Hi all :)
I’ve been using MediaMonkey on Windows 10 and Android to organise my music, playlists, audiobooks, and podcasts, including syncing them to my phone. MediaMonkey has let me down again, so I’m looking to switch, and as I’m trying to switch to Linux too, now would be a good time to get a Linux media manager.
One of the main ways that I use MM is by either building a playlist and transferring the whole thing, or adding to a playlist and just syncing the new tracks. I prefer the tracks to be placed in their artist / album directory though, rather than a directory for the playlist.
I also use MM on Windows to organise my tracks with online metadata, usually from Discogs, so that it matches the entry for the album. I store my media under music\sorted\album artist\album name\track no - artist - title, with a similar setup for audiobooks and podcasts, and would prefer to do the same with the new software.
Does anyone know of anything that can do this please?
I’ve looked at Strawberry and Cinnamon, but development seems to have stopped, and I don’t know enough about things like flaws and bugs to know if they’re still safe to use.
Thanks in advance for your help :)
My music workflow is the following: I’m using dynamic playlists based on last played timestamp. If a song was played, it gets a new timestamp and is removed from the playlist. Now a new song comes automatically in to the playlist where the timestamp doesn’t exist or is older as x-days. That’s easy to setup on strawberry and other applications. This playlist will be synced via whatever you want to your phone. In my case a SFTP service to keep it wireless. On the phone I use the same playlist with every player you want. Additional I’m using lastfm to scrobble the played music. This keeps the last played timestamp on the phone and can be synced with strawberry. I don’t know if other applicants can do the same.
Sounds complicated at first but after initial setup it’s a automatic process.
That sounds interesting. I generally prefer to have mostly static playlists, but that’s a good way to hear new tracks :)
Does the SFTP service sync automatically, or is it manual? If it’s manual, can it be triggered from the phone?
You’ve just reminded me that I need to sort out my playlists and pull them from MediaMonkey. It stores playlists in its own database, rather than as separate files, so by default they can’t be used in other players.
Media Monkey uses SQLite as database. I have used Media monkey to, before I switched to Linux. So I extracted the last played timestamp and play count with a simple SQL select and migrated this info to strawberry, which uses also SQLite. But be aware that both stores the date in an incompatible way. It’s not that easy to spot in Media monkey database.
You can also use a Windows program like Media Monkey or Musicbee on Linux through Wine. So you don’t have to migrate your database. Syncing will work for both with Media Monkey and Musicbee.
Regarding SFTP. You can have the server on the PC or the phone. It’s up to you which fit’s better your needs. Having the server on the PC is more common. Then you can use any file manager to get the needed files from your server/PC. You can also use USB, Samba or other services, but at least here SFTP is the fastest variant.