Hello, I’m interested in symphonium and would like to see if it’s the right thing for me.
I have some specific concerns I’ve witnessed with other streaming services, and would like to know if they are fixed, not present or present here.
I will mainly talk about music. I have one big folder called Library. Here is everything. I have another folder called “Playlists”. The structure is easy, each folder in the “Playlist” folder is its own playlist. Let’s call one Playlist “p1”. p1 will contain any songs I’d like to have in it. All songs in p1 are copied from the library folder. That’s how I manage my playlists. I will also have a p1-lowquality folder. p1 and p1-lowquality have the exact same songs, the difference is that p1 contains high quality flac only, while the low-quality one contains m4a 320kbits only.
My main concern here is following: Having this structure will leave me with multiple copies of the same song. One is in “Library”, one copy in “p1”, and one copy in “p1-lowquality” as m4a. This is how I had to manage it on other services to stream my music. The service will index all the music files I have, creating duplicated albums and songs, which is really annoying.
What I want and need is a way to 1. stream in lossless quality 2. stream in low-quality for not being on WIFI and 3. not having multiple copies of the same song/album in the album view when symfonium indexes my songs.
I don’t know how else to write what I want or need. I hope I can mix something up and understand how symfonium works. And I hope some people can answer my question.
AFAIK Symfonium shouldn’t give you any issue streaming any of your music. Low / High Q in your case should both be fine & doable even without wifi if the files are cached. (Not super well versed in the streaming aspects of this app as my library is fully local)
As for your alternate versions you just need to separate them from your main library.
Symfonium Has a killer source filter feature which allows you to very quickly toggle what directories are visible in your library.
You’ll notice I have a few different Directories here. Looking at the first 3…
I have my main library in Music (125F). I have alternate versions, Clean & Explicit in Separate folders from my main library folder with the same internal structure across all 3 folders.
This gives me the ability to toggle those alternate libraries at will. I’ve made sure all my tags match so these alternate versions simply popup in my album tracklist like newly unlocked characters when I toggle them on. No duplicate albums.
Getting to this point however is its own challenge. You’ll need to be meticulous & it’s possible those m4a may hinder you depending on which tags you utilize in your metadata. If you just stick to the basics then you have nothing to worry about. You just need to ensure your tags for each version of the album MATCH as closely as possible.
My suggestion for relocating all those alternate versions would be to use something like mp3tag or robobasket. If you can flag all the low quality tracks then you could have mp3tag automatically do this conjoined twin surgery for you. If your library is PURE FLAC in the HI res & 0 flac in the Low Res then that shouldn’t be too difficult to split.
Your playlists folder shouldn’t be scanned in though. If it were me I’d add tags to your hi & low res library so that you could utilize smart playlists & thus not need to playlist folder which is no doubt taking up space. You can also use a standard playlist & save the m3u / m3u8 file. I feel these to be less stable but great backups. (Smart playlist doesn’t break when files are renamed or moved)
I tag my files so that I can use smart playlists but I often save a standard playlist file so that in the event files go missing or corrupt I still know what playlist(s) they belong to when I replace them
You’re going to have duplicate copies, because you, in fact, have duplicate copies.
What you may want to do is use a server on the backend (I use Navidrome, there’s a few other good options as well) and use that to manage your library. It may be a bit tedious to re-create your playlists via the server, but once you’ve done that, you can just continue to create playlists this way going forward and you won’t have to worry about it again. As far as maintaining different qualities for streaming, just use the transcode functionality on the server to transcode smaller files on the fly to save data.
You’re sort of duplicating the functionality provided by a proper media server via your filesystem. Symfonium will allow you to configure a streaming quality for wifi and one for mobile data. You can also manually cache full quality files offline while you’re on wifi to listen to away from wifi without needing to use data to play them.
If you don’t want to do that, then you’re probably going to want to use the filters within Symfonium to deal with the duplicate files / play the appropriate quality while on mobile, but again… you’re doing a lot of things manually that you don’t need to.
Hey, sorry if this is off-topic, but how did you rename the folders in Local device? I saw you had one named “Music Recovery S9”. On my device, the folders just show up as something like “msd:10000”. Is there a way to change that?
Try removing the folder you currently have from your media provider settings & moving that folder into another folder then add the new folder to you media provider
I have an external SD Card. The recovery folder for example is just not at “base level”
The path for that folder is:
SD-CARD\Music_ALT\Music Revovery From S9
The standard music folder (1st one in image) has a path at “base level”:
SD-CARD\Music
This is likely where the “125F" part of the name comes from. That’s the name of the SD card itself
The other folders are just buried in further subdirectories & what you see in the screenshot is simply what I named those folders in my file manager.
So, understanding all of this correctly. I can stream at 320kbps when on mobile, even if source file is FLAC and much higher quality. That is awesome. That means it should cut down the mobile data consumption.
The only thing that stops me from furthermore testing is the syncing time. I have thousands of files and I don’t know if symfonium is struggling or not. I’ve seen it stop and then restart. I don’t know if I just have too many files to start with.
Will synfonium constantly try to sync my library? Again, thousands of files can’t be constantly synced. One sync will last maybe an hour if it doesn’t stop again.
I might not. If symfonium has its own feature to stream in 320kbps on mobile then that’s exactly what I want. If symfonium allows me to exclude specific folders to be seen in the library, then that’s also what I want. The only problem I’m facing now is that symfonium is not syncing my files correctly. It says scanning files tags and 5000 is the last number I saw. Reopening the app and it started back at 0..
My media provider is dropbox and that’s where I am streaming from. Why is there an option in the setting to stream at 320kbps to mobile if it’s not working with every source? Doesn’t this sound a bit misleading? Or am I missing something?
Hey. Sorry to bother again. I’ve been searching through the wiki but couldn’t find anything.
Do I have to keep the synfonium app open in order for my provider to sync with synfonium? I’ve hit sync yesterday and I’ve noticed it starts from 0 when reopening the app after a while. It’s currently at “Scanning files tags”. Or does it just take a long time?
Edit: It will hop from 0 to the latest number I closed the app pretty quick. But it doesn’t increase when the app is closed.
Well. Even though I did everything, it’s still closing I think.
I unrestricted battery access, unticked “manage app if unused”, I hit “keep open”, and in good guardian I now use quick switch mode, using no auto optimization, no power saving.
Locking the screen might close the app or put it to sleep nevertheless.
