Without ageing myself too much here, I vividly remember receiving my first music CD and CD player, and while overtime I have grown a sizeable collection, I exclusively listen to music via devices such as my phone and computer, and have done for many years now.

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Back in the day, the process was to rip my CDs into iTunes or use iTunes to purchase and download music as .mp3 files. However, as someone who loves to explore and listen to extensive amounts of music, curating hundreds of playlists mixing various tracks together, purchasing albums for the purpose of enjoying a single track isn’t economic. As such, greatly welcomed the advent of music streaming, being able to browse and listen to seemingly endless amounts of music in a significantly cost effective way.

Spotify

For many years, I was subscribed to Spotify and was mostly satisfied with this choice. There was one glaring drawback for me though. For the better part of the last fifteen odd years, I listen to Asian music, notably that in Japanese and Korean. While the latter has largely been readily on such streaming platforms like Spotify accessible with the explosion of K-Pop over the past few years, it nonetheless tends to exclude K-Rock, and the availability of Japanese music has always been patchy, due to longstanding issues the Japanese music industry has had with making its content more accessible – it took many years for full length music videos of Japanese artists to be uploaded to YouTube.

From 128kbs to FLAC

Although more Japanese artists are having their work added to streaming platforms, many of my beloved artists are still absent. As such, to enjoy such music on the go, ripping the CDs and converting them into digital files so as to listen to them wherever I am is the name of the game.

Furthermore, as times have moved on, I have become more aware of sound quality. While teenage me would have been perfectly satisfied with 128kbs files, the obvious choice as someone with a basic iPod Mini which could only hold so much music, I found myself later not accepting anything less than 320kbs, and now with significantly higher standards. These days, not only am I proudly on team FLAC, I am now aiming to upgrade as much of my collection as possible from 16bit to 24bit.

It was the change towards FLACs that caused a significant change in how I listened and organised my music collection: iTunes doesn’t support FLAC. Nor does Spotify, but I was not using that anyway to handle my local files as I found the integration process poor, so kept them separate. As such, I needed to find a way to organise my music collection in FLAC format, and another way to play them on my computer and phone.

An iTunes Successor

I wanted an experience as close to iTunes as possible, as organising my music collection, with the creation of large amounts of playlist, appeared to be near impossible using programmes such as foobar2000 or VLC, which I had seen recommended. I had memories of MusicMonkey handling large collections well, and heard its spiritual successor MusicBee was worth investigating. However, I had since moved onto a Mac, and none of these were compatible, being Windows only.

As such, using a Mac became an obstacle, and I had to research I find more obscure programmes to use. Eventually, I came across Swinsian, a Mac app which was exactly what I was looking for. It was able to handle large libraries, access and edit playlists easily, and of course, played FLACs.

A Spotify For FLACs?

This addressed playing and organising FLACs on my computer, but did nothing for my phone. While I could of course put all my FLACs on an SD card to stick it into my phone, I would need a very large SD card. Additionally, popping the SD card in and out each time I wanted to sync the tracks seemed cumbersome. Plus, I was becoming really drawn to the ‘Spotify experience’, being able to stream the tracks across multiple devices from a single source.

Thankfully around this time I was also looking into general media storage and playback, and grabbed a great deal for a lifetime pass of Plex. Without going into too much detail, for those unaware, Plex sits on a server, reads the media files (photos, video, music…), and presents them to you on a variety of devices to watch or listen. Visually, it’s a very nice experience, with movies and TV shows neatly organised and played back to you with little effort on a bunch of smart devices.

However, the music capability is lacking in my opinion. While Plex have made advancements, releasing a dedicated music app Plexamp a few years ago, it isn’t a pleasant interface in organising large music collections, and the management of playlists is cumbersome, especially since there is no way to import or export playlists, so recreating years of playlists would have to be done track-by-track, which was far from appealing. Though with little options elsewhere I could find, I uploaded my FLACs to the server, and could play them via Plexamp on my phone to enjoy them. But this was far from an ideal experience.

Subsonic

I’m not sure how I exactly found out about it, but at some point I came across Subsonic, an application running on a server which reads your music collection (as well as other types of media, but I exclusively used it for music), presents it in an orderly fashion, and then enables it to be listened on a variety of devices, not too dissimilar to Plex. Difference here was a better experience for handling music libraries, and most importantly for me, a way to easily import playlists from my computer.

I initially struggled installing Subsonic on my Synology DiskStation, though I thankfully found a package which aided in the process. However, Subsonic is not free for the feature I wanted to use it for the most – listening on my phone, requiring a subscription instead. Although a one-off paid option is available, it is set at $99, which was pretty steep for me. However, I realised the thirty-day trial could be reused over-and-over again by simply backing up all the data, uninstalling the package, and reinstalling it. So, for a while at least, I would go through this process every month in order to keep everything working. It was not a perfect solution, but one I was content with in the meantime.

A huge benefit of Subsonic is its API, and how any one can create applications to connect to their Subsonic installation to pay their music on a device of their choosing. As such, there were plenty of options to choose from when it came to finding a compatible Android app. After trying out many options, I finally decided on Substreamer, due to its attractive interface, good usability, and how it just simply worked.

Although I realised I could migrate away from Swinsian towards a Subsonic compatible application for my computer, I was reluctant. I was not fond of the web interface for managing my music and disliked the idea of having to use my web browser to be my music player. Although the notion of running numerous apps from instead web browsers is prominent for many, particularly with Chrome Apps, it really isn’t for me. Of course though, the Subsonic API was open for many to create their own applications to connect to their Subsonic servers, and so I could just find a compatible computer app, and then I would be fine. However, I was unable to find any I liked, and always found myself simply going back to Swinsian to organise, and the export to Subsonic to keep everything in sync. Again, not a perfect solution, though one I had to put up with.

High Quality Music Everywhere

While my Japanese and Korean language music collections were growing nicely in FLACs, I slowly came to the realisation the English language music I played in Spotify was far from a high quality listening experience. While I was aware of platforms such as Tidal, Qobuz and Deezer which heavily marketed their superior audio, I was not in a position to pay for the higher prices. Although Amazon and Apple later offered higher audio quality, I had trialled Amazon Unlimited and found the interface very poor, and I was concerned about the limited ability to play Apple Music on a variety of devices. Spotify was reasonably priced, easy to use, had a huge music library, and widely accessible on all my devices. Furthermore, I was hearing every few months about Spotify HiFi, the high quality audio option, and how it was coming soon.

However, I eventually ran out of patience, and after some research, I found a way to get Tidal at a more reasonable price, so decided to take the leap. Migration from Spotify was rather seamless, as I utilised Soundiiz, a website which aims to effortlessly migrate your music between dozens of platforms. It is free, but limited. I could have manually moved each playlist over to Tidal using Soundiiz, but found paying $5 to move them all over in one go a better option. Although I faced a smaller music library, I also gained some music missing from Spotify, and immediately enjoyed the higher quality audio.

A Better Subsonic

As time moved along, I became more and more annoyed at having to uninstall and reinstall Subsonic every month, but did not want to pay subscription fees to keep it nor pay $99, especially since at this point, there had not seemingly been an update for many years and may soon become abandonware. I began looking into alternatives which could easily run on my Synology DiskStation, and eventually settled on the free Airsonic. This successor to Subsonic builds on the existing work, and thus is compatible with the API and any of the applications marketed as being for Subsonic, rather than needing a whole new infrastructure. Another benefit was how moving from Subsonic to Airsonic was pretty much completely effortless, as the web interfaces are near identical and thus I had a zero learning curve trying to understand this ‘new’ application.

There was one issue with the installation though, as I again had to seek out a package for Synology DiskStation because there was no official package, though the same developer had also created a package for Airsonic, which installed perfectly fine. Since installation, I have had no issues whatsoever, and am overjoyed with the experience.

Because I’m Clearly Never Satisfied

After my success with Airsonic, I began reviewing my situation with Swinsian, and realised how ridiculous it was I was still using Swinsian as my computer’s music player and having to manually sync the music and playlists between it and my now new Airsonic server. Surely in the years which have passed, there are better applications which can play music from my Subsonic server on my computer?

Initially, it did not seem so. I scoured the internet and found little development, with websites and users recommending the same old software, or pointing to, admittedly nice looking, applications made for Windows or Linux. As a Mac user, things seemed to be limited. However, I then stumbled on a Reddit post which spoke about a new cross-platform programme called Sonixd, a music player which streams music from Subsonic and Jellyfin servers.

Fully featured and customisable, this beautifully modern piece of software was exactly what I was looking for. Although I have not been using it for too long, it has made me excited about the collection again, being able to easily see my playlists, quickly search my albums, and present a wealth of information about my music library from a separate app, and not my web browser. I can sit now at my desk, create a new playlist from within Sonixd, and then refresh Substreamer to see it loaded on my phone. I finally have my offline music collection integrated seamlessly across my phone and desktop, with options readily available for other devices if I so choose, again thanks to the prevalence of the Subsonic API.

Future Plans?

I won’t lie, there is still one large issue I would love to resolve, and I think may one day be possible. That is to fully merge and integrate my online and offline collections. I recently helped a friend with their music collection, and while they have gone down a completely different route (Qobuz, Raspberry Pi, DLNA/UPnP… all of which is a different post I may one day write up), while we were on their path of discovering what works and doesn’t for them, they wanted to try out a piece of software everyone in the high quality audio world was talking about – Roon.

Roon is a piece of software, ideally running on a server, which, like Plex and Subsonic, reads your music collection, organises it, and makes it available to listen to on numerous devices, as well as connect many devices together to create multi-room audio – it’s also incredibly beautiful to look at. Among its many features, including an extensive ‘brain’ which makes connections between musical artists to aid in music discovery and fill in your missing metadata, it is able to seamlessly merge your offline music collection with your Tidal and Qobuz accounts. This isn’t a feature exclusive to Roon, Volumio Premium also has this feature, but both share the same drawback as to why I am reluctant to use these platforms – both charge subscriptions to access this feature. While Roon does have an option for a one-off payment, it is currently priced at $699, and considering I had issues with $99, there is no way I will pay $699. While it may be worth it for some, I should also point out that even if I did deem the price acceptable, Roon struggled with my offline music collection during my trial (I was curious how amazing a piece of software must be to charge $699).

I think the issues Roon had was because my collection is entirely of Japanese and Korean language music. Although my collection has perfect metadata, Roon was confused, creating multiple artists for the same act, having some artists’ names in English, Japanese, or Korean, with some acts split into two different artists with different spellings for their names. The ‘brain’ was also less smart, struggling to create meaningful connections to other artists, and lacking even basic information about artists which Subsonic could do. As such, it essentially broke my collection, making it useless. I did not go so far as to examine if my playlists could be imported or not, as the mess it created with my collection was a dealbreaker, and I uninstalled and immediately cancelled my account.

Although this does not rule out Volumio Premium, which may be a better experience of reading my music library, I again do not wish to pay a subscription for the rest of my life to listen to my music.

So for now at least, until there is either a free or one-off fee I can pay at a reasonable price, my music libraries will remain separated, one for English music I stream, and another for my Japanese and Korean language collection. Hopefully one day I will be able to bring these together into a single platform, but for now, I am satisfied with Airsonic, Substreamer, Sonixd, and Tidal.