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Alternative to iTunes/Music for Offline Music

A

Apples555

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 4, 2012
188
24
I've been using iTunes since 2002. I only use it for one purpose, organizing and playing my media library with its unparalleled (at the time) database feature. It would (a) tag my (lossless since 2005) audio as necessary (b) organize files into folders based on these tags and (c) play my music in order in the background as I use my computer. The "Automatically Add Files" folder was perfect.

It seems that iTunes, or Music as it's called these days, is starting to rot a little. Since early 2020 or so, it seems the database gets corrupted or confused, and the same album gets split into two on one random startup. Half of the songs go in one, and the rest go in the other. Changing the album name to something else, then back to what it was usually fixes it. But the problem is not going away. A full rebuild of the database did not help either. Some albums never get touched, and others have it happen all the time. This had never happened before 2020 and the death of the column browser.

Is there an alternative for Mac? Most of the alternative media players I see (VLC, Foobar, etc.) don't have any database, organizing, or tagging ability.

Alternatively to the alternative, has anyone experienced this splitting issue and resolved it?
 
After reading some other threads, it appears that the column browser wasn't removed after all. In Library > Songs, the column browser option is there in View > Column Browser. In column browser, the albums aren't split like they are elsewhere.
 
Music.app is an app for accessing Apple Music now, for sure. I use Apple Music so that's fine, and it handles the small amount of mp3s I can't find in Apple Music and instead have uploaded just fine, but I'd hate to use it for library management like I used iTunes for so long.

Sorry I don't have any input into whether there are decent alternatives for that, just thought I'd say that I sympathise with your search. Apple has decided that iTunes/Music.app isn't for the thing it used to be for any more, and if you don't subscribe to Apple Music it's a really substandard app.
 
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If I find anything, I'll post here. There are a few other threads but they haven't had a lot of success either it seems.
 
I am really annoyed that MusicBee is not available for macOS. The offline music players on the mac are terrible. Most cost money and the rest either crash or show a mess of your music library.
 
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With a functional column browser, I don't have as much of a need for an alternative now (why was it removed and randomly put back...?). In my research, I've come across Quod Libet as a well-regarded cross-platform audio organizer. I might try this one.
 
it's mainly promoted for use with video, but plex handles audio really well also.
  • for basic use, it works for free.
  • you need to run a server program on a computer, it must be running to access your music. it runs on Mac, windows or linux, for music a rasperryPI should have more than enough power.
  • you can stream to pretty much any device.
    • It will play in a web browser
    • there is a dedicated music only client called Plexamp for iOS, android, Mac, windows, and linux. It supports car play
    • you can also use the regular client with music if you want. the regular client also works on appleTV, as well as most streaming sitcks/boxes and smart TVs
    • It's supported directly on Sonos and Alexa speakers
  • if the computer running the service is on at home, you'll be able to stream your library anywhere you have internet.
  • you can invite friends to share your library and they can access remotely. (you'll each have your own account & play history)
  • You can sync to your device (this might require a paid upgrade)
 
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Partron22 said:
I'm trying to move my music to Raspberry pi. It's rough times for people who have Macs and a substantial personal music collection.
Click to expand...
I don't see what the problem is.

I have 28,000 songs in my iTunes Library (Mac mini 2018 running Mojave). That doesn't include a lossless music library and a hi-res music library nor does it include movies or videos. Is that a small collection?

Also, let us know how you manage the media on an iOS/iPadOS device using a Raspberry Pi. Most of my music is ripped from CDs (I listen to a lot of classical music and opera).

My iTunes Library is almost twenty years old, starting with one of the early white iPods. iTunes loads pretty fast even though the entire library is on an external spinner. The HDD is still plenty fast for 1080p and 4K video playback.
 
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Erehy Dobon said:
I don't see what the problem is.

I have 28,000 songs in my iTunes Library (Mac mini 2018 running Mojave). That doesn't include a lossless music library and a hi-res music library nor does it include movies or videos. Is that a small collection?

Also, let us know how you manage the media on an iOS/iPadOS device using a Raspberry Pi. Most of my music is ripped from CDs (I listen to a lot of classical music and opera).

My iTunes Library is almost twenty years old, starting with one of the early white iPods. iTunes loads pretty fast even though the entire library is on an external spinner. The HDD is still plenty fast for 1080p and 4K video playback.
Click to expand...
Have you experienced the album splitting like I have? It only happens in album view.
 
I'm a bit unclear about what you are referring to.

Occasionally one or two songs appear to split off the actual album and associate themselves with a second album or appear to "get lost". This does not happen on iTunes on macOS. It only happens on Music for iOS (I use iTunes to sync a lot of media files to my iPhone).

Sometimes this later resolves itself so I attribute this to a macOS-iOS syncing or maybe a Music-for-iOS bug rather than something in iTunes because I haven't seen in manifest in the desktop software.

If I put those songs in a playlist they all show up in proper order, no songs missing.

This is not a widespread problem, just a couple of songs from a couple of albums.

Similarly some songs on my iPhone don't have album art even though the art exists in the AAC files on my Mac. I've even transferred these files into another user's iTunes Library and they work fine so it's not an iTunes Library database corruption thing either.

It's a bit annoying but because it isn't widespread I am not compelled at all to seek out new desktop media management software. As far as I can tell, I still need to use Apple's solution to sync content between my Mac's media library and my various iDevices.
 
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Erehy Dobon said:
Occasionally one or two songs appear to split off the actual album and associate themselves with a second album or appear to "get lost". This does not happen on iTunes on macOS. It only happens on Music for iOS (I use iTunes to sync a lot of media files to my iPhone).
Click to expand...

Yes, that's exactly it. It happens to me on both iPhone and Mac. It happens quite often.
 
I haven’t experienced exactly what you’re talking about, but something remotely similar.

I listen to an archive of weekly radio shows on MPEG audio stream files. The shows are up to several hours long, broken into 30 minute files. Occasionally while playing the file, as it nears the end of the 30 minute segment, it will jump to the beginning of the next file/segment. I can go back to the point before it jumped and play it again, and it doesn’t jump. It happens sporadically - no apparent rhyme or reason. The only thing consistent is that it happens towards the end of the file.

This has only happened since I have been using Music, I never experienced this on iTunes using the same files for years.

I’m not seeing the split albums you mentioned. I’ve been viewing as playlist. I think I’ll switch to ‘as songs’ and see if it behaves differently.

I’m starting to see a value in old machines and old software for offline-only use as the big corporations try to corral us all into their subscription models. Have you considered an old machine with iTunes dedicated to just music?
 
Apples555 said:
I've been using iTunes since 2002. I only use it for one purpose, organizing and playing my media library with its unparalleled (at the time) database feature. It would (a) tag my (lossless since 2005) audio as necessary (b) organize files into folders based on these tags and (c) play my music in order in the background as I use my computer. The "Automatically Add Files" folder was perfect.

It seems that iTunes, or Music as it's called these days, is starting to rot a little. Since early 2020 or so, it seems the database gets corrupted or confused, and the same album gets split into two on one random startup. Half of the songs go in one, and the rest go in the other. Changing the album name to something else, then back to what it was usually fixes it. But the problem is not going away. A full rebuild of the database did not help either. Some albums never get touched, and others have it happen all the time. This had never happened before 2020 and the death of the column browser.

Is there an alternative for Mac? Most of the alternative media players I see (VLC, Foobar, etc.) don't have any database, organizing, or tagging ability.

Alternatively to the alternative, has anyone experienced this splitting issue and resolved it?
Click to expand...
I feel your pain. It's not acceptable and it happens to me too, all the time. Album splitting is annoying to say the least. Sometimes songs will just vanish and I cannot find them. Now I wish I'd kept my CDs. Music videos, that I downloaded from iTunes, have also vanished from iTunes. Although I can find the files they won't appear in the app.

And while I'm ranting, why does Apple insert random pictures under artists iOS; they're never the pic I would choose and sometimes it's of the wrong band. Let me pick my own pic.

Others don't have these problems or are not as annoyed. I'm glad for them but I'm at the point where, when I find an alternative I'm switching.
 
hello
this thing of albums splitted in two has been happening to me for some years now. it started with itunes (on sierra) and now i have a new mac with big sur and music, and it's still there. this means, imho, that music is not a new app at all; it is just a stripped down itunes with some more apple music integration feature.
another thing i hate is that, when i log into my itunes account, all the music i bought on itunes gets displayed as it is on itunes. so, if I changed the title of an album (i.e. from "GreatAlbum iTunes Version" => "GreatAlbum"), suddenly the title reverts to apple's original. the fact is, that sometimes changes to apple's metadata are needed to amed apple's errors. Say, you buy an album with its pdf booklets, and find that the artist is misspelled in the booklet metadata. apparently, things go back to normal when i log out, but who knows tomorrow?
so, me too i am searching for a music app alternative: i would be glad to find an app that looks similar to it and keeps the library organised like music does, but does not mess with my metadata, taking them just like i set them. i could still use music to buy songs from itunes store, but then i would import them in the new app and delete from music's library.
at the moment, i did not find anything similar yet.
 
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FWIW, I'm still here using iTunes/Music daily (with my iPhone as the "iPod"). With a little tweaking, it can go back to the exact (excellent) interface of old iTunes versions with the column browser and list of songs with checkmarks.

I found the album splitting issue I mentioned above has stopped occurring. There have also been a few bug fixes here and there, particularly with tagging autocomplete. I guess the one person not using Apple Music at Apple finally spoke up. Thanks Apple!

I still haven't found any alternatives for Mac/Linux either for creating a centralized music database that keeps files tagged and organized, but truthfully I haven't been looking too hard since all my issues cleared up. I feel that there aren't as many people keeping large collections of offline music these days, so Apple may eventually move away from iTunes.

iTunes fulfills 99% of my music needs, and the other 1% is handled by mpv by providing exclusive access to the audio interface on the Mac (neatly integrated with the folders that iTunes sets up, I like to listen uninterrupted and without distractions), so I don't really have a need to look.
 
I use a very good music player, Fidelia, plays high res formats and anything I have. Sounds good, easy to set up and use. Wasn't free but I don't think it cost a lot. It is on the App Store but I can't see the price because I bought it already and it just says "Open". ?
 
Geoff777 said:
I use a very good music player, Fidelia, plays high res formats and anything I have. Sounds good, easy to set up and use. Wasn't free but I don't think it cost a lot. It is on the App Store but I can't see the price because I bought it already and it just says "Open". ?
Click to expand...
Just looked, Fidelia is £25.99 in the UK. Whilst I'd pay that much for a really good app, it's too much to take a punt on and I can't see any trial option. I mostly listen to classical music and there's a perennial problem with players being so focussed on "songs" whereas I want composers and works.
 
filbert42 said:
Just looked, Fidelia is £25.99 in the UK. Whilst I'd pay that much for a really good app, it's too much to take a punt on and I can't see any trial option. I mostly listen to classical music and there's a perennial problem with players being so focussed on "songs" whereas I want composers and works.
Click to expand...
Wow, I'm sure that's gone up a lot from when I bought it!
Agreed, that's probably a bit much for a music player app these days if you can't check it suits first.

Having said that it wouldn't take long to reach that with subscription models like Music or Spotify.

Good luck, hope you find something or Fidelia offers a trial soon.

EDIT - Just had a look - you're in luck!! You can give it a go..... for free!

www.audiofile-engineering.com

Fidelia - Premium Digital Music Player for Mac OS X

Fidelia is a leading high-definition digital audio player for the music lover with a discerning ear. Fidelia supports a full set of digital audio formats—including FLAC.
www.audiofile-engineering.com www.audiofile-engineering.com
 

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Amigaman said:
I recommend checking out Swinsian ($24.99) and IINA (Free). Both are capable of playing music in lossless formats. I hope this helps! :)
Click to expand...
Sorry to bring up an old thread, but can you tell me if Swinsian works on M1 / Apple Silicon? I can't find this info anywhere... TIA!
 
verm said:
Thanks @Amigaman. Is it native or via Rosetta? Is it using a lot of resources (memory or CPU)? Thanks again.
Click to expand...
It's still Intel, but it uses around the same amount of memory as Music.app. I have used it since 2015 since I didn't like the new iTunes introduced around then. Also, I don't use any streaming music service or Apple Music nor I intend to since most of the music I listen to aren't available and I prefer owning my music, which are in lossless (ripped from CDs) or High-res downloads for legal services.

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