In my 2nd ever post on this blog - 2 years ago! - I wrote about tending to my music collection, so on the anniversary of that post I figure now is a good time for an update.
I am still using Navidrome, I enjoy its simplicity and focus. When I started with it spun up several instances:
- A small curated collection I built from the ground up of my current favourite music
- A lossless collection of all my FLAC files, mostly CD rips of my own CDs made during lockdown
- A big bucket of everything else, including some MP3 files going back to the 90's
In the end though I found this was just badly compensating for the real issue which was the poor organisation of my music so I ended up merging them into one and re-doubling my efforts to get the music properly organised.
The main tool as before was Picard, although I found synchronising music between my workstation and my server frustrating, the breakthrough came when I discovered Picard-web so I could host Picard directly on my headless server, this reduced some of the friction and allowed me to really get on with the job.
As of today, ~95% of my music is processed through Picard, what remains is some recent Bandcamp purchases, older stuff that might be bootlegs or from releases with a chequered history of renaming and a couple of really obscure releases from short-lived bands. I intend to deal with those at some point but they will require manual tagging and uploading the results to Musicbrainz, something I'm not yet familiar with doing.
I now use Navidrome most days, if I want to listen to something I own I will get it there instead of YouTube (I still don't subscribe to Spotify no matter how desperate they seem to be trying to win be back lately). I run Symphonium on my Android phone for streaming from Navidrome on the go, via tailscale. The user experience with all this is excellent, even better than it was before streaming suckered us all into giving away our ownership.
I've been steadily growing my collection too. If I find something I enjoy in streaming, my impulse is to search for it on Bandcamp and more often than not it's on there for a reasonable price and I'll buy it. My tastes are pretty diverse and change over time so that keeps me coming back for more. I've lately been getting into "Nu-gaze" music, a genre that revives the old Shoe-gaze indie scene of the 90's, I was never much into it at the time but it's resonated with me today. I also like to explore ambient music spanning decades, some artists are really prolific creating it and giving it away for next to nothing, or literally nothing though I never take it for free even if there is no minimum price.
So in all it's still an on-going project, probably forever more now that I know collecting my favourite music in a form of true ownership is something important to me. I also bought a DAP, a Snowsky Echo Mini, so I can put the damn phone down and still listen to music, it has a 128GB SD card in it so I don't even need to transcode to MP3 to keep a decent sized collection on there but it is still a more curated list of music than what Navidrome keeps.
I'm pretty happy with where things are, there isn't much I feel the need to improve on so I can just get on with the hobby of buying more music and expanding my collection. As of today Navidrome says I have 9,972 tracks totalling 138GB, not nearly enough!