(Of the current cloud music services, I think Apple does it best because cloud tracks can more easily stay in sync with changes made locally, but people seem to constantly get confused as to how it works, iTunes bogs down with larger libraries, iCloud Music library has a 100,000 track limit, and I fundamentally don’t like the concept of mixing my own personal music tracks with the tracks available in a streaming service as it just leads to needless complexity.)Īnother drawback of this setup compared to the easy days of iTunes + iPods is that with the multifarious ways of listening to music the notion of keeping track of play counts and last-played is no longer really feasible. However I still find it better than any cloud music service, which often do “scan and match” which often goes wrong, and which have a cap as to the number of tracks you can upload, and which do not stay in sync with your local music collection (for example, if you have edited metadata on some tracks locally, Google Play Music would not reflect this unless you deleted tracks from it and reuploaded them or somehow edited them on the service). The other disadvantage of this setup, obviously, is you’ve got to keep your home computer running all the time. (It can display the contents of an iTunes library, but this is not very useful.)
Its apps can be unintuitive and weirdly designed, creating playlists is a pain, and there’s no way to actually import normal. Plex isn’t perfect: Its metadata scanning has a number of bugs (for instance, with older versions of the ID3 format it will insert a bunch of extraneous slashes into your artist name or whatever).
#SWINSIAN ALFRED OFFLINE#
You'll need a $5/month Plex Pass account to sync music onto your smartphone for offline listening and to get some other fancy music-related features.
#SWINSIAN ALFRED HOW TO#
I’m not going to tell you how to get Plex set up (it's pretty easy), but to access it outside your local network you’ll need to configure port forwarding on your router to make sure Plex is available externally, if it doesn't happen automatically. Plex is its own separate universe it doesn’t sync up with Swinsian other than periodically scanning the folder structure it creates. I use Plex media server to make my music available to myself wherever I go. It will back up everything on one computer, including external drives, but not network drives. Backblaze is $5 per month and it is the best unlimited backup service for most people. This is sort of extraneous but, of course, I keep all my files, music included, backed up to the cloud with Backblaze. Swinsian‘s biggest drawback is that it does not support multiple libraries you can work around this with alternate user accounts or a virtual machine. It sorts my music into folders based on criteria I specify (I use the standard iTunes-style Artist/Album folders) and resorts it if I change the metadata.
When I say I use Swinsian to organize my music, that’s really all I use it for.
#SWINSIAN ALFRED WINDOWS#
A Windows equivalent would be MediaMonkey. It has many useful tools for editing and completing track metadata and, most importantly, it is very fast and reliable and does not choke on large music collections. Swinsian is somewhat like iTunes used to be before it got crudded up with a bunch of extraneous features that have nothing to do with organizing local music files.
#SWINSIAN ALFRED MAC#
I organize my music using the Mac program Swinsian. As part of my commitment to service journalism, here is how I organize my personal music collection and listen to it on all of the high-tech devices that so disastrously permeate my life, including smartphones (with offline playback) and Echo speakers.
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