anymore. I don't think I am the person to keep an older thing going, but thanks anyways.
posted by 58 at 9:12 PM on September 18, 2018

Can anyone recommend a good device to rip cds?

I have a Vortexbox, originally running Squeezebox Server and now Sonos, and I like it a lot. The process of ripping all my CDs still took a long time, though.
posted by ottereroticist at 10:33 PM on September 18, 2018

My understanding is that JRiver Media Center will do everything you're looking for. It's a $50 buy. I have it on my laptop with hundreds of CDs of music ripped. When I want to play music for the whole house, I just use HDMI cables to output to the amp. I believe there is a digital remote subprogram you can use to output to a wireless network but I haven't tried it.

You can definitely use it to rip to whatever format, do sound leveling, micromanage the metadata, create manual or smart playlists, sync to devices, etc. Sometimes it isn't intuitive, and the support community isn't everything it could be, but it's very, very capable. I've been using it for a year, and so far there is no library management task I've wished for it to do that it can't do except actual file editing.
posted by heatvision at 3:04 AM on September 19, 2018

I'm another Squeezebox die-hard - still have a Duet in the kitchen, plugged into active sub+satellite speakers, mainly playing CDs ripped as FLAC to my NAS - it's also an internet radio, playing 6 Music to me right now. It used to do all this very well, but I guess couldn't/didn't compete with Sonos.

Despite Logitech killing off the Squeezebox product line, there are still devices targeted as front ends to the open-sourced Squeezebox server - e.g. Max2Play, which might be attractive if you're Pi-friendly. If I was starting from scratch now, I'd probably use something like this.
posted by rd45 at 3:26 AM on September 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: ottereroticist: That vortexbox looks incredible! Do you back up your vortexbox to another drive? My experience with hard drives is that they die and getting a new vortexbox every 5-6 years sounds bad. So you have a vortexbox and use the sonos app/interface to tell it what to play?

Sonos is expensive but may work better as we will need speakers upstairs and downstairs in the future and sonos seems like an easy way to expand our set up. But once I add up all the Sonos parts I might be too expensive.

I don't need to rip hundreds of cds, just maybe the 50-100 or so that I have neglected since becoming frustrated with my set up. But I was thinking more like an external drive that I hook up to my laptop. After ripping all of my music myself a very long time ago my hard drive failed and I lost it all. I then paid a company to rip them for me in two recommended formats - lossless and mp3.

Thanks everyone-I am learning as quickly as I can. Thank you so much for sharing your setup and your ideas.
posted by 58 at 8:23 AM on September 19, 2018

I don't think you need a specific device to rip CDs—any computer with a CD drive will work fine. I guess if you don't have a desktop computer, then the "device" is "a desktop computer", or perhaps a laptop with a USB drive. You could certainly set up a computer to automatically rip a CD whenever you put one in the drive, though. RipRight for Linux, which you could set up on pretty much any old computer made in the last, uh, 15 years or so would work, and can be run as a daemon and automatically rip whenever you put something in the drive.

It just needs to be able to access the storage that the Plex server is using, assuming you are using Plex. So if you are running Plex on a Raspberry Pi with a bunch of locally-connected USB drives, you would also want to share those drives (via Samba, probably—pretty easy to set up on Linux and there are a million tutorials out there) over the network, so that when you rip CDs you can drop the resulting files into the correct place on the Plex server's drive. Plex will then re-index them and add them to its database so you can play them on your TV/Roku/phone/whatever.

Personally, given how cheap hard drives are, I would actually mirror the entire Plex Library on the locally-attached hard drive of the ripping workstation, and then I would copy new files found on the ripping machine over to Plex—not a full bidirectional sync (because you don't want a wipe of the ripping machine to be destructively propagated over!) but one-way—using Rsync run every night or hour or whatever. Easy to set up.

There seems to be some integration between Amazon Alexa (a/k/a the software used on the Echo, Echo Dot, etc.) and Plex. As of right now, apparently you can't actually play music from Plex via the Amazon Fire TV stick, just control other device playback; not sure about an Echo / Echo Dot.

Plex to Google Home integration seems pretty janky, involving setting up an additional piece of software (with its own web configuration interface), effectively a middleware layer between Home and Plex.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:06 AM on September 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

The best (and free) software to rip CDs on the Mac is XLD. It’ll report any read errors (including ones that iTunes ignores because they are common) and check the track against the AccurateRip database to tell you if it is 100% correct. It also has a bunch of settings for ripping that can help when trying to get an error-free transfer of a damaged disc.

It also will encode AAC files (AAC files have the m4a file extension) in “true VBR” mode, which is part of Apple’s encoder not available within iTunes (which only offers a constrained VBR mode). The resulting files are standard AAC and will play on any player that supports AAC. XLD will also encode in all of the other common formats.

It can automatically set the metadata using CDDB or MusicBrainz.

It can be set to automatically add tracks to iTunes.

Plus a bunch of other features.

The downside is that some of the options require technical knowledge to know what they do and the documentation is poor. Fortunately, the defaults for these options are fine for most cases.
posted by D.C. at 12:52 PM on September 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

I've been using the same system for a while, and it seems to work ok. I rip CDs with Audiograbber, organize them into folders by artist (and then by album), and play/tag/further organize them with MediaMonkey. When I am at home, my desktop computer (where everything lives) talks via bluetooth to whatever speaker system in the house I want it to (although I do have to control this from the desktop. It's not like it follows me around the house), and I can control the playback on my phone using MM Remote Server app. I also use CD Art Display (a no longer supported little Windows program) to control music from keyboard, but if you use Rainmeter, there are a lot of little album display apps out there.
I have also used Google Play Music to basically copy most of my collection so I can play remotely, although the collection analysis is super spotty. You can, however, adjust the settings so that it will automatically upload music whenever you add something to your designated folders.
I did look into Sonos and Plex, which seem awesome, but the upside to all of the above is that it is free free free.
posted by ikahime at 8:36 AM on September 20, 2018