[hifip]

Hi all,

I have just bought myself some Sennheiser IE80 S and have a SONY ZX300 coming tomorrow.

As such, I have decided to begin buying and collecting digital music again after a few years break. I have a pretty vast collection of music which is all in iTunes. About 800GB worth on my iMac.

iTunes is a pig of a piece of software. It’s steadily gotten worse over the last 15 years, and with Apple dropping Aperture when they screwed that up, leaving my entire life’s photos in a huge pile of crap, I don’t have much faith in iTunes going into the future. There are many things I dislike about it.

What methods / software do you use to manage your digital audio library? To share between devices?

My concerns and features I would look for would be:
- Future proofing
- No restrictions on file format playing
- Excellent organisation with tagging, rating, notes, bookmarking key points in longer pieces of music, etc.
- Large community of users
- 100% free (or some kind of business model that actually works for both ends)

It’s daunting managing such a huge music library, and I would hate to have to give up on it / lose it in future. What’s the best solution? What do people use nowadays? I would also be very interested in DJ / professional curators choices. I’m not opposed to paying for something that works on a professional level.

Please note I have no interest in streaming services. Much of the music I seek out doesn’t even appear on any of them.

Thanks!
Paul

 

[project86]

I'm in love with Roon. It seems to hit all your requirements save the the last (and arguably most important) one - being free. But you mentioned being willing to pay under certain circumstances so I am throwing it out there.

I've used JRiver Media Center (a competing commercial product) for ages. I've probably spent dozens of hours refining my setup for Foobar2000 (a free player). And there are others that I'm forgetting at the moment. Roon surpasses all of these by a substantial margin.

It certainly isn't cheap but I figure if people are willing to pay ~$10/month for any number of video streaming services, software subscriptions, etc, then an incredibly robust music manager/player can also be seen as justified. At least for some of us.

They have a 2 week free trial so you can give it a spin. In my opinion it takes at least a week of use to get a feel for it - prior to that it might not feel right, but don't give up.

 

[Roseval]

Assuming you are on OSX, I have a list of iTunes alternatives on my website: http://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/OSX/Players.htm

A bit dated: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/mac-os-x-music-players-alternatives-to-itunes.539740/

 

[nraymond]

I use iTunes primarily as a repository/browser/source for exports. I either buy albums as Apple Lossless/FLAC/WAV or purchase CDs which I rip with XLD (which supports AccurateRip) and ultimately everything becomes Apple Lossless:

https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html

XLD does an initial metadata match/pass with the MusicBrainz database. After that, I do a second pass of tagging with MusicBrainz Picard:

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

I use some of the plugins as well to massage the metadata further into a format I want:

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/plugins/

During the tagging process I also manually review album artwork, and if what is automatically pulled down doesn't meet my baseline requirements, I scan my own artwork (and then sometimes upload it as well as any metadata corrections if necessary to MusicBrainz via their website). If I have a rare CD, sometimes I need to create a new entry on the MusicBrainz website, but that hasn't happened too often.

After that, I move the files into iTunes. For playback on my Onkyo DAP I have a USB 3.0 card reader that I plug the MicroSD cards into directly and use a $5 app called "Playlist Export" from the Mac App Store to copy music files to the MicroSD card.

I listen to albums or artists, so in general I don't make use of playlists except for exporting from iTunes. As a result, my entire library is portable. All definitive metadata is stored in the files themselves (I do the same thing with everything in Plex). The iTunes Library actually lives on my NAS. I wrote a script to automount it on login on my Mac. I also have an HTPC where I also mount the iTunes Library, but there it is indexed by and shared out via Plex. This means that I can always use any Plex client anywhere to stream my iTunes Library as well. I imagine I could also front-end the library with other software if I cared to, but this combination works well (if I sit at my Mac, I'm using an external Emotiva Big Ego DAC going to a Pro-Ject Head Box S2 amp and SMSL speaker amp for hi-res playback, Onkyo is loaded up with a decent chunk - 400GB - of the library for portable offline playback, and I can use Plex on iPad/iPhone/Android/Roku/Windows/macOS/etc. wherever I am in the world with internet).

 

[EELawson]

I love JRiver. It it easy to use, sounds great, is not expensive, Good file layout, lots of tools that allow you to get deeper involved or not, depending on your desires.

I also have Roon, but I prefer JRiver.

 

[whitedragon551]

I use MusicBee as a library and management, MP3Tag to name and standardize all of my folders, and I use SyncBack Free to make sure my NAS music repository and secondary SSD in my laptop are in sync at all times.

 

[Jam Boy]

Another vote for MusicBee. Been using it for several years.

 

[Mystie]

I've been using streaming services like iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube to access music. I prefer the first two because you can find and save a song in a few taps, but the region lock is often frustrating. Do those applications boost what I already have downloaded or should I build a different library?

 

[Whazzzup]

iTunes and roon. I tunes portable, roon desktop. Both are not going away

 

[wje]

Software aside, I ended up buying a Western Digital NAS (Network Storage) device that I configured with (2) 1 TB drives. This allows easy access to my files by many devices connected to my network. I have some higher bit MP3s, as well as FLAC files. Both are divided under "Public" and then into:

1) FLAC
2) MP3
Artist sub-folders under each, with additional sub-folders for the albums.

After many years of keeping my music on my primary computer and using a device such as the Logitech Squeezebox, I now prefer the current configuration much better. Plus, with the dual drives, they are cloned, so I have a backup of all my music files to keep worries minimal.

As to the front end, I'm using Foobar at the moment as I have for the past several years. Though, I'm always open to other interfaces too. I once had a Tidal subscription and with my veteran's discount, the higher resolution music was discounted. Though the library was so massive, I had issues with not enough time to listen to so much music, so I cancelled the subscription after a few months. I didn't use it with headphones or my computer, but with my Cambridge Audio network player in my main home audio system.

 

[Roseval]

Plus, with the dual drives, they are cloned, so I have a backup of all my music files to keep worries minimal.

Sounds like RAID1 (mirroring)
This is a popular solution.
Indeed if one drive fails you and you buy the replacement in time, the NAS will faithfully synchronize the 2.
But what if e.g. the controller of the NAS fails you.
Can you mount these drives in another NAS without formatting?
What in case of theft, fire or simple dropping the unit (cats, children, a beer to many)?
Not to mention the most common disaster, cockpit errors.
You screw up your tagging massively, delete the wrong files, etc.
Than you will notice that all your errors are faithfully replicated from one drive to the other and no way to roll back.
RAID is about high availability, not to be mistaken for a backup!
I recommend you get an external HD (modern NAS do support this), make a backup and store this in a save place.
Because there will come a day you make a note to yourself "I should have made a backup”.

 

[nraymond]

Sounds like RAID1 (mirroring)
This is a popular solution.
Indeed if one drive fails you and you buy the replacement in time, the NAS will faithfully synchronize the 2.
But what if e.g. the controller of the NAS fails you.
Can you mount these drives in another NAS without formatting?
What in case of theft, fire or simple dropping the unit (cats, children, a beer to many)?
Not to mention the most common disaster, cockpit errors.
You screw up your tagging massively, delete the wrong files, etc.
Than you will notice that all your errors are faithfully replicated from one drive to the other and no way to roll back.
RAID is about high availability, not to be mistaken for a backup!
I recommend you get an external HD (modern NAS do support this), make a backup and store this in a save place.
Because there will come a day you make a note to yourself "I should have made a backup”.

Agreed, RAID is not backup, and can't help with something simple like accidentally deleted files or file corruption, which is one of the most basic things that backups can cope with. A good basic backup approach to start with is the so-called 3-2-1 strategy, which says that you should have 3 copies of your data - your in-use data and 2 backup copies - on two different physical media with one copy off-site for disaster recovery. One of the more affordable offsite backup cloud companies these days is BackBlaze, and their B2 service can integrate with a lot of NAS solutions for providing direct backup from the NAS (and most NAS solutions also provide a way to backup from the NAS to drives directly attached to the NAS via USB or eSATA). A lot of businesses have moved beyond the 3-2-1 strategy, but for home users I recommend they start there.

 

[wje]

Sounds like RAID1 (mirroring)
This is a popular solution.
Indeed if one drive fails you and you buy the replacement in time, the NAS will faithfully synchronize the 2.
But what if e.g. the controller of the NAS fails you.
Can you mount these drives in another NAS without formatting?
What in case of theft, fire or simple dropping the unit (cats, children, a beer to many)?
Not to mention the most common disaster, cockpit errors.
You screw up your tagging massively, delete the wrong files, etc.
Than you will notice that all your errors are faithfully replicated from one drive to the other and no way to roll back.
RAID is about high availability, not to be mistaken for a backup!
I recommend you get an external HD (modern NAS do support this), make a backup and store this in a save place.
Because there will come a day you make a note to yourself "I should have made a backup”.

Yes, all good points. With this NAS, if the controller failed, I should be able to buy a new one and insert the drives to get it up and running. On a previous NAS, one made by Buffalo, this wasn't the case, which is why I went with the Western Digital this time around. Additionally, yes, I do have "another" backup of my music files that I take periodically on a 1 TB USB drive. Can never be too cautious in this game.

 

[InAnimaTed]

I use Plex Music for all my high quality, Spotify "following+saving" for everything else. I have my music replicated at home and on a dedicated server available for listening anywhere I am via Plex apps. I combine this with Chromecast Audio (w/ toslink) to my DAC both at home and work as I found out last year bitperfect streaming is much more difficult than it should be on PC/Mac. And no, Plex doesn't do any transcoding, its all forced Direct Stream (24/96+192) which the CCA handles perfectly