Rewiring

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• 10 Nov, 2025 *

Heh. Naturally some hours after the previous post about synchronizing my music collection between devices something broke, which led to the rethinking nearly the whole thing.

A recap of the original approach:

• Music collection on a local hard drive, removable media etc.
• Using Picard and LRCGET to enhance files
• Syncing to and from a linux machie via Nextcloud desktop
• Syncing to and from an Android phone using the Nextcloud app
• Playing music with Gramophone, with local playlist support as the killer feature

This worked well until it didn’t. Syncing m3u changes from Android to Nextcloud stopped working, although I’m sure I got some changes synchronized earlier. Might be be some hidden battery optimization hi-jinx, might be just me being impatient, but after some fiddling I started looking for alternatives.

Ampache and Subsonic to the rescue

In Nextcloud Music you can configure application access to the library via Ampache and Subsonic protocols. These allow music players to access the collection, create and modify playlists that are synced between apps, dynamic playlists, ratings, tracking of listening times etc.

I decided to have a go and fell in love - with some caveats.

Now the process starts the same way - local file management and refinement before uploading to Nextcloud. Then I use Power Ampache 2 on the phone and Supersonic on the desktop. Both support easy playlist handling and streaming directly from Nextcloud or persisting the files for offline use, which is great for phone usage.

The tradeoffs

Although the player apps are shinier, there’s some things missing from the previous setup

• No synced lyrics

• If a song has a corresponding synced .lrc file, Power Ampache 2 does show a lyrics tab but without synchronization

• This appears to be more a limitation of the protocol (or the backend?) than the apps themselves

• Playlist backup

• A key point I made in the previous was “I like all my music to be under /Music”. This is no longer the case, as the playlists are stored in an internal, hidden database structure in Nextcloud.

• When I want to back these up, I have to go there and do a manual export of the playlist before I can copy it to a new file

Even so, I feel like this is a superior approach at least for my use cases. The painless playlist synchronization between different hosts is the key selling point, I’m sure all the other bells and whistles will soon become too nice to ever live without. At least until some key part breaks!

Thoughts, comments? Send me an email!

#ampache #music #subsonic #tech