I’m happy to announce there is a Symfonium Application available for Windows.
Kidding…sort of
So recently I followed this Youtube video tutorial to install the windows subsystem for android. After the installation I logged into my google account as one normally would & then I downloaded our favorite app.
After that I had to figure out how to have the emulated app read my tracks stored locally.
[See Screenshot] Once you open “Subsystem for android” (its an application with a green icon) find your way to the advanced>experimental features & enable folder sharing, I chose to share just my music folder.
For those who’ve been looking for a PC version of the app this may be the closest thing to it at least for now. I’m happy to say the media controls on my keyboard work in Symfonium so I can use it like any normal music player.
You do need to remember the app is not optimized for a PC interface / display but Symfonium is still LIGHT YEARS better than Windows Media Player.
I shed a single tear when I got it all working. just thought I’d share this with you all, in case you too wanted to replicate your media playing experience on your PC.
Pro Tips:
Read the Github installation descriptions, you need the installation WITH Google Play Store & Services
Create a backup of Symfonium & import it on your PC, makes an immediate clone for you
If you tag your files manually & copy / move them elsewhere you can use this method to test how your tracks will appear in App before making a final copy / move
The list of players that are light years better than windows media player is quite long. Off the top of my head I’d list Foobar2000, Winamp and even MediaMonkey in that category.
I’d recommend converting .wav to .flac in 99% of all cases. Flac saves you ~60% of space, has a wider tag compatibility and is also lossless. And I’d wager every player from this decade has no problem decoding it even at the highest compression level.
Personally I think MusicBee is unparalleled on Windows.
I like how much information you can cleanly display and it has an astounding amount of options and customizability.
I’ve wad never quite sure what to do with WAV files. In a perfect world all my files would be FLAC or Opus because they are by far the easiest to tag.
Unfortunately I still have alot of 128kb mp3’s that i cant get better versions of. I can bloat that file to flac or potentially degrade it to opus but then im either taking up more space just because or creating a file thats a bit less universally supported. Feels like a lose lose almost
Then I have the WAV files which I was first told wouldn’t hold tags at all but for me they act exactly like mp3 files so i know what to expect from them. The file sizes are definitely larger though. In cases where I have a large number of WAV files i do usually convert them rather than let one album take up 2GB of space but in this case I only had a small handful of tracks so i didn’t bother lol I think I generally like keeping original files that are of quality. I personally cant stand m4a files though so ill happily bloat one to avoid that container completely.
I’ve heard great things about MusicBee & even Foobar2k. I’ve spent much of my time optimizing my library for Symfonium as my phone is my go-to when listening to music that I’m honestly too lazy to optimize or figure out another platform.
I’ve been sitting on Foobar for almost a year & i know it has much to offer but if im honest I’m already very happy with my “daily driver” I really just want that experience carbon copied elsewhere & i don’t want to have to learn all the ins & outs of another program that’s just going to do the same thing ive already perfected.
I would of course feel differently If there were unfulfilled desires or needs in Symfonium but at the moment I genuinely have just about everything I’ve been looking for in a music player.
My only request now would be support for viewing multiple embeded album arts but i wouldn’t be willing to go through the motions of using a different music player for that 1 feature.
It’d be akin to cheating on a Girfriend soley because you found another girl who’s eyes are a slightly lighter shade of brown.
-like we get it but…does it…does it mean that much to you?
Neither is a good idea. Reencoding lossy files almost never is (unless your player outright does not play a specific format so you don’t have a choice).
You lose nothing by converting them to flac as both are lossless formats. I reencode all flac files before adding them to my collection to ensure that they are free of errors, have a small padding (4KB) and use the latest encoder (for best compression and compatibility).
The reality is that over the years, often times either a program stops being developed (I hope this won’t be the case for Symfonium) or a better alternative emerges (I also doubt that will happen to Symfonium or MusicBee).
I’ve collected music digitally for over 15 years now and in that time I’ve moved my library from Windows Media Player to iTunes to Songbird to Mediamonkey and finally to MusicBee.
I wouldn’t put all my money (so to speak) on any one specific player. If your tags and folder structure are sound, any player (with a little bit of work to configure it correctly) should make your collection usable (tho perhaps not perfectly).
That’s always nice. I expect different things of a desktop player than of a mobile player. For example I very often open the cover art in full size, which Symfonium can’t do (and is fairly pointless on a small phone screen anyhow). Or I edit/sync lyrics in MusicBee, or flip through the artist pictures and bio which are crawled online in real time.
My advice would be not to limit yourself by hyperfocussing on one piece of software (however good it may be).
Currently the only pro for me is not dealing with the padding issues from FLAC in Windows when i have very large album art files. I usually grab art from itunes or make custom ones that regularly exceed 3-4mb & Windows doesn’t like that at all. I like to cast or display my music player on a very large TV in the house so the extra pixels in an album art are always welcome
Sound advice. While I hope nothing unforseen happens to Symfonium it is definitely possible, who knows what the future holds.
For the most part library tagging is very systematic & fairly consistent. For that reason if ever i need to switch to another software I could definitely make some library wide changes without too much effort. I tag my files using alot of “holding fields” those holding fields sort of just get parsed based on what my current player can do / is happy with. So I’d simply make changes to my “parsing” steps & 80% of the work is likely done. I have alot of custom tags & unorthodox tagging going on though so I will admit its a bit tougher to optimize my library for more than one software at a time. Each usually has its own quirks that simply take time to learn & understand. All my standard taggs should have 0 issues across the board though besides maybe needing to change a few delimiters in some fields.
Im just lazy now though. Feels like the end of the Breakfast Club or Thanos after His Snap. I’ve done what i set out to do & I am completely content (atleast for now).
-PS
Forgot to say your MusicBee setup looks pretty robust🔥
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by that. If you embed art, the padding increases, however that should not pose any problem unless you exceed the flac limit of 16MB per picture.
While iTunes regularly offers art of 3000px, that’s sadly often upscaled. I’d inspect each artwork at 100% resolution to make sure you’re not wasting space on bloated images that look identical to a 1400px version for example.
I envy you for that. I can’t perform library wide changes in a reasonable amount of time because I cannot open my entire library in Mp3tag (or any other tagging software I know). The last time I tried, Mp3tag crashed after a day or two of trying to read in the tags.
Thanks, I love it. And since I use the portable version stored on my NAS, I can open the same instance on my main PC and on my HTPC (not at the same time tho), so I can start listening to a song on my workstation and finish in front of the TV. It’s quite neat.
Whenever i embed art larger than 4mb or so the files (in windows) are no longer searchable in Explorer when you select that file the metadata does not appear in the details menu of explorer as it should. This isnt really a fault if FLAC its a windows error from what I understand.
This I did not know. I always wondered how they had art at such high resolutions I Dowloaded a few original arts as well as versions from Itunes & couple of the ones from itunes in my small testing batch looked a little (emphasis on little) sharper so I just went with those. Beyond that ever so slight difference i did notice itunes seems to have more covers available in album art grabber. They often have the clean & explict versions of covers which is cool.
You my friend have much much more music than I. My only suggestion would be to maybe do it in sections. If you were to make library wide systematic changes you may be able to do a few directories at a time depending on how your library is stored. Ive chosen what i think is a less widely used method of seperating by general mood / genre. I know alot of people have folders for an artist & in said folder is another folder for each album of theirs along with a cover.jpg
This is very organized but Ive found the sea of folders to be a bit of a hassle. I tested this folder structure when I started archiving album art. There’s SO MANY FOLDERSA but i have to admit doesnt matter what im looking for I can always quickly get to it.
The only pro of my current folder structure is its very easily duplicated on an android device which is helpful when making standard playlists. I can save a playlist from my pc or from my phone & then copy that playlist to the other device. Maybe make a quick edit to the playlist file using find & replace & boom
This also works with Pano Scrobbler. If you also install that, and set it up (properly) you can automatically scrobble to wherever… Last.fm, Libre.fm, etc.
You just need to select Symfonium as an app it scrobbles from.
Easy solution, ignore Windows Explorer. I don’t know when I last viewed tags in there. It’s limited and buggy.
I could, but that is super inefficient. Performing the same step 10 times and waiting half a day between each execution would infuriate me. I’m just waiting for a time when 25TB+ SSDs become affordable so I can fix up my legacy tagging decicions in batch without losing my mind.
Albumartist/Album/Tracks
with 1 parent folder per physical hard drive that the respective folder is backed up to.
I could check but I probably have a couple hundred thousand folders.
Which does not hinder the accessibility at all. With voidtools Everything I can find whatever, wherever (as long as I know what it’s called). With filters and regex search + a db that lives in RAM I usually find what I want in seconds.
I have my playlists in MusicBee where the paths are Windows paths to mounted network shares (Z:), however in MusicBee you can set that during export these are converted to Linux paths and you can also let it replace the root path. Which is how I use them in Jellyfin/LMS. The same playlist gets exported with /mnt/ as the root for Jellyfin and /music/ as the root for lms and converted to Linux paths. It’s quite neat.
I currently use explorer when im moving or copying files to my phone so if I have no way to search them I’d probably be in trouble. I cant remeber now but I dont think mp3tag allowed me to copy files to my phone when it was plugged in as its bot recognized like a stardanrd external storage device. Ill have to checkout voidtools & see of i can utilize in anywhere in my usual routine.
Honestly if i could get my phone to be recognized like it was an external drive or flashdrive I’d be Golden the only way I know of currently is to remove the SD but thats a whole process remove the case getting a sim tool & then when its re-inserted all my recently added music is jumbled up.
I looked at a couple tutorial videos to accomplish just that but they all fell short l
Just share your music folder via SMB and use a tool you probably heard of called Symfonium to search and sync what ever you need ?
Or Webdav or an Open Subsonic server
