from artist name to listening on phone, how *i* handle music

inspired by Someone On Fedi, this is how i manage my music without relying on spotify or any other corpo (other than Big Hard-Drive, i guess :P).

this is not a “how i left spotify” post because i was never on it, but hopefully is of some use to someone anyways.

i will mention other things that i have recently used and would still recommend, but this is not meant to be a guide including every possible workflow, since i can’t write about how well things i’ve never used (or used for a day) work. the hope is that you vibe with at least some of the things here.

but i will happily link to other writeups here, or copy paste suggestions at the bottom

sourcing music

https://bandcamp.com is still good better than normal, despite The Horrors (being bought out, being sold to Songtradr again, the strike breaking). https://www.bandcamp2.com/ (mirror) offers a list of other places, though mainly for artists to use. (as a listener you might find luck looking in those places too).

the https://bandcamp.com/discover/free search in bandcamp is good for finding free shit, a good chunk of my music collection is just random free shit that it turns out i really like :3

yt-dlp is good for downloading music from youtube (it can also download the free previews from bandcamp). you won’t get proper tags here, but they can be cleaned up later.

piracy :3

https://www.slsknet.org/news/node/1 soulseek is generally quite good for music piracy. it does have an “account” system, but generally speaking accounts are interchangeable and it doesn’t really matter. (if you get more into adding buddies and such, you’d want to take more care of your account, but if you’re treating it like just a bittorrent alternative, it’s whatever).

on that note, you don’t have to share anything yourself, but some users do have auto-warnings or even auto-blocks for people who don’t share. those users are being dickheads, but whatever. one way around it (and in a way that is genuinely still helpful) if you don’t want to share your music collection as a whole is to share your soulseek downloads folder. helps with redundancy, if a user goes away you can still share what you downloaded from them.

note that your IP is locatable (it’s still a p2p network after all), though it’s not sprayed everywhere like it is in bittorrent, so a VPN is less needed. port forwarding is recommended but not required, as in bittorrent.

on bittorrent, i haven’t used it in ages, so don’t really have anything useful to say on it. (don’t use µtorrent. there are plenty of OSS torrent clients out there, i’ve used qBittorrent and Deluge in the past.)

(contact me if you want me to link to anything here!).

tagging

once you have your files, you now (probably) want to tag them.

i use beets.io, which is a CLI tool for library management. generally easy to use, but requires a bit of setup, and since it expects to handle a library itself, it has a database, and you need to tell it about your music by importing it. all the tags are written out to the actual music files by default though, so the source of truth is still your music.

if that’s too heavy and you just want an autotagger, consider MusicBrainz Picard, which has a GUI.

both beets and picard use the https://musicbrainz.org/ database, basically “wikipedia for music metadata”. popular music will basically always be in the database, but obscure shit might not.

manual tagging is an option with both beets and picard. (but i’d recommend, at least once you get settled in, to make a musicbrainz account and start adding stuff :) good way to help the community, and make these tools more useful for everyone)

transcoding

beets has the convert plugin to let you easily transcode (a subset of) your library to some format.

there’s also the alternatives plugin which lets you maintain a given directory automatically with transcoded versions of your music.

for example, my config will take all music tagged with on_phone=true in my library and put it in a syncthing folder, for it to be copied over to my phone automatically(discussed next chapter)

for non-beets users, i don’t have personal experience with anything. sorry. suggestions welcome :)

syncing

i use https://syncthing.net/ installed on both my desktop and my phone(phone syncthing is https://github.com/researchxxl/syncthing-android… which looks to have been transferred to a new owner. interesting :) shrug. i’ll continue using it

anyways the results of the transcoding end up in a shared folder that ends up on my phone

playing

phone

i’m currently using VLC on android. i used to use https://github.com/OxygenCobalt/Auxio for music but the long rescan times on larger libraries (and the AGENT.md and vibe coding shit) made me switch. Auxio is better for having support for musicbrainz metadata (so an artist that put out 10 singles and 1 album can have that album sorted to the top).

desktop

mpd + ncmpcpp. this is very much a “works for me thing”, but it’s what i set up years ago and never felt the need to switch.

other suggestions

none, so far! if you want to make your own suggestion for any of the above, contact me(links on homepage) with the text you want added (and if you want to be credited, and by what name/links if so) and i’ll make a chapter marker here for it.