It's Critter Time!

I've been trying to cut music streaming platforms out entirely and have a nice collection of cds and digital downloads to listen to but I've been wanting to find a good program for organizing what I have. The problem here is I don't know where to look/what to look for with this.

So long story short, what do you all use for your music if you aren't streaming it? What's some programs out there that's good for organizing albums/playlists?

Bonus points if there's a way to somehow sync my music between my phone and pc or at least the playlists. I tend to prefer to hook up my phone to my cars AUX if I'm taking a long trip so I can just set it to shuffle and not be distracted swapping cds or anything while driving. (currently making due with doing a shuffle of everything I have on Bandcamp but that obv doesn't work with my cds too.)

((I wasnt sure if this went to Tech or general so I went with Tech Talk off of vibes))

foobar2000 + mp3tag :3

also, i can definitely recommend getting a used iPod and modding it for listening to music on the go. foobar has utilities for syncing files including an iPod sync plugin so that makes it really easy.

I'll second foobar2000, I have mine set up with one big playlist full of music (for when i just want to shuffle and be done with it) as well as a library off to the side where I can select any album and listen to it in the proper order.

foobar2000 is highly customisable, not only with the built-in layout editor but also with all of the plugins you can download and use. I used to use Spotify, now I'm solely running on music purchased from Bandcamp and Qobuz, ripped from CDs, and Legally Acquired from elsewhere.

If you're like me and you have Self-Hosting disease:

Prior to my affliction I was just copying mp3's from my external hard drive to my phone's SD card over FTP which is an agonizing process even if you're tech savvy. I was using Pulsar on Android for playback during this period of my life.

For a long time I was using Plex. Plex, recently, has started making really baffling and unclear business decisions and I've been pondering getting out for a while. I moved my TV and Movies to Jellyfin but I think Jellyfin's *horrible* at music, it does all sorts of stuff I don't want it to do.

After alot of experimentation I landed at Navidrome, a program you can run in Docker and exposes the SubSonic API. Subsonic is a music streaming over http protocol I think? I'm not too clear on the API itself, but Navidrome acts as the server, and you can play back from teh web interface but the web interface sucks, most people run it through a client. My clients are Symfonium, a 99 cent Android App that's well worth the money, and Aonsoku, an electron? app I can run on the desktop, but if you want a web-based version they have one of those too. This way I don't have to physically move mp3 files around between devices.

If you do not know what any of this means, I'm sorry.

Thanks all! I'll try out foobar and ask here if theres any probs I run into lol

Beets is a very good and powerful tool but it's a lot more work to get set up the way you want. But it's always worth bringing up when people ask about music library software. I specifically use it because I want to maintain a database of my music complete with desired folder and file names and organized metadata separate from the files I have saved on disk, which is a lot less common.

I've got a half written blog post about it that I need to get back around to doing, as well as finalizing how much of my library I want to organize with it and actually running it through everything. I wanted to only run it against things I want on my MP3 player, but that's a lot of decisions to make. Some day.

I personally started messing with mopidy, thanks to self-hosting and a pi Zero + audio (no joke, that's what it's called, I'm not sure I want to write the ARRRRH word here xD )

Still gotta figure out if it accepts playlists and whatnot tho.

I can definetly second navidrome, the only tricky this is that it only relies on metadata and not folders so if you music is not well labled it can have a tough time. I really liked Symfoniun as an android app for playback, which also supports stream from plex or locally on your phone. Today I sent myself down a rabbit hole by giving iOS a try so back to square one on finding the right app for subsonic playback.

As for music on a pc, under windows MediaMonkey was my go to for having a large library. I've been almost purely on linux now for many years though so there I liked Strawberry.

I use MusicBee on my desktop and it's absolutely wonderful. It's super customisable as well - very modular in its design, and it also supports a whole load of custom tags for each file that you can further organise your library through.

On the phone I use GoneMAD, which I found is a good middle ground between the kind of organisation I like and a decent enough visual flair to make it nice to look at as well.

idadeerz wrote: Fri Jul 18, 2025 9:53 pm foobar2000 + mp3tag :3

also, i can definitely recommend getting a used iPod and modding it for listening to music on the go. foobar has utilities for syncing files including an iPod sync plugin so that makes it really easy.

Do you mind if I ask what mods you have on your iPod? Been meaning to get one for a little while and it would be rly cool to be able to play around with the hardware a little

For bulk metadata editing, my go-to software is MusicBrainz Picard. It can look up info from the MusicBrainz database, and you can also hand-edit in bulk in case the data is incorrect or missing from there.

I listen using a terminal program called cmus. Basic, no frills, but it gets the job done, and you can even set it to run a custom script anytime the program's status changes. Super useful for updating the now-playing info for background music on a livestream.

Picard was really useful for me to wrangle my messy collection of mp3s mostly downloaded in the early 2000s on various filesharing sites and often in pieces rather than full albums. The database it references from is quite loaded with non-"professional" album releases as well which was really nice.

Flint wrote: Thu Jul 24, 2025 7:37 am I use MusicBee on my desktop and it's absolutely wonderful. It's super customisable as well - very modular in its design, and it also supports a whole load of custom tags for each file that you can further organise your library through.

On the phone I use GoneMAD, which I found is a good middle ground between the kind of organisation I like and a decent enough visual flair to make it nice to look at as well.

yoo

literally same!!!!!!!!!!!

I also use MusicBee to sync my music to my phone. I have a playlist that's a subset of my big library and that's what I sync over. It works great because I can do all the annoying management pieces on my PC, then just hit a button and sync it over to my tiny lil phone. It can even delete the stuff that's not on the playlist anymore so, it just works.

I do like MusicBee. Supposedly there is a way to get MusicBee to use my Navidrome server as the source for the library but I cannot for the life of me get it to work. Plus I'm in Linux full time now anyway.

I'm still using Music/iTunes, but that's probably out of habit as much as anything. I haven't had the self-hosting itch yet though, and if I did I think I'd be trying out stuff like what Mico's talking about. I will say, for anyone who wants easy wireless syncing to phones, Apple still sells iTunes Match - it's about CAD$25 a year, and it does the local music library syncing parts of Apple Music without the rest of the streaming stuff. You can sync your library between devices, stream music from your own library on other devices, etc. without having to pay the much higher cost of an actual streaming service. I use it to keep stuff synced between two Macs and a phone.

Foobar2000 has been treating me well, it was a bit of a learning curve figuring out how to get the interface customizer to do what I wanted but got a pretty cool looking setup now, it serves my purposes, AND I noticed it has a radio player too so I added a station I listened to since I was little lol.
Thanks all! I'll probably look into the other recommendations eventually, keeping this page bookmarked in case.