De-Clouding: Music
21 comments
·September 8, 2025commandersaki
I have an offline music library that I use with Apple music app. It's the only way I can have Siri play playlists by name when using CarPlay; despite this functionality being broken for me since iOS 17 (have a longstanding bug report with escalation with engineers that have been saying they'd fix the bug for about 2 years now). Synchronisation is awful because it can't reconcile multiple copies of the library on different devices, so you're essentially tethered to one mac (or windows) for synchronisation.
Semaphor
Interesting that they prefer syncing. I went the other way and stream everything, but locally. Music acquisition is 95% bandcamp (5% is Amazon or Qobuz or physical CDs I rip), the FLACs gets transferred to the N100 server in my living room, where it gets picked up by Navidrome[0]. Navidrome then streams it to the kitchen (via Music Assistant to a pi3 with USB-connected speaker), to my phone (via Symfonium), and to my browser (via the web app). The server has tailscale for remote access as well.
[0] Until recently I used Jellyfin, but the performance of Navidrome is far superior.
xp84
This is definitely admirable, for lack of a better word. It's frustrating how having been in the "streaming world" for a decade now, it put a stop to me getting music that I can own DRM-free which puts a pretty big wall in front of this optin for me.
It's kind of like we've been incurring debt all that time, and the "payments" are all deferred as long as you keep the subscription. But if I drop the subscription, suddenly I don't own any music newer than 2015, despite having paid $1200 -- it was just to rent music from Apple all that time.
Which kinda would be fine since I can afford it and it allowed me to get more music than I probably would have bought with a $1200 iTunes gift card.
But as you pointed out, Apple Music (and in my humble opinion Spotify and YouTube Music) both have modern-day UIs that are a horror show, only getting worse with each passing release. But the only choice is to keep subscribing to one, or rebuild your library at great money or time expense. :(
rmunn
It's not that hard to set up Audacity to record the audio loopback input on your computer; https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_recording_compu... is a way to do it on Windows, and if you're on Linux you probably already know how to do it so I don't need to explain it. (Which I wouldn't be able to do immediately without looking it up, as the last time I needed to do that it was on my wife's Windows computer).
I'll refrain from explaining the rest of the steps to commit what some people would consider to be copyright violation, though IMHO if you paid for the music you should have a right to download a DRM-free copy as long as you don't distribute it to others.
Though of course, that does factor into the "time expense" you mentioned. But it's something you only have to do once, and you don't have to do it for your whole library at the same time.
brokenmachine
Sounds like piracy with extra steps and a worse end result.
raffraffraff
In my teens I started collecting CDs instead of tapes even though I didn't have a CD player, because I record them to tape on someone's player. So when I got my first PC and shitty little modem, I had a nice little stack of CDs to rip, as soon as that because feasible. (Actually, I remember ripping Rage Against The Machine's "Bullet in the head" to .wav in 1994, I think, and then deleting it because it took up most of the hard drive space). I've used audiograbber, EAC, Nero and a whole bunch of encoders. I must go back and find my earliest surviving rip and see what I used to encode it.
Anyway, none of what the author is doing is novelty to me, I stuck to my guns this past 30 years. I buy on Bandcamp or 7digital, or I rip charity store CDs. Occasionally, for really hard to find stuff, I download from YouTube or get a torrent, but only if I can't find it legally.
I've been running Musicbee on Linux/wine for a decade (I think). My last two DAPs were tiny, light-weight Hiby models.
I have had happily never actually paid for any music streaming service.
bob1029
Spotify, et. al., are wonderful for discovery but the chances your esoteric finds will stick around are precarious.
Their entire economic model relies upon providing the least amount of money possible to the rights holders. This seems to often mean removing access to "expensive" content in customer libraries.
I don't think it's a simple coincidence that some of the best tracks wind up getting removed arbitrarily. It's almost like I can trigger this to occur by listening to anything "not mainstream" too many times.
NSUserDefaults
I was also frustrated with some aspects of streaming services so I wrote my own offline alternatives: Tiny Player for Mac and for iOS a similar solution to Doppler: app + companion uploader app for the Mac. All free: https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player-for-mac/ and https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player/
aitchnyu
Is there a workflow of fetching individual songs and getting recommended songs? I'm now firmly in Spotify, I used to have whole albums and "scrobbled" my playlist to Last.fm.
rckt
I created my own cloud, exposing my Apache WebDAV server via DDNS. Using Evermusic for iOS and simply mounting it as a folder on my laptops.
sn0n
I have a 512gb s22 ultra wifi only that was a handle down, the carrier radio was fried and they just sent a replacement... It's an amazing offline mp3 player loaded up with my 45k song Library. Using auxio from f-droid which handles it fine. Couldn't be happier. Also have the full library loaded onto my nextcloud (selfhosted, behind wireguard) and my laptop. I try to avoid the streaming side of things because camping and road trips happen.
walthamstow
Petrichor is indeed a fabulous name, Ross. Love for that smell is the mark of a true Briton.
zuInnp
I did the same like 2 years ago, but I am using Plex on my NAS. That gives me both, flexibility and owning my music. Only downside is that I don’t want to open ports to the outside, so I use WireGuard on my router.
Discogs is amazing. Virtually every second hand record store on the planet is on there, so you can search up virtually any CD that exists, buy it, and have it mailed to you in a few days. I buy so much stuff there.
I often wish there was a Discogs equivalent for DVDs, but there doesn't seem to be.