During 2020 Google shutdown its music service Google Play Music and the related Android App, and forced its users to migrate to YouTube Music.
YouTube Music, as well as its competitor Amazon Music, are super annoying and keep asking to upgrade to their premium service.
Moreover, managing the music library is cumbersome and often (as it happened to me several times) the music library is modified by the service owner.
So, time has come to get rid of all of this and find an alternative. What I needed was:
- an easy way to manage my music library that let me be 100% in control of it;
- an easy way to listen to my music from Android phone and GNU/Linux workstation;
- being able to download my music for offline listening;
- no advertising;
- 100% free software;
I started googling around and the first thing I found was Subsonic. Subsonic is a server side software that allows you to access your music library from mobile, web or desktop apps supporting its protocol. There are a lot of Subsonic clients, however Subsonic isn’t free sofware and also, none of the suggested clients on their site fits my needs (and my taste).
Luckily, the Subsonic protocol is open (or, at least, is known) so, several server and clients alternatives have been developed.
After trying a few combinations of clients and servers, I finally found an almost perfect solution for me:
- Gonic on the server;
- Audinaut and Airsonic Player on Android;
- Sublime Music on my PC (all running Fedora GNU/Linux);
Sublime on GNU/Linux
Audinaut on Android
Air Player on Android
I personally installed Gonic on a spare Raspberry PI 2.
The nice thing about it is that all I need to do was copy my music library on the Raspberry keeping my current music library filesystem layout intact: just a directory for every artist and inside of it, a directory for every album.
Gonic and the clients uses the folder.jpg file for the album cover and they perfectly reads the mp3 tags, so, when rippin your CD collection make sure to tag your music properly.
Both Audinaut and Air Player do all that I need: music streaming, music caching and music “pinning” for when I’m offline (commuting by train across Liguria it happens very often) but I haven’t yet found which one of the two is my preferred.
If you have suggestions, please leave in the comments: I’m still open for test new clients.