Is there a cloud music library that doesn't keep deleting my music?
Long store:
I purchased a bunch of audio CDs and Apple Music (the Mac app) offered to rip it and save it into my iCloud library. I was very happy and saw to it that all the audio files were uploaded. I even saved it into a new playlist. I also have the paid Apple Music subscription which I pay for monthly.
In just an hour, iTunes Match (a feature of the paid Apple Music subscription) tried to match the songs and deleted almost all of them and just left 3 songs in my playlist. I tried it a couple of times and this was still the result.
Apparently some songs aren't licensed for my location/country and/or aren't available in the catalog of Apple music for my country and therefore they were all deleted except the ones that Apple already has in their catalog.
That got me thinking - Is there a reliable paid service where I could just upload MY music I legally purchased and they wouldn't be deleted just because of some stupid location based licensing or some other reason?
Spotify is no better as my songs in their library have disappeared a couple of times as well.
Thank you in advance.
Youtube Music actually does have a option to upload up to 100,000 songs. This was one of the biggest selling points of Google Play Music and the feature was mostly carried over. The difference now is that uploaded files aren't automatically added to the library, they live in a different section. You can make a playlist that includes uploaded songs and songs on youtube music, but the song suggestion/radio feature does not combine them. But there are no limits to listening like you experienced with Apple music. Youtube music premium can be bought standalone or bundled with youtube premium.
The other alternative is self hosting, plex and plexamp are popular.
https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/thread/52908732/faq-...
I had an album in my library mysteriously vanish from Google Play, a service I had used for years. So I switched to Apple Music. A few months later, the same album vanished as well as a single.
Possibly the final straw was when I wanted to purchase an album that existed in iTunes, but only in the iTunes "store" of another country.
Since then, I've just went back to maintaining my own library. I purchase lossless music from Bandcamp and Ototoy. I also rip CDs. I had been importing my files into VLC on iOS but recently switched to Sailfish and just copy my files onto an SD card. For streaming I setup my own instance of Koel.
Does it suck to maintain almost 200GB of audio files? Yes.
Have I lost a single track since doing so? No.
I've been using Plex for this purpose and it's been great. I self-host it on a NAS server, but I'm noticing a number of consumer products coming out with the server pre-installed (Namely the NVIDIA Shield).
If you're willing to pursue the self-hosted root, there are loads of options beyond just Plex:
https://jellyfin.org/
https://funkwhale.audio/
I ended up uploading my music library to S3 compatible cloud storage (DigitalOcean Spaces) and creating[1] a minimalistic audio player that plays music straight from S3. S3 serves as a live audio library and as a backup at the same time. The web interface lets me listen the music from a desktop or a mobile web browser.
[1]: https://github.com/akrylysov/bsimp
This used to be a really common service about 10-12 years ago. Amazon, Apple, etc, all offered 'digital lockers' where you could upload your songs and stream them.
These are no longer popular, so not many services are doing this anymore. It's such a wasteland that Wikipedia has a page for closed services [1]
A few small services like medialeap.com still exist, but it is anyone's guess how long they will stick around or how good they are. But I guess you could try that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_music_loc...
This kind of experience is exactly why I bought a bunch of old iPods and loaded them up with music and favourite playlists. You can mod certain iPod classics to take micro SD cards and upgraded batteries too.
Yes it’s a hassle to sync them but I retain control, and there’s no tracking and no ads. One iPod for out and about, one for the car. They’re dirt cheap for certain models nowadays.
Sometimes, you gotta do things yourself. My music library is a bunch of tagged files in a large music folder. I set up a Funkwhale[0] instance for myself, but I rarely use it. I mostly play transcoded files on my phone, tablet, or MP3 player (Sandisk Sansa with Rockbox).
[0] https://funkwhale.audio/
If you're willing to check out self-hosting, Navidrome is fast, slick, and under active development. It provides a Spotify-like experience from your local collection and is compatible with dozens of clients for different platforms.
https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome
Cloud music without outside intervention? No, not really. There's not really a guarantee, because of the nature of how licensing works. If there is a service that would support this in the way you're asking, they would probably be in violation of some sort of agreement. All of these popular cloud services are untrustworthy precisely because they are following the licensing agreements. The ones that don't follow the agreements are probably illegitimate.
Assuming you don't want to steal via TPB, etc. I would recommend going with a service that allows you to locally download the music you pay for. I like using 7Digital [1], but they do make a point of warning you that anything you buy, you can listen to on their cloud player, but might be taken off due to licensing reasons. I feel it's a decent offset of clarity by the site owners, high quality audio, good selection, and reasonable prices. I would prefer to not have to worry about keeping multiple backups locally, and instead just be able to listen to whatever I pay for online, but the only true solution to getting the licensing issues fixed is through the court system, and that doesn't look like it's going to be changing any time soon.
Basically, your choices are:
1. Break the law and steal directly from artists and audio techs
2. Use a streaming service and be stolen from by record labels due to stupid licensing issues
3. Take control of the situation by hosting your legally purchased content locally
Each option sucks, but the third option is the one that bothers me the least.
[1]us.7digital.com
Youtube Music (which replaced Google Play Music) allows you upload your own library of songs. The app UI makes it fairly difficult to find them and play them, but it does work. If you can tolerate the app's UI, that's one way to go.
I toss everything on the NAS and interface via Swinsian [1]. Bought a license many years ago and haven't looked back. Closest thing to "old itunes" UI and rock solid, low-latency playback and browsing across a large library over the network.
[1] https://swinsian.com/
I chose to cut out the middle man. I'll only buy mobile devices with SD card slots and headphone sockets. Loading all my music onto an SD card is an order of magnitude quicker than uploading it to the web. And I have all my music everywhere, even when there's no internet connection.
I'm a lazy person so I just connected a Raspberry Pi with a large hard drive to my local network and installed NextCloud on it. There is a small app called "Music", that's more or less enough for my needs:
https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/music
There is no way I'd give the music I purchased over a few decades to some online "library" that tries to be too smart.
No. That's the risk you take with a cloud service. Even if they don't do it now, if they ever become popular enough they eventually will.
That's the price of convenience. Either you have your own storage (preferably on hardware you own, such as a home NAS) or you have the convenience. You won't have both. My nextcloud server hosts my music. It doesn't host anything that I didn't buy, but I'm pretty sure the music I once bought won't disappear...
I keep my ogg and mp3 on my phone. 45GB and growing. Just plug it into the computer to copy, same for listening on the big boxes.
I still have a phone with a headphone/mic jack 3.5". I have never tried to plug the spdif cable into the phone. Changed to spdif after the copper cable became defective.
Anyhow, plug the phone into the computer's USB and mount it like an external drive. I really try but apart from the music library, it uses 32GB at most, including OS. The photos and videos are on a mini SD card, 128GB in size.
But I'm not sure if Apple lets you export the bought songs as mp3 or other formats do you can share or upload or copy them somewhere. Wasn't that a big issue with iTunes?
I ended up self-hosting all my music via https://funkwhale.audio/. I use S3-style object storage to store the music files so large libraries are no problem!
Nothing you store in the Cloud is yours.
If you want something of yours in the Cloud to remain safe, you have to host it yourself in a computer that you physically control.
It's the same advice I give others about wealth. If you can't hold it in your hot little hand or touch it, it is not yours. Electronics numbers in somebody's else's computer, doubly so.
I learned a hard lesson many years ago when DropBox and I were both a lot younger. Probably (almost certainly) my fault, but I lost several gigs of files when those files were deleted from my 'master' computer instead of being copied to an 'underling' computer.
Build a local library, using DRM-free FLAC files.
Use your favorited encrypted (with a key you have and they don't) cloud backup solution as a safeguard in case you lose your local files.
Amazon did the same thing to my music library almost a decade ago. Their app even deleted some of my locally stored music.
It's best to just store it all locally (and make it read-only).
I uploaded all of my CDs to Google Music (now YouTube Music) over 10 years ago. They are still there and I still stream them regularly. For me, I needed to have access to songs that are not available on streaming services (I wish all music was available, but it simply is not). I can't use Spotify because I can't add certain songs to playlists, and what's the point of using a music service if I can't listen to all of the music that I like?
Roon is my weapon of choice. It has all my lossless CD rips, the Roon ARC app gives me access to my library remotely and for everything else there is TIDAL integration.
I don't think any company would ever get into that space. RIAA (etc) will come after them for not verifying that each user has a license for everything song uploaded. The best the community could probably do is have a 1-click AWS instance that is already setup for running your own streaming server and then you just push your music up there. Could even have a lightweight open-source mobile apps to use the APIs of this server.
On a similar vein and as a PSA...
I was recently disappointed to find out that IG saved stories / highlights can have their music removed. I found a bunch of memories now have a "song unavailable" on them (and still the original audio silenced)...
What's even more disappointing is doing a search for some of the tracks and seeing they are still available. Presumably under a new primary key in their DB.
Get a Synology NAS with the DSAudio app. I stream music from my NAS wherever, super simple classic interface, and it caches songs too.
Recently Amazon Music stopped allowing me to play my own uploaded music from many years ago in playlists. It says to access my songs via playlists I have to subscribe to Amazon Unlimited Music. It is my music, why can't I play it via playlist anymore? I can still play albums I uploaded, just not playlists.
I use Dropbox and Dropsync on Android, keeps my music synced across all devices and I just use a regular music player with it.
Aside: I've gotten so burnt/paranoid from having this exact same thing happen to me many times over the years. No joke, if I really love a song/albumn then I get it in vinyl. That way no format/codec/law/whatever can change the song and 'steal' it from me. I'll have it for the rest of my life.
I saw Plex mentioned, but personally I like Subsonic better for music specifically: http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp
If you're already hosting Plex, what's one more Docker container running Subsonic? :)
Consumer-grade SaaS won't cut it. You need enterprise level storage like S3, or you self-host it yourself.
Google play music was this exactly. And it worked beautifully. But alas, someone at Google needed a promotion.
How about your own computer? How about a network share? How often do you need your music outside of your own home network? How often do you need all of your music and you wouldn't be able to manually copy files to whatever portable device that you have?
You have all the pieces.
I use the Synology DS Audio app and works great. That's where I host all my music.
Buy a PCloud subscription. Upload your music, mount over webdav or rclone and enjoy.
This hasnt been my experience with Apple Music. I have added a lot of music that isn't in their catalog and I can play it on all my devices. Would like to understand what the difference is here. I'm in the US.
You can host your own private FunkWhale instance (https://funkwhale.audio/) and use any Subsonic-compatible client to listen to it.
I have one, but only because it's a computer in the closet in my house. :)
I like mstream lately, it's very simple as compared to e.g. MPD.
https://mstream.io/
I use pCloud. They're not (only?) a "cloud music library", but you can certainly use them like that. They have a music player built into the web and phone interface, but I just use VLC.
There's a setting along the lines of "don't delete". People were burned by this, it boggles my mind that it's not the default...
Nextcloud has a good streaming player of uploaded music.
I use Github. Am I the only one?
I'm sure it's not Github's ideal use case, but if they bin off my account, at least I have the files locally, and I take periodic backups to a physical drive that I store. Can't say it's particularly fast to clone to a new machine though and it's not streamable like e.g. S3.
'Sourcing' new music? TBP, Google dorks used to be good a few years ago but clickbait-farmers cottoned on and now they're unusable. If you have the misfortune of being in the UK, you'll need a VPN.
I've given up and just use a NAS as kind of a cold storage solution. I rotate tracks from it on my cellphone whenever I feel like it.
You can ge an awful lot of music onto a modern MP3 player, and have a backup of it on a hard disk or two at home.
What's the point of uploading the music somewhere, and even more so paying for that?
iTunes match. But I don't think you can get it anymore. Been using match for a really long time, no issues.
Amazon Music whacked my concert archive at some point, which was unbelievably aggravating. Never again.
Mega?
Host it yourself using Plexamp?
FLAC files/iPhone 256GB/foobar2000
Jellyfin works great for me.