I have quite a bit of music ripped from CD in FLAC quality comprising albums that are not available on streaming services including, and this is a travesty, the Original Xanadu Soundtrack!
Apple Music recognised this is the case for many people and allowed me to upload the audio files to my Apple Music library for streaming anywhere. However, in my household, 3/4 music listeners began on Spotify and that’s where they wanted to stay. I had an Apple Music subscription for 18 months but all things considered it was too expensive to continue with just for me.
I cancelled my subscription and moved back to Spotify with the help of a FreeYourMusic to convert my playlists. Getting my CDs to Plexamp was seamless as can be seen in my horrific, completing confusing, unnecessary and fragile Mobile play of out-of-catalogue items using Spotify. It also had the benefit that it was constrained to only working on music I’d downloaded to my phone. In FLAC quality that’s more that my phone’s total storage. Yet, that’s not a problem since it doesn’t recognise FLAC files on the iPhone anyway. It only plays them through the desktop app so I needed an addition FLAC to MP3 conversion for every album.
Late today I decided to try Plexamp, a companion music player to the amazing Plex media server1 Mobile play of out-of-catalogue items using Plexamp. So easy, that it took less time to set up Plexamp than it took for me to decommission Spotify’s setup (under 5 minutes and most of that was Plex indexing the new files).
It was a nice little drive to get fish-and-chips for tea with TV-2’s Nærmest Lykkelig blasting through the car speakers via the Plexamp CarPlay integration, streaming directly from my NAS at home.
Footnotes
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The only software I have ever bought a lifetime subscription for. ↩