DIMM027: I kinda found a solution to my music problem
Ok so in another entry I talked about my problems with music streaming services. TL;DR, I feel like I'm trapped in this system that is bad for the artists I love, costs a lot of money, seems super unstable, and I still don't even own the music.
However, I think I've found something that works pretty well for me.
Basically, the other week, my friend told me about how you can share folders using the SMB protocol. To people who know networking stuff this is probably the oldest news that you could possibly get (it was created in the 80s), but I just found out about this.
With SMB, anyone on my network with my computer's IP address, username, and password, can read and write to any file that I share with SMB. This is regardless of what platform they are on, it even includes Mac and iPhone.
My friend originally pitched this as a way to sync video files from my Mac to my PC, but I think that is also a great option for syncing all of my music to all of my devices.
So I bought a lot of the music that was on my spotify playlist, basically just the ones that I really cared about, and moved them all to a music folder. Shared that with SMB to my network, and now I can access them on any device, as long as I'm on my network. If I'm not on my network, I'm kinda screwed, but we'll get to that.
I of course had to find a good Apple Ecosystem app to do this with, and I chose Flacbox. It looks good and professional, everything pretty much works in it. It does have a monthly subscription, but its only a dollar, and you can also buy it forever. It also has built in SMB integration, which makes this whole thing way easier.
What I do is tell Flacbox to look at the SMB folder, then save it as an offline folder. So it will sync when I'm at home, and when I go out, everything will be saved as expected.
It's definitely not perfect, it has some baffling design decisions but its good enough. It is probably very hard to be basically a file management app, with a music app on top of that, and I don't envy them, but I would have done some stuff very differently. But its the best that I have found, and I don't think that there are very many options in this field (if you do have a better option that is on iPhone or Mac, send me a DM).
I hope that this changes at some point, because I think that this is a great option for easily making your own music streaming service. I mean if I can do it, I think that a lot of other people will be able to as well.
If you're wondering what to do on Android, my friend told me that foobar2000 is good for that. It also has SMB support, but I cannot do their app it just looks so horrible. I cannot roll up to the function with my music looking like it's some shady jank from 2009.
And on Windows, I've also got you covered. You can do foobar2000, but I liked MusicBee way better. Its basically the same as all of these. My small gripes are that you can't double click on a song to play it, you need to bind playing a song to a key (I bound it to my bottom mouse button). And also the queue works weirdly (when you skip to a song in the queue, it brings that song to the front of the queue, but doesn't skip all of the songs leading up to it, which is bizarre), but these are things I can deal with for the most part.
So strong recommend for Flacbox, less so for FB2k and MusicBee.
But DIMM, what if you're not at home? Then what?
Well, currently I don't know...
If you are setting this up yourself, probably just suck it up? You probably don't need this music everywhere, this is probably good enough. But I'm currently looking into using WebDAV or SFTP to share encrypted files with myself over the internet. I'm not entirely sure how these work yet, so I'll have to get back to you on that.
Anyways, this has been my obsession for the past couple weeks, so hopefully this blog post will satiate my brain and we can actually get back to writing for real for real.