I’ve been doing the MP3 thing for 25 years or so, ripping CDs to 128kbps MP3s back in the late 90s! I’ve built up quite the impression collection of legally owned music, if I do say so myself, including many playlists that I adore.
The problem with my music workflow is I can’t “stream” it to different devices easily. I can only get it on one single mac plus iOS devices connected/synced to that one mac. Right now I’m typing on my laptop and I can’t access my music collection unless I pull out my iPod Touch because my main source of music collection truth is my iMac. The second problem is backup. Getting the songs again is less challenging than rebuilding dozens of carefully curated playlists.
I want to avoid paid-streaming services because I don’t want another monthly bill, I don’t care much for new music and add relatively few songs to my ~7,000 track library each year, and if the service shuts down, I don’t want to rebuild my playlists elsewhere.
What I’d love is a way to roll my own streaming solution where I host the music somewhere on a cloud server and can access it from any of my devices, including playlists. As an alternative discussion point, I’d also like to explore backup options if this streaming thing isn’t viable.
Most likely I’ll just stick to always having an iOS device with me nearby and using that to stream music to either my headphones or whatever smart speakers are nearby. That’s okay, I’ll live.
Here’s the backup options I have considered:
Upload everything to Google Music’s free match thing. I haven’t tried it in a while but it used to be all free and work similarly to Apple’s paid match thing.
As a second backup, upload all of the audio files to Amazon Glacier. I don’t use backblaze or any of those services nor do I want to because I have some pretty confidential client work product on my machines and I would accidentally upload that I’m sure! Also, the monthly cost. I think with Amazon Glacier, I pay a very low fee once to upload it and then it sits there possibly forever and I pay a small fee to download it if I need the backup.
Third backup, of course is a thumb drive stored offsite. And fourth/fifth backups are every iOS device I have that syncs my entire collection. I buy the biggest size possible, my iPod Touch has 256GB.
For the playlists, I can export XML files from iTunes of the lists and store those in plain text on various cloud services. I run my playlists with metadata, in the comments I write (Playlist Name) and then use Smart Playlists in iTunes to dynamically build a list where the comments include that string. And if one song is in multiple playlists I just put them in the comments delimited by their own parenthesis (Playlist 1)(Playlist 2)(Playlist 3).
I’ve put a lot of time into this over the years it’s a fun hobby! What tips or suggestions can the group share to help make this better and secure for the long term?
Seriously for the most simple and trouble free experience, along with the great app design of the new Plexamp playback app you might find this is the answer without having to invest more than about 30 minutes.
