I felt that my previous post in the Desktop Media Player series was the final post, but it turns out there’s a post-credits scene which up-ends pretty much everything I’d written previously.

Ditching Crates

Crates had a lot going for it, but I’m being honest the thing that I liked the most was that it could connect to Bandcamp and stream any available music I’d bookmarked from the website, which effectively treats the Bandcamp site like a streaming server. I guess while that’s a nice feature, I specifically stopped using streaming services to, you know, show more financial support for music I enjoy, and streaming it like that felt a little undermining to that cause.

The real reason I stopped using Crates, though, was because it was screwing up my music library, or at least I think it was. I had gone through the settings and tweaked how the “move to collection” operation worked. In a nutshell, new music should come in to the “inbox” and from there, with proper tagging either manually or through online services, it could be automatically moved into the “collection”. Crates would move physical files within a root directory, and would create or use folders according to the rules set down in the settings of the app. My music is organized by artist, then album, with each file named with the track number and track name. All of that should be available in the tags, but I figured I needed some visual reference for those days when something goes wrong — as it did — and I need to visually sort things.

I found that there were times when Crates didn’t know what was going on with the music it was organizing. It dumped files into folders called “%artist” despite there being actual tags on the files that told Crates who the artist was. When I tried to manually fix this, I was getting permission issues which I blame both on Linux and my lack of understanding about Linux, but as Crates was doing the re-organizing, there was another layer at play here. So I took out the middleman and uninstalled Crates.

Enter MediaMonkey

My second choice — actually, it had been my first until I decided that the Bandcamp streaming feature was something I wanted to have until I decided I didn’t want to have it — was MediaMonkey. It’s got a lot of nice features, most of which can be ignored when they start making my head hurt, and I can just focus on picking music I want to listen to, when I want to just listen to music and not deal with logic-puzzle gymnastics about what mood I’m in or whatever (though it can do “mood-based playlisting” if I set it up to do so).

I still had the issue of “split albums”, so I used MediaMonkey’s Auto-Tag feature to help ID the tracks in those instances. It worked pretty well — I have it defaulting to check MusicBrainz — but there were still cases where albums showed up more than once, with some songs under one icon, and the rest under another. One explanation I thought might be correct was that these cases represent multi-disc sets, but since that’s actually a tag option, identifying tracks as being from “disc X of Y”, I didn’t put a lot of credence into it. In some cases, I didn’t know if the album represented a multi-disc set, but in other cases, I did know for a solid fact that all songs came from a single album, so I went through every representation and updated the “disc X of Y” across instances where multiple albums showed up, but which I knew were all from a single album. That seemed to repair a lot of issues.

Taking it on the road

After patting myself on the back for my creative solution to not having to download my entire library to my phone, Internet luminary @kevinbrill threw in a nomination for Plex. Plex had been a second-string contender should I not have been able to get my VPN setup working, but as I knew Plex mainly as a video streaming platform I didn’t really consider it from the get-go. Turns out that was a massive mistake.

Installing Plex in a Container works amazingly well for the most part. I did notice that some albums are showing up in multiples again, but for different reasons this time; looks like I’ll need to do some manual work on the back-end to everything set. One issue I had at exactly the wrong time was that I didn’t set Plex to scan my directories periodically. I had just received, ripped, and added the TRON: Ares soundtrack and wanted to listen to it in the car, but Plex played dumb; once I returned home and set up a periodic re-scan, everything showed up right as rain.

I’m using Plexamp as the mobile player and it seems to do what I need it to do, but Plex can serve a DLNA endpoint, and I had run into a few mobile players which could connect to a DLNA source, so I feel pretty good about using Plex as my streaming base. Also, since I have Plex installed on every TV in the house, I can use those systems, which are connected to better-than-Bluetooth-speaker audio outputs, to play music from the TV in all of the major rooms of the house, should I want to do that some day.