Music Servers

Always wanting to do something with the music I have, I always want it in a way I can easily listen to it, and basically enjoy it fully. 

I used to sit at my desk mostly to listen to music via my computer. At one point I had an mp3 kind of player, but it wasn’t a good one. It got me discombobulated since I wanted something that worked well. Eventually we got a few sandisk blue & white players, ended up using them for audiobooks mostly.

Next was the SanDisk e200 series. I still use that series of player to this day. I wanted my music in the cloud, had that with Google Music later on, as soon as they LET me do it, that is.

Before Google Music it was always about how to fill one’s device with music. I still deal with that sometimes, using the e280 ,,, it’s rather static, and that’s OK it’s my BASE of what music I have. Last time I did that I used Media Monkey and I don’t have Media Monkey installed anymore.

At any rate, the e200 series I have posted about before. I don’t use the Original Firmware, I use the RockBox alternative, which really rocks. 

So then this past year, I had started to use Plex and used my music in Plex … enjoyed it for a bit, but then… I felt disconnected from my actual music, because of all the effort that goes into the Music libraries in a machine like Plex it was literally like using Google Music ,,, my real files don’t get fixed up if I edit things in Plex or Google Music. Google Music uploads my stuff, and so it’s a second copy in the cloud that is kept separate from my original.

Plex looks at your files and matches but never touches your files, even when you edit metadata … you aren’t changing your files.

So that means the meaningful changes you did, aren’t in your files on your computers. The wrong article case of letters, the spellings, what you might add to a title … none of that makes it to your original files if you use Plex or Google Music.

Well I had enough of Plex entirely, so I removed my Music library and tried Emby’s, didn’t like music it there, and there’s no scrobbling server side, so I removed that library from Emby (Movies and Tv Show are great in Emby.)

What now? I already have something running, and got it going to the best I can, Airsonic. It’s what I’m looking for, it’s my local music, exactly how I have it, wow it’s great! But I don’t like listening via the browser, both Chrome and Firefox have glitchy sounds here and there.

But there is server side scrobbling, which needs tweaked, it scrobbles twice, thrice and quadruple sometimes.

I installed the Tomcat War version of Airsonic, didn’t work it out (firewall issue) and in the end it didn’t matter because I wanted to start over and have it as lightweight as I wanted. Airsonic War Standalone, worked like a charm. So I’m running it like this:

javaw -jar path-to-airsonic.war

and I don’t have an issue with shutting down my server too easily now.

Adding it as a service in Windows doesn’t work, maybe I’ll get to packaging it up so that it will run as a service one day, but for now I’m fine with this methodology, manually cmd, running in the background.

I also installed mstream or whatever it’s called, and took it off my computer before it had finished scanning. Nice looking, wow yeah, installs in Windows great, but … no scrobbling, no android app … no, no, no.

So I bought the Dsub app on Android, it’s fine with Airsonic, it’s has a lot of good options, and I can use server scrobbling if I want, but on my Android devices I have other scrobbling options that work well, so to avoid problems, I’m happy to cache my scrobbles with Simple Last.fm Scrobbler, for instance, and submit a batch of scrobbles when I’m ready to.

I still have Google Music, I just hate the Android app, it’s so bright.  On my S3 Tablet it’s horrifying. And on my tablet there are no themes, and I’m not rooting my tablet.

Enter rant: Why does Samsung not allow their tablets to use THEMES?

Why does Google not provide a Dark Mode in Google Play Music?

Augh!

Well then it comes down to listening on my own computer where the server is, what will I use … I have to explore more, MusicBee, there is a plugin, but I don’t know what happened, if it didn’t install right, it never got anything from my server. When you had MusicBee already and move your music it’s not so simple to say to it DELETE THAT LIBRARY. So I will end up deleting it later on entirely, the MusicBee app, and figure out how to make it work with my Airsonic server once MusicBee is cleanly installed. I want this to work so that I can also do this on my laptop. 🙂