QOTD: How do you listen to your music?

I’ll start. I have a meticulously organized FLAC library stored locally on my laptop and played with cmus. Everything is manual but I have a collection of home-grown shell scripts that help me maintain folder structure, manage metadata, calculate information about the recording like dynamic range and spectrograms, and do transformations like cue splitting. Once an album has been processed, it goes into the music folder on my laptop with a duplicate copy stored on my server.

I have been thinking about letting beets do all of that boring stuff, but I’m not sure I can trust it to do it right. I also really want some kind of (self hosted) algorithm to pick songs for me. As it is, I can’t just shuffle my library or even genres because there are a lot of songs that don’t go well together as well as songs I just don’t like. I haven’t found anything that can do that.

Anyway, I’m curious to see how you guys do it.

@mckinley@twtxt.net It’s very simple. Quot Libet is my player at the moment, it’s okay, but not great. I really did like Amarok back in the days (unfortunately, not available in Debian anymore), then tried Clementine and switched to xmms2 for a bunch of years. I had a few scripts around it. I don’t remember why I moved away from it, though. A few years back I gave mpd a try, but could never get it to work properly.

Quod Libet usually just plays the whole collection from top to bottom and I manually skip every now and then. Sometimes even entire bands.

I’ve got all sorts of file types in ~/music. Usually each artist gets their own directory, depending on how many stuff I’ve got, there’s usually a directory for the album and then come the tracks. Filenames are all over the place, for new stuff I use lowercase only and no spaces but dashes. I make use of common meta data such as artist, title, genre, often also year, album and track number. These days I get a lot of new music from YouTube and cut the start and end off with Audacity. The last three fields are only filled when I can be bothered to look them up.

Currently playing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS0hYhD-U0A

@mckinley@twtxt.net I have it simpler than you, and @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org. I use Apple Music. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Interesting. mpd + ncmpcpp seems to be a common setup among our type but I really like cmus. Whipper is my CD ripper of choice and it is excellent. It queries AccurateRip for checksums and MusicBrainz for metadata, and can encode to any format you want. It also creates a nice log file like EAC does (it can even create EAC-compatible logs with a plugin) so you can verify that it was ripped properly.

I use Plex Amp 😅

Nothing fancy, although it has changed along the years.

I payed for Spotify Premium for many years, but since 2020 I think it lost its value for me, so I switched to YT, or a local company is offering Deezer free for a year.

I’ve been playing with the idea of storing most of my music in SD cards or internal memory from an old android.

Currently in my car I listen to music in a SD card with ‘everything’ I’ve been getting in the last 10+ years. I’m lazy to switch on the Bluetooth on my phone.

At home, I have a few different speakers, with line input and bluetooth. My wife has an Alexa near the dining room, so we often listen to music or the radio there.

Also, very often I play Youtube playlists on the TV (I’m looking for some way to listen to Youtube on a speaker, but haven’t found any. Or with the phone with Revanced (which stopped working last week)

Since I have diverse players I try to stick to MP3 VBR, although I try to download or convert tracks to ‘more recent’ formats. Weirdly my car allows WMA, and more weirdly I have some tracks which came to that SD card mysteriously.
I haven’t found FLAC interesting as when I was in college, I can’t notice a difference between lossy and loseless formats. Perhaps my environment is too noisy or I’m getting older 😅

That said, I’d really want to isolate my home-office, I have too much reverb when recording, and also external noise, which sometimes affect when listening to music.

@prologic@twtxt.net Plexamp has some really cool features. It’s a shame it’s proprietary and dependent on central services.

Gonna give cmus a try. cmus-tutorial is a cool thing I have to say.