Alternatives to rubbish iTunes

[Puce Moment]

So, I have not used iTunes for about 3-years or so as it is easily the clunkiest and unfit for purpose piece of software I have encountered in my short life. This is fine, because it coincided with me signing up for Spotify. And if something isn't on Spotify, I can usually find it on youtube.

But I have been trying to find music that is quite rare, not found on Spotify, or I don't want to have to access youtube. So I have a shitload of music and I would like a player that is reliable, won't crash constantly, and perhaps has a similar 'tag' system (something about iTunes that I used a great deal). The tag system is wonderful for joining together music by the same or similar artists that have different names. Particularly experimental, avant-garde jazz and the like.

Has anyone used a music player that is reliable and intuitive?

[Petey Pate]

Foobar2000 suits me fine. The standard interface is very basic but you can customise it in many different ways.

https://www.foobar2000.org

[Bazooka]

QQMusic which is the Chinese Spotify and was co developed by Spotify devs nd Tencent. I think there is an English version, but it's self explanatory to navigate searching for music and clicking the heart to favourite it and download the tracks.  I've found tons of rare stuff on there, including live recordings and everything popular is on there too.

[Endicott]

Have you considered using the Spotify Desktop version local files feature? No tags and the display is a bit basic, but it will instantly pickup anything in your Music folder or Downloads folder.

https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/features/listen-to-local-files/

[thugler]

In the last couple of days I've been preparing to organise my collection of music files a bit ready for when the DAP I've recently purchased (Hiby R3pro) arrives. I've also long been an itunes user for reasons of convenience for file transfer to my phone and the difficulty of moving to another app in terms of all the tagging and stuff I've been meticulously correcting for the last 2 decades. Likewise I've wanted to get rid of it for ages, it never seems to get better and is memory intensive as fuck.

I read about 'MusicBee' which apparently you can transfer your itunes library straight over to. I've decided to give it a try and am currently doing said transfer. It'll probably take a few hours after which I shall report back on if it's any good. It's supposedly also really good at finding album art/sorting out tags. Also if you save your itunes playlists as .m3u you can transfer those across easily also (I didn't realise you could do this..) I've heard it is also a bit of a memory hogger with big libraries, but I guess anything will be when you get over 1tb of stuff.

[Bently Sheds]

Another vote for Music Bee here. It's so customisable and skinnable.

[olliebean]

+1 for MusicBee.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Foobar's great on windows.

Tend to just use vlc now though as it can stream out to chromecast.

Of course Google Music allows you to host loads of mp3's in the cloud which is handy if you use multiple devices from multiple locations. UI is simple too.

[holyzombiejesus]

I asked a similar question on a dedicated thread a while back but never got an answer that I wanted...

I asked if there was anyway that I can get all my MP3s and (without putting them through a laptop) play them through the downstairs stereo? I used to have an ipod with them all on and played them through a gizmo that connected the ipod to my stereo but my other ipod got left in the pub so I use it now. Something similar would be good. I DON'T WANT SPOTIFY.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I asked a similar question on a dedicated thread a while back but never got an answer that I wanted...

I asked if there was anyway that I can get all my MP3s and (without putting them through a laptop) play them through the downstairs stereo? I used to have an ipod with them all on and played them through a gizmo that connected the ipod to my stereo but my other ipod got left in the pub so I use it now. Something similar would be good. I DON'T WANT SPOTIFY.

Where would you be keeping the mp3's then? A chromecast audio would do that if you uploaded the files to google music, they're about 20 quid. It could also do mixcloud, spotify, youtube, bbc sounds etc.

[thugler]

I asked a similar question on a dedicated thread a while back but never got an answer that I wanted...

I asked if there was anyway that I can get all my MP3s and (without putting them through a laptop) play them through the downstairs stereo? I used to have an ipod with them all on and played them through a gizmo that connected the ipod to my stereo but my other ipod got left in the pub so I use it now. Something similar would be good. I DON'T WANT SPOTIFY.

Or a NAS.

Transferring my itunes library to Musicbee is into it's 6th hour.. Think I may have to leave it going overnight

[Puce Moment]

Guys thanks so much - I am already having much success with Fubar2000 (thanks Petey - love the basic interface a lot) and Beltley Sheds and olliebean for MusicBee which I am also trialling with much to like already.

Already tried Spotify but it could never seem to play my music collection with any consistecy.

[Retinend]

My Foobar setup:
https://imgur.com/a/o0vS0wH

It's not the most intuitive program so I'm quite proud of how I've got it to work.

What you really want is Milkdrop (trippy visuals generator) for Foobar, which is the box in the bottom left in my setup. It was the system for Winamp but has long been enabled in Foobar via a wraparound plugin called "Shpeck".

Here's a guide:
https://appuals.com/how-to-get-milkdrop-2-visualisations-in-foobar/

Complicated as hell but worth it. It eventually appears as an option under "visualizations" when you download:

"directx_Jun2010_redist" from Microsoft (do this first)
an empty "winamp.exe" file which is required for code reasons (available above)
the "Shpeck" wraparound for the Milk

[holyzombiejesus]

Where would you be keeping the mp3's then? A chromecast audio would do that if you uploaded the files to google music, they're about 20 quid. It could also do mixcloud, spotify, youtube, bbc sounds etc.

I keep 300gb of them on a portable hard drive plugged in to my PC. Was hoping I could find some way of playing another hard drive through a hifi via something. One of those Bremman (?) things they used to advertise in Mojo would have been ideal but they're shitloads.

[thugler]

My Foobar setup

This looks great but I definitely had too much stuff pre organised with itunes to go through sorting all this out. Looks like a great setup though.

This morning Musicbee had finished transferring from itunes and i'm well impressed, works very similarly to itunes, everything shows up as before but it all works without slowdown. Also seems to have found album art automatically for virtually everything I have. Definitely need to find a good skin though. 

[Sebastian Cobb]

I keep 300gb of them on a portable hard drive plugged in to my PC. Was hoping I could find some way of playing another hard drive through a hifi via something. One of those Bremman (?) things they used to advertise in Mojo would have been ideal but they're shitloads.

Ah ok, there's a raspberry pi image for a 'hdd-music' device you can put a hdd on. It's all supposed to be super easy to configure (from the webpage). You will need to buy a cheap daughter-board for the pi (about a tenner from alixpress) as the onboard dac is awful (as in sounds noticably shit). Unless you have your tv connected to your hifi already, then you could run the pi through the HDMI.
Here's an example, there are others:
https://volumio.org/

If you were to get more than one you could use primary-secondary so the music is only on one of them, and they do small amplifier boards as well as line level if you wanted something lowfi in another room.

[holyzombiejesus]

Ah, cool. Cheers.

[Sebastian Cobb]

These are clones of the hifiberry board - https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32755238319.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.66831cfaxJqtRp&algo_pvid=5025a2e9-c05d-4532-bed7-04c89110fc47&algo_expid=5025a2e9-c05d-4532-bed7-04c89110fc47-0&btsid=0ab6f82415892785769372901e272c&ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_,searchweb201603_

Also check out moode and rune if you're interested. They all do a similar thing but will have different quirks.
https://www.runeaudio.com/
https://moodeaudio.org/

You're probably looking at about £40 for a pi and a dac, then for storage if you don't have any, although I notice you can get 512mb pendrives for cheapish these days.

I started looking in to it just as an alternative to chromecast audio's as I heard they were being discontinued at some point (but still supported) so google could push their assistant speakers instead, which can get to fuck.

[thugler]

chromecast audio's as I heard they were being discontinued at some point (but still supported) so google could push their assistant speakers instead, which can get to fuck.

You can do the same thing with a normal chromecast so I thought the audio version was a bit pointless?

[Sebastian Cobb]

You can do the same thing with a normal chromecast so I thought the audio version was a bit pointless?

Normal chromecasts don't have a dac so you need to get a hdmi audio breakout thingy as well.

The dac in the chromecast audio is quite respected, for the money the device is/was a bargain.

[thugler]

Normal chromecasts don't have a dac so you need to get a hdmi audio breakout thingy as well.

The dac in the chromecast audio is quite respected, for the money the device is/was a bargain.

I didn't realise this

[Utter Shit]

Lads lads lads do any of these have a rating system like iTunes does? It gives me an easy way of knowing which songs to prioritise when putting them on my phone, so this is a deal breaker. Sick to death of iTunes.

[olliebean]

MusicBee has ratings. If you import your iTunes library I presume it will also import your ratings, although I haven't tried it.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Lads lads lads do any of these have a rating system like iTunes does? It gives me an easy way of knowing which songs to prioritise when putting them on my phone, so this is a deal breaker. Sick to death of iTunes.

Oh, short answer, "yes" with an "if." Long answer, "no" with a "but."

There is a loose de facto standard for implementation of song ratings. Most apps will display 0 to 5 stars for any given song, and how the stars are expressed can vary. For instance, when rating a song in iTunes, the rating is not embedded in the tag in the music file, but is instead stored in a separate database that contains all of the iTunes metadata. Other media players can embed rating tags in music files, but not necessarily the same way, so as a result a song which is rated on one media player sometimes won't display the rating the same way, or at all, when played on other software or mobile device.[citation needed]

However, there is a "Popularimeter" frame in the ID3v2 specification meant for this purpose. The frame is called POPM and Windows Explorer, Windows Media Player, Winamp, foobar2000, MediaMonkey, and other software all map roughly the same ranges of 0–255 to a 0–5 stars value for display.

Basically because Apple are Apple they store the rating in their own DB so depending on how you export and import your library it may not be carried over.

[thugler]

MusicBee has ratings. If you import your iTunes library I presume it will also import your ratings, although I haven't tried it.

I can confirm that it does. You just click file, library, import, import from itunes. It gives you the option to keep ratings etc. (I never used that myself). Playlists are automatically sent over as well.

Edit: The above means this may not be the case. That's a shame. Fuck apple !

[olliebean]

I think it will keep ratings, as it will read them from the iTunes database, but because - unlike iTunes - it stores them in the tags of the file, it will probably take a very long time for a large library, as it will have to write out this information to every file it imports.

[Sebastian Cobb]

edit what olliebean said.

[thugler]

Can any musicbee users explain to me how I can have different layouts that i can switch between? I've tried using a different tab but when I change settings it just changes the main one.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Vlc is perfectly fine and free, slimline, no corporate bollocks, seems to play every file format in the known universe without kicking up a fuss.

[poodlefaker]

If you still have a working i-pod will it sync with any of these? (eg Music Bee)