DIY Portable Android FLAC Player, Player App, & FOSS Linux Media Manager

December 7, 2023 8:27 AM

Hello hive mind! Because I'm cheap, I want to repurpose an old, unused Samsung Android smart phone and make it into an FLAC & MP3 player. Special snowflake details inside ...

FLAC is the key feature, because, reasons.

Plan would be to buy a 256 GB micro SD card and install it in the phone, then download an easy-to-use FLAC / MP3 player app (NB: I don't consider VPC media player easy-to-use).

Then I would download a Linux FOSS media manager(?) application to my laptop, and use it for ripping CD's, and loading / managing the content on the phone.

So ...

1 -- Does the overall concept make sense?

2 -- Recommendations for an Andriod FLAC- & MP3-compatible, user-friendly app?

3 -- Recommendations for a user-friendly media manager application for my Linux laptop?

Thanks!

posted by ZenMasterThis to Technology (4 answers total)

Best answer: I recently went through a similar situation, though in this case it was me trying to move from Windows to Linux and finding a substitute for MusicBee, which I used previously. After trying out a few different apps I ended up on Strawberry for desktop music organization. It's a little fiddlier than MusicBee was, but it's capable of organizing and MusicBrainz tagging, and copying files to a device is very easy, plus all the FOSS stuff.

I have a dedicated music player as opposed to a phone, but I've heard AIMP is a solid option for Android FLAC playing. I tested it out a little bit before typing this and it seems pretty good! I had no problems getting songs to show up and it was a pretty snappy interface.

As for CD ripping, I've been using Asunder, and it's been working just fine for me, though I've heard if you're very concerned about accuracy RubyRipper is the way to go.
posted by Infinite Peaks at 10:41 AM on December 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Another vote for AIMP!
posted by lokta at 11:29 AM on December 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

GoneMAD music player is the absolute best music player for Android that I've found.
posted by dunhamrc at 5:11 PM on December 7, 2023

Best answer: Still using PowerAmp on Android, since 2014, with FLAC editions of music on SD-Card.

I backup CD's with SoundKonverter and edit tags with kid3 because they're native apps to KDE and do the job adequately. Music manager is just a file manager because you have laid out the music by artist -> album and then you either want all the music or symlinks to a subset of the music and to use rsync with dereference-symlink mode to copy the subset of files.

I currently update files the phone using Amaze file management app, pulling from a Samba share on my network. I will likely run SyncThing on the home music host and have SyncThing client also on the Android phone to update the phone's music catalogue when on the home wifi network.
posted by k3ninho at 4:16 PM on December 10, 2023