Besides buying good music, I’m also a sucker for apps and online services that offer a good UX. I’ve spent €€€, $$$ and £££ on apps and subscriptions, although not always music related.
From time I see someone on the community posting about an interesting app or service, but perhaps I would be nice to have one place where we can create an overview of music related apps and services. I’m not talking about the main streaming services and their apps (we all know Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify, Apple Music… ) but rather any apps related to music. I hope this makes sense
Finale - A Last.fm client - I use it to have widgets with my listening stats on iOS. What can I say, I’m an engineer, I like numbers almost as much as I like music.
I’ve not tried it myself, but it apparently the app also can scrobble what is playing around you. Perhaps something vinyl fans who also like stats might enjoy?
Soundiiz.com - Probably also known by many on the community as a way of “transferring music” from one service to another. I use it to sync my Shazam playlist from Apple Music to Qobuz so that it’s available in Roon. I’m still on the free version, but exploring use cases to see if I can feed my addiction
Bandsintown - Find concerts of your favorite artists in your area
Although Roon for me is the King of Music. I am using one other multimedia program a lot. It’s cross platform (Windows, Mac and Linux). And its good old JRiver Media Center.
Before discovering Audirvana and later on Roon, I’ve been using it for a long time to listen to my own music collection. Nowadays I am using it for tagging. And it also handles my movies and series collection. So I can stream my huge collection to my TV from my trusty daily usage NUC.
Roon, PlexAmp, LMS, AssetUPnP, Symfonium and UAPP as players.
dbPoweramb and its suite of tools for ripping and converting tagging. MP3tag and MusicBrainz Picard again for tagging. I tend to use MusicBrainz Picard the most these days for tagging, analysing replay gain and adding albums to MusicBrainz catalogue that are missing and I have in my library, this helps Roon identify them after a day or two.
Discogs for purchasing 2nd hand CDs/Vinyl and cataloguing (slowly my collection) and getting discographies. MusicMagpie for buying 2nd hand CDs (UK only). Bandcamp for purchasing and listening to new albums and bands. LastFM for scrobbling and a more rounded play history and looking up bands. Dice for following smaller bands that are playing in my area and buying tickets.
JRiver - playback & general metadata - most metadata still edited this way
Tag&Rename - the name says it- originally because it could resize images
TagScanner (Occasionally)
MusiCHI tagger
SongKong - sadly very rarely usable
MusiCHI suite sadly seems to be not easily available any more but if you can find it , It has a feature MusiClean which is a lookup for classical music Composition, Dates etc, its worth it to standardise classical music. The text editor saves so much work , it can split Composition & Movement out of Name, it can number Movements and basically any text manipulations. Almost every classical album is modified in some way via this . The rest of the suite i a basic audio player , not really much to shout about
In my experience when user has a problem with SongKong, 80% of the time there is a user misunderstanding and 20% of the time there is an actual issue, whichever it is I would like to resolve the problem for you.
Unlike most alternatives to SongKong we have a public issue tracker so anyone can see the list of bugs and improvements we are working on
And we really do try to resolve issues quickly, here is an example of an issue reported on the forum and then resolved in next release, an example of an improvement/new-feature initiated by a user request and then implemented, and here is an example where the customer just needs a little help.
Next time you have a problem simply run Create Support Files so I get a copy of your logs and latest reports then post some details of the issue and I will try to sort it out.
