I’m tired of Apple Music to manage my library. What is a better/best alternative that works well with Roon? Currently my library is on an iMac but slowly copying files to Roon Nucleus Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD
I don’t stream music from available services to solely listen too instead I buy the whole album from sources such as Bandcamp, Bleep or Warp or vinyl directly at local music stores. Then bring these into the iTunes Music folder.
Curious what others are doing. And yes I’m keeping Roon app and the Nucleus.
I continue to use iTunes as the “source of record” for my local library because it’s the only good way I’ve found to keep music synched on my phone/laptop/tablet for when I’m out of the house.
I expose my iTunes library files via a file share, and my Roon server mounts that file share read-only so that the music is indexed and available in Roon. I also use Qobuz streaming in Roon. When I’m home, Roon is 100% of my listening, but I still get my local library on my mobile devices via the Apple ecosystem.
When I buy new music I rip the CD or import the downloaded files into iTunes and then force Roon to re-scan the library.
The overall experience is not great, but it’s not bad either. When I’m out of the house I don’t have access to any of the Qobuz streaming tracks I’ve added to Roon, and there’s no real playlist synchronization.
https://bandcamp.com, https://bleep.com, and https://warp.net are sites where musicians can self-publish music for resale. They are great places to find and purchase independent music, often in high resolution formats like FLAC or ALAC.
Thank you both. I found Bootcamp. What I didn’t like was that it expected me to pay before knowing what the file would be OR the info was too hard to find which means a poor we design. It did make it clear what types of files were available but one track I went thru as far as almost paying for still wasn’t forthcoming with the info I needed so I stopped short of buying.
