Hey y’all! Sooooo I’ve been missing my teenage years of having a nice organized local music library on my computer. iTunes (now “Music”) has gradually become crappier and crappier for these purposes, constantly trying to pull you OUT of your library and into their streaming platform.
Does anyone else use/like Doppler, or have another good local library manager?
(my use case / setup - store main library on Macbook, ideally library sync or at least manual to iPhone + Carplay capability, so far seems like Doppler can basically do that)
Things I like so far -
clean interface
actually respects my metadata + album art choices (Apple’s app randomly dumps artwork ‘guesses’, and once it gave like 70% of all my albums a Van Halen cover for no reason lol)
Don’t love so far…
no option to ‘also delete files’ when removing music from library (have to ‘show in finder’ then delete manually)
no interface customizability, would be nice to be able to add/remove different “Presets” and otherwise tweak things to my liking
I haven’t used it but I will probably try it, thanks for the tip.
I am so sick of iTunes/Music trashing my playlists because Apple changes the ID of the song on Apple Music. I finally gave in asnd subbed to Apple One, which while awesome (you get all the songs), it didn’t fix the dumb issues Music has with playlists.
I’ve recently gone old school and haven’t had much time to put it through its paces, but Winamp’s app ticks most (all?) of your boxes. They’ve got a more modern app, but also still the old classic desktop player that we all knew and loved.
Yep, I used it in the 90s and was telling my 13 yr old about it and how cool it was back then with the skins and visualizations and looked it up to try and show him and found out they’re still going! So of course I had to get it again.
Winamp still whips the llama’s ass, though I’m using WACUP, myself. It’s a patched and updated version of the last Winamp release, which hasn’t been updated for 13 years at this point.
Update - I abandoned Doppler cuz it felt significantly underbuilt/under-updated…
no playlist exports
no auto syncing from Mac to iPhone
very limited interface customizability (can’t even view album artwork while playing a song)
can’t customize columns in Songs view
I managed to like Apple’s Music app way more just by going to Settings > unchecked “Show” for Apple Music and iTunes. Now Search works way better for local library, and I’m not getting harassed to subscribe to anything.
Apple Music works great for me. You’ve hit on my workflow, plus having virtually all music at your command to call up whenever you want is outstanding.
