If it ain't broke, don't fix it (just let me play my music)

Let me start by saying that, as someone who loves music, I have quite a lot of it. I am currently in the process of fixing some of them (mostly the extended video game soundtracks, but also regular songs and unextended osts), but it's a list that continues to grow. Thus, it would only be appropriate that I have the required music players to be able to play these tracks.

However, I've had some kerfuffles on finding the right one. This is mostly due to the fact that I have to keep getting new ones once the one I was using gets shoved aside for some reason. Sadly there's been a decent number of times. Not too big, but big enough that it makes me frown.

My Old Phone

A long while back, probably before 2015 (don't quote me on that), I had a phone. It was just an average phone, but I figured out that I can place my music onto it one day. Can't figure out why I didn't know that could work, but once I knew how, I started to use it. Just some songs I got from YouTube, mostly video game tracks with some actual songs mixed in, but it was good enough.

However, I guess at some point I found out that I had limited space, which due to the ever growing list of music, I needed something that could help me keep my music to play for me wherever I go.

Enter...

Google Play Music

I loved this app. It lasted me pretty much entirely throughout high school. At first I couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to reach my music, but I then realized that it's because I hadn't added them to the storage space they allowed for my account.

Thus, because I didn't know this at first, I found the radios and podcast areas. I found some of my favorite podcasts there (some of which I listen to still), and also found other songs I wanted through the radio, including a lot of Monstercat. There is one song in a Monstercat album that has to this day still avoided me, but we aren't here to talk about grudges.

Oh wait, we are.

You see, after high school ended for me in 2020 (yes I graduated during the pandemic), I guess Google had a problem with its app. Maybe it wasn't as good as other apps like Apple Music, Pandora, or even one that I'm gonna talk about in a bit. Maybe it was just another app that they thought should merge with something else. So they discontinued the app in December of 2020, I believe (either that or 2021). In it's place they made an app that I used alongside that other app I was gonna bring up:

YouTube Music & Spotify

These two have actually done pretty good for the most part. The reason why I used the both of them is so that I could have one for regular songs that have actual albums (Spotify), and have the other one for the OSTs (YT Music).

For some reason, I ditched some of those extended video game soundtracks for those same soundtracks on Spotify, unextended. To elaborate further, I deleted those extended albums from my PC alongside the songs that I had that were on Spotify, which I did so that I could save space on my computer.

We'll see why that wasn't smart later.

My family was paying for Spotify Premium for all of our accounts (which meant no ads during play of any song you were listening to), and we did so for a while. But, there was one thing that became a bother. One of my family members noticed that they weren't getting most of their songs in the shuffle. They were being given a few handfuls of the same songs over and over again. In order to not have that problem, we've stopped paying for Premium and have sought out another way for us to play those songs.

However, that meant that I needed to recollect those songs that I had previously deleted, which I am still doing. Not only that, I decided that all the extended OSTs that I have need to be redone. Shortening their length so that it's still long, but doesn't take up that much space storage-wise. Fixing metadata. Change metadata in order to organize them into groups. Overall improving everything. All this (and hopefully not more) because of my dad's solution.

Jellyfin

...wait, don't jellyfish have tentacles, and not fins?

Apparently this one evolved differently.

Jellyfin is, I believe, an open-source media library in which the whole point of it is to be able to have control over certain things. I don't fully know, but it's pretty good. My family agrees with me.

I have a few problems with it though. First one is out of its control, and that's wifi. Being where I live and where we usually travel as a family, sometimes when we're out and about and I try to listen to music, it has trouble with getting service. I don't know why this area's like this, especially since I don't remember having this kind of trouble when we first moved here, but it's a problem that bugs me, since (unless it's a game song) I don't like having my music buffer when I'm partway through a song.

The second problem is more of a nitpick, and I don't know if it has a solution. When I listen to a song, I usually like seeing the title of the song, followed by the artist(s) of that song, and then seeing the album art to figure out, y'know, the album. Gelli (a phone app that you use to connect to Jellyfin and play music on your phone; the best app for Jellyfin that I've encountered) seems to do things differently. It shows the title as you'd expect, but then shows the name of the album, which is not only redundant for me (since I could see the album's art right there), but also infuriating. I don't always remember which albums are connected to which artists, so I like seeing their band name alongside the album art so that I can understand all of the info about the song and use that accordingly. This is just annoying to me.

YouTube Music and Jellyfin are really the only two good ones that I've encountered that can play my mp3's on my phone without connecting it to my PC. Jellyfin's problems for me I've explained, but for YT Music, there's a limit of songs that you can upload to the server. It's a thing that was carried over from Google Play Music. There's a few more nitpicks with it that I have, but they're very miniscule, smaller than my second problem with Jellyfin.

So Jellyfin and YouTube Music work, that's cool. Why am I still here?

You see, that was just for my phone's music app. There are other places to play music, like the PC. Jellyfin, for example, has a browser that you login to and play music from there. However, since it's a browser, if I have no wifi I can't access it. Plus it's more effort to open up a browser, open the link to the site, probably log in, and start playing music. I want a local program that I can open up and play my music by giving it a directory.

And yes, I've had some problems with these ones as well.

Music???

To be honest, I don't remember the first actual mp3 player I had on the PC. I believe it was called Music, but I'm not so sure, since it's been years since it was like that. That's because, a long while back, there was an app that replaced it called...

Groove Music

I had trouble with this one at first, but once I figured everything out I loved this program. The only problem I had with it was that it was in Light Mode, and I don't remember there being a Dark Mode option.

Granted, looking back on it, the app probably used the same theme as your PC, of which I usually use Light Mode. Sadly, I can't check this info because, a few nights ago, Microsoft thought that Groove wasn't doing as good as they wanted it to be. So what did they rebrand Groove to, you may ask?

Media Player

...yea, I know. For starters it's kind of a bland name, but I can't really fault it on that because this can now play other media too, like videos.

This could've been fine, and I would've come to love it like I did Groove and Google Play Music, but there's a big problem that I have with it.

It doesn't know how to deal with metadata.

It would only notice a few bands/artists and put them under their own names in the Artist tab, but the rest? Filtered into Unknown Artist. Now, due to the way I use Artists, Albums, and Genres for the songs that I have (choosing an artist, album, or genre to shuffle and play), the fact that most of them became unsorted and the rest aren't even in that same unsorted pile pissed me off. I'm not the only one though. When I got Media Player last night, and came across problems, I went online to figure out how to potentially fix it. What I found was that other people have also been complaining about Media Player, each with separate problems than mine. Some even mentioned that they reverted back to Groove, which I attempted to do earlier today but failed.

So thank fuck that I found a replacement for them entirely.

MusicBee

I came across this today in my searches and decided to try it out. Once I fiddled with some settings/preferences, it looks pretty good, and sorts good too. At this point it feels like a much better Groove Music.

Yes, that's pretty much all I have to say on that. It's a functioning program that does what I want it to do with my mp3s. There are of course some streaming options, but that's not what I got it for, and it does nothing less than it should.

Thus ends my huge rant about these music apps. Of course, your experiences may vary, and actually like using other applications for playing your files. This is just how I prefer mine to be. Just know that if you're struggling to find that right program to play your files, you aren't the only one.

I will cya next time.