[McAlpine5892]

Recently I gave up on Apple Music. The clients had gotten so bad from a UX perspective that I found it frustrating to use. Especially on desktop. There is also no easy way to cache your _entire_ library to disk. Other services+clients are heaps of Electron that I'd rather avoid.

It took some effort and pain but I have a pretty solid self-hosted system now that requires no futzing around:

0. epoupon's Lightweight Music Server (LMS) [0] is an awesome, barebones Subsonic client written in C. It's really good and deserves to be more well-known.

1. wrtag [1] is a less-fully-featured beets written in Go that handles tagging.

2. amperfy [2] is an excellent Subsonic client that runs on iOS. It's configured to automatically cache anything and everything on LMS.

3. Syncthing [3] syncs music files. Needs no introduction. Rock solid.

4. Swinsian [4] a macOS music player that is very reminiscent of old iTunes, but much better. The information density is so incredibly refreshing after using Apple Music.

5. Everything talks to each other seamlessly over Tailscale [5].

All together, an entire open-source stack maintained by volunteers that easily outdoes Apple's own UX in the music department.

[0] https://github.com/epoupon/lms

[1] https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag

[2] https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy

[3] https://syncthing.net

[4] https://swinsian.com

[5] https://tailscale.com

[dawnerd]

I've started buying cds cheap and ripping them. It's kind of incredible how much music you can stockpile legally for the same amount you're paying for a monthly sub. I have a pretty similar stack to yours and with tailscale makes it very convenient to have my own streaming platform anywhere. Plus I have many albums that simply don't exist on streaming. Downside is there are some albums that are streaming only, mostly soundtracks from Disney. I get those from Qobuz since they let you download flac.

[rs186]

Apple Music costs $10.99 per month in the US.

How much music can I stockpile legally with that?

Last time I checked, a CD easily costs $12, excluding shipping. Not to mention that I probably listen to at least one new album per day.

Curious how your math works.

[peterldowns]

Just to pile on the terrible Apple Music UI — it's so unnatural and baffling to me. One example that really takes the cake is that there is no ability to set a sleep timer in the app. After having to google it, the only way I've found is to set a timer in the Clock app and change its ringtone to be an "action" of stopping all playing audio. WHY???

[rs186]

Well, that's Apple and iOS for you in a nutshell. I found out about it the hard way as well. I have mixed feelings about Apple's products and design, but that may be one of the most stupid things I know of.

[akch]

LMS is in cpp and not c

[xyst]

It’s always been pretty terrible.

When I was in college, Apple gave it to students for free (or at a steep discount, maybe $2.99/mo?). The 2015 client was god awful but I honestly couldn’t complain since it was just a few bucks.

But once I graduated and the university locked me out of the .edu account. I didn’t feel it was worth keeping anymore and dropped them for Spotify or Pandora.