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May. 13th, 2022 02:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psipsySlowly, I'm getting the hang of Plex. I've been mostly using it for music, although putting anime on it is an option. While Plex can handle non-lossy formats such as .flac, I'm still using .mp3 on account of bandwidth and monthly data use. Naturally, I've found a few places where it drops out. Places like Skyline Drive, which has large enough gaps in coverage to overwhelm any buffering.
To that end, I still use my Ipod Classic a lot. As far as capacity goes, 160GB is still a lot because that comes out to about 15k to 16k songs. It's not a lot when my main library is 5x that and somewhere over 83k songs. If sheer capacity was the only issue, I could dust off my old Galaxy S4 or get a cheap Android phone, stuff in a 512GB microSD card (1TB cards are also available), and use that as a portable music player. I think Apple figured that out, which is why they discontinued the Ipod line entirely. The problem I have with the Android route is with playlists.
A lot of the criticisms leveled against Apple and Itunes are well-deserved, but Itunes does know how to handle libraries and playlists. You have a playlist of about 100 random songs and you want to put it on the Ipod in the same order? Just drag the whole playlist over and except for about a minute for the actual file transfer, it's as good as done. Oh, you forgot to add a few files? No problem. You need to rearrange the play order? As you wish, it'll be done as soon as you let go of the mouse or touchpad. Metadata such as when the song was added to the library, when it was last played, how many times it was played? That's there too, do with it what you want. You want to transplant the whole library to a new computer? Just move the music folders and the .itl file and Itunes will know what to do from there. They made it easy to move bunches of songs around and to keep track of it all. Nothing else seems to come close.
To do large and complex playlists in Android, I have to create an .m3u playlist on the host computer, then transfer that and the files over to the target device. Then I have to make sure the music player on the phone can see the playlist and all of the files. If I need to move files around, it has to be one at a time. If I need to add tracks to the playlist, I have to hope the music player has the option of adding tracks or else I have to create a new playlist on the host computer and re-import it. All told, what takes only a couple minutes at most in Itunes takes several times more in Android. Maybe there are better options and methods but I haven't found them. If anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears.
To that end, I still use my Ipod Classic a lot. As far as capacity goes, 160GB is still a lot because that comes out to about 15k to 16k songs. It's not a lot when my main library is 5x that and somewhere over 83k songs. If sheer capacity was the only issue, I could dust off my old Galaxy S4 or get a cheap Android phone, stuff in a 512GB microSD card (1TB cards are also available), and use that as a portable music player. I think Apple figured that out, which is why they discontinued the Ipod line entirely. The problem I have with the Android route is with playlists.
A lot of the criticisms leveled against Apple and Itunes are well-deserved, but Itunes does know how to handle libraries and playlists. You have a playlist of about 100 random songs and you want to put it on the Ipod in the same order? Just drag the whole playlist over and except for about a minute for the actual file transfer, it's as good as done. Oh, you forgot to add a few files? No problem. You need to rearrange the play order? As you wish, it'll be done as soon as you let go of the mouse or touchpad. Metadata such as when the song was added to the library, when it was last played, how many times it was played? That's there too, do with it what you want. You want to transplant the whole library to a new computer? Just move the music folders and the .itl file and Itunes will know what to do from there. They made it easy to move bunches of songs around and to keep track of it all. Nothing else seems to come close.
To do large and complex playlists in Android, I have to create an .m3u playlist on the host computer, then transfer that and the files over to the target device. Then I have to make sure the music player on the phone can see the playlist and all of the files. If I need to move files around, it has to be one at a time. If I need to add tracks to the playlist, I have to hope the music player has the option of adding tracks or else I have to create a new playlist on the host computer and re-import it. All told, what takes only a couple minutes at most in Itunes takes several times more in Android. Maybe there are better options and methods but I haven't found them. If anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears.
