Almost the perfect music stack

Feb 25, 2018

I used to be a person that perfecly could live without any music in my daily basics. That changed a lot last years. Now I have some use cases where the music is essential:

Developing
Training (it doesn't matter inside or outside)
In the shower
Cooking, traveling...

So I had a little problem with the playlists because they are difficult to be synced across multiple devices and different music players. It's a true nightmare if you want to have the same available all the time. But I guess it's posible and... free!.

On the desktop I'm used to play music with cmus - I think I've written about this before - because it's really light and it barely consumes computer resources. Ok, this is the only case where I have to build my playlists manually (or even that, continue reading). I've tried (and I have it installed) the unofficial Google Play Music Desktop Player and it's fine, but, far from being a battery drainer, it's not as tiny as cmus is. Desktop (and laptop) covers the "developing" cases, both, home and coffice.

On the mobile I was using VLC and some other players but in the end it was a waste of time to have to sync all the music all the time, update the playlists, etc... so in the end I decided to give a try to Google Play Music. As I was using it from time to time (the unofficial one) in Desktop, I have all the music there, so I can download to the phone the playlists I want to listen while I'm offline. That's perfect. The mobile covers all the other cases (training, shower, in the kitchen...) but the car (that's another history).

In brief:

All the music is in my Music/ folder, organized by folders, those folders are my local playlists because in cmus I treat the folders like playlists.
The Google Play Music watches the Music/ folder and uploads automatically all the songs that appears in any subfolder there (you need the Music Manager installed in your computer).
I have to tag the songs in it's playlists once they're uploaded to Google Play Music and that's it.
Extra step: I can download the playlists just in 1-click from the mobile if I run out of data connection.
Extra step 2: If the Music/ folder is synced via Owncloud/Nextcloud the music is available even across many other devices too.

PROS:

This stack is free, well, limited to 50.000 songs (by Google Play) but that's, by far, as free for me.
On the other hand, the left one to be more specific :D, I have the Garmin Vivoactive HR, and there is a widget to control the Music Player of the smartphone, it runs really nice with the Google Play software, so with this extra feature, the stack is almost perfect for me.

CONS:

I have to think twice which folder fits best for every song in my Music/ local storage.
I have no automatic/automagic solution for the car. I need to manually sync the Music/ folder to the USB drive I'm using there. Or just connect the smartphone to the AUX IN and see what happens (never tried, that thought just occurred to me as I write).

And I think that's all folks, how do you manage with this? Feedback is always welcome.