Hello!

i listen to music. not tons of it, but more than none. lots of songs ive picked up over the years, you know how it goes. hear stuff on the radio, recommended from friends, the occasional youtube recommendation that's actually worth another listen. anime openings even. look i don't know how other entities discover music okay? it just kind of happens.

irregardless (yes i use that word. we all know what it means. I'm reclaiming it from a very specific type of pedant). being able to queue up one's music from anywhere on the planet, and shuffle or sort it, would be supremely convenient. and indeed, since the "iPod", such has been possible for normies who overpay. i like that smartphones can do the same thing, and i want mine to. there's just a few problems…

in the beginning there was the dumbphone. specifically the LG B470, a flip-phone that could do calls and texts, take very low quality videos and photos, and hold about five songs. this was fine until it wasn't - ive always been pretty accepting of my limits. but under my parents' noses, i smuggled a slightly better device from the depths of ebay.

since i refuse to use Apple services, my next option was once "Google Play Music", an utterly confusing app which i somehow ended up using on my first ever smartphone, a Samsung J7 (brief retrospective of that coming eventually…). it made mixes from songs i sought out, drawing on genre and artist associations. i heard much, both desirable and not. the lesson is this:

do not trust recommendation algorithms, for they do not care about the same things mir does.

the other lesson i learned in the era of "Google Play Music" was: internet streaming is not a reliable source of smooth audio, or indeed any audio at all. this era predates me having a sim card, let alone one with data, so whenever i walked too far from the house wifi my song would cut out and the app would load forever. the caching was juuust good enough to occasionally finish a song while walking away, giving the impression that i could have made it work. but no.

to this day, i will not use a music app that does not have local downloads to be pulled from. this is the bare minimum: have my music on device, and play it.

for a while i would use ytmp3 dot cc to backup youtube audios, save them to my phone, and play them using [i forget which] basic audio player app. it was an okay existence. not ideal but what can you do. i also briefly owned a tiny SanDisk music player gadget, about a cubic inch in size. just large enough to hold a screen, d-pad, audio jack, and MicroSD card reader. this card would be the end-all be-all of my music collection for over a year.

for privacy and money reasons, i refuse to touch spotify. i only use youtube with ublock-origin or (re)vanced.

a few years ago, discovering that jellyfin exists, i began using it for my anime collection, which worked well enough (not ideal but that's Another Post) - so i figured may as well dump my mp3s into it as well. the jellyfin android app is literally just the website but worse - media control widget was busted, background play nonexistent - but i discovered Finamp.

Finamp is my bare minimum music player app: it (can be tricked into) saving your entire library to local storage, to be played back in any order at any time. in fact, i deeply appreciate how little else it does! it's a wonderfully minimal app. there's just one teensy weensy little fundamental incongruity between its model of a music library and my own:

playlists.

now, a playlist as a concept is fine. unlike a few organizational categories for music, i do not hate playlists. however, finamp's caching (the essential feature) is buried behind playlists: one must create a playlist and then download THAT, rather than just selecting what songs to download by some other less bespoke means. thus, since i actually listen to all the music in my library - that's why it's here: to use finamp i must manually add every single song to one gigantic "everything" playlist and download that to be used offline.it's a hack, but it's fine.

Part II: metadata

obviously youtube rips often come with the wrong thumbnail/album-art, or the uploader is some random fan rather than the official artist, or many other lacking qualities.

a netizen whom i respect was once asked how to manage a personal music collection, and she said "Beets for organizing!" and well, it took mir about a year to get around to actually trying that tip. i discovered that "beets" has a very different understanding of many concepts, than mir does. i don't want to be mean, or articulate my particular frustrations with their way of doing things, so i'll redirect those feelings to the underlying assumption:

WHY THE FUCK DOES EVERYONE CARE ABOUT ALBUMS??

put down the pitchforks. i get it. for a century you had to pay for your music, and it came on a physical disc that could only hold so much data, and that incentivized artists to produce music that all fit a vibe. I'm not denying the historical reality of albums, or their place in the hearts of the masses. i just wish i could ignore them and most music software makes that nearly impossible.

beets takes all my music, and puts it under the following directory structure: 

/music
| Non-Album
| | Artist
| | | 'Full Name of Album'
| | | | song.mp3
| | | | song2.mp3
| | | | 'Song With A Malformed Title'.flac

this is a headache. i listen to a lot of one-hit wonders, and the greatest hits of decently known bands, and songs whose names and artists consist of unreproducible kanji. the above is a best case scenario, because the names are mostly readable and there's more than one song that happens to be from the same album. but it's still way too many levels of folder depth, to allow for a categorization that i do not use, and could just get shoved into the metadata just as well.

in the desktop Apple Music interface, which i attempted to use once, setting a track number to an mp3 will prepend that number to the filename. this is an elegant solution, if a tad crude. i would take twenty characters of nonsense per filename to avoid pointlessly nested directory trees, if such a system existed.

the fact that beets adds missing metadata and pulls from an online music database is very cool! it even usually works, except with the Japanese songs! i just wish it could iterate thru my folder without having to copy to a new folder with its own [adjectives removed] structure. also, i haven't gotten it to add album art properly, which is a shame.. there are workarounds for that but the one i found happens to delete the rest of the metadata so it has to be done as the first step of naturalizing a track.

but enough about beets and its albums! let's look at Navidrome. navidrome is a self hostable music server with… more music oriented features than jellyfin. what does that mean? it means that the front page is full of albums!

i do not want to see albums. i want to see songs ideally, or playlists if you must. an album is just a worse and more roundabout way of getting to the song i want, and i wish i didn't know of the concept. that it was possible to not know the concept. let me dump my songs all together, and make playlists if they're absolutely necessary.

… it was at this point in the writing of this article, that mir posted it to fedi with a question about how others resolved their similar issues.

… proceeds to try out scripting it

actually, for now im just going to make a playlist in youtube music that has all the correct versions of my songs, and download that with the magic yt-dlp arguments that make it keep all the metadata. and possibly switch back to jellyfin - it seems this music app actually works with both jf and navidrome!

btw that command is 

yt-dlp -i --extract-audio --audio-quality 0 --restrict-filenames --embed-metadata --embed-thumbnail 'https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-hDLCa4S-DEc9122WulDeo2Ft1HZ05ab&si=Mv2guessR9u-SwDB'

yup, here's my current setup:

TODO: