you can't do this on iOS. Even if you could get a phone with a large enough SDcard, natively ... transfering that much to the phone would be prohibitively painful. And one might be tempted to go through that once, but to go through it every time you get a new phone would drive you mad.
I have a 500GB card in my android and have 70% of my digital collection on it. I, also, make the card the primary destination for my photo/videos from my camera. I have my own home-grown backup solution. A mix of my own backup solution combined with the SDcard means i never have to rely on cloud services to my music, nor to backup my valuable files.
But this chapter in my life is coming to a close as phones increasingly take away sdcards.
Eventually my phone will fall back to just being my phone again. Because i refuse to use their services to replace functionality they took away.
I use PowerAmp music player. It's the most full features player out there that's got a good deal of polish to it, IMHO.
> Even if you could get a phone with a large enough SDcard, natively
...iPhones don't use SD cards for storage. They never have. They have internal flash storage.
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With that out of the way: I have a 10,000 song collection that I sync to my iPhone. It's only about 60GB of music. iPhones come with up to 512GB of internal storage, and there's an option when syncing your music to convert higher-bitrate music to 128kbps (or 192 or 256kbps, your preference) AAC files. I guarantee you, a library the size of hasbot's will fit on an iPhone with no problem.
I have no idea where you get the idea that you can't fit a decent-sized music library on an iPhone. Maybe you're one of those who believes that only lossless audio is worth listening to, and didn't consider that that's a niche opinion...?
> I have a 10,000 song collection that I sync to my iPhone. It's only about 60GB of music.
How exactly do you sync to your phone? I've been using an iPhone for the last 3 or 4 years and I entirely gave up on the concept of having my own music on my iPhone as I used to do on Android.
First issue: I have to deal with iTunes to sync and organize my music on my iPhone. I still haven't drink the full kool-aid of apple and thus still use windows as my personal PC. I refuse to use iTunes, I have a powerful pc that can run the latest games and this absolute piece of crap of a software still manage to freeze syncing large quantities of files.
Second issue: I have tons of FLACs that I need to convert to whatever the hell iOS wants as the default file AAC, ALAC, I can't even remember. So now I have to duplicate my music library to fit iOS / Everybody else.
Third issue: My ridiculously expensive iPhone still manage to transfer files using USB 2.0 speeds. Whereas my 4(?) years old android had USB-C and happily managed to transfer my entire library in no time.
Sorry for the rant but this issue is my biggest regret from buying an iPhone.
There’s an option in iTunes to sync entire library, in the phone music page.
It takes a while to tx 100+ gb, sure, but you do it once when you get the phone and after that you just move diffs.
It’s not perfect - I get errors from time to time saying music I have isn’t available in my region. Fix is a resync of those songs that got lost.
This is one of those go with the flow situations… the cost is dealing with iTunes, the benefit is carrying around all the music you’ve collected over the years in your pocket.
There may be some non iTunes methods that work as well, I’ve never looked into it.
>the cost is dealing with iTunes, the benefit is carrying around all the music you’ve collected over the years in your pocket.
I have this benefit without iTunes. I get to keep the 30% or so of my collection that is in FLAC, don't have to use 3rd party software for transfer (as any OS's file manager will do) and when i get a new phone i merely swap the SDcard.
That you have to share with photos/videos, apps, downloads, and everything else.
>syncing your music to convert higher-bitrate music to 128kbps (or 192 or 256kbps, your preference) AAC files.
Yeah, see - this isn't really your music collection then but reliance on Apple's Library and them "matching it" with what they have. I could never sync from their library b/c their library wouldn't have huge chunks of my actual digital collection.
I have hip hop mixtapes, Grateful Dead livesets, local artists who never had a major record deals (Fighting Gravity and a variety of punk bands), EDM live sets, and tons of stuff not in the Apple/iTunes Library they could never do anything with.
Secondly, like 30% of my collection is in FLAC, which Apple doesn't even support.
>I have no idea where you get the idea that you can't fit a decent-sized music library on an iPhone.
Because my music library is:
Server: $ du -sh Music/
905G Music/
Phone: 305GB ( i recently purged a ton to make space for videos/pictures )
Even if i was dealing with 60GB and even if i could rely on what was in their library - pulling down 60GB to a phone is painful. It takes me literal SECONDS to swap and SDcard from one phone to another as opposed to hours over WiFi.
Nevermind on android i can move files via ftp, smb, or any number of protocols. Even over the wire - it's plug and play. Copy and paste through any Windows, Mac or Linux file manager.
Thus, I don't have to rely on apple's crappy proprietary music apps to move files over a network or even a USB/lightning cable.
>Maybe you're one of those who believes that only lossless audio is worth listening to, and didn't consider that that's a niche opinion...?
No. I have a lot that's 320K mp3s. In fact, the grand majority of it is. Maybe 5-10% of my collection is worse quality than that. Virtually nothing is at 128k or worse. I typically stay away from Apple specific formats, lossless or not, regardless of their benefits.
> Yeah, see - this isn't really your music collection then but reliance on Apple's Library and them "matching it" with what they have. I could never sync from their library b/c their library wouldn't have huge chunks of my actual digital collection.
Nope. This is 100% false. You may be mixing up "sync your library from your computer to your iPhone" with "sync your library from your computer to iCloud," which are completely separate things.
I have a local music library the core of which goes back to about 1997. I have never subscribed to Apple Music, iTunes Match, or any of the other music subscription services. I synced portions of it to various iPods and early iPhones, and several years ago when iPhones with large enough internal storage to affordably sync the whole thing, I've kept it all on my iPhone as well.
> I typically stay away from Apple specific formats, lossless or not, regardless of their benefits.
AAC is not an Apple-specific format. It's an industry standard (MP4 audio); it just never gained quite as wide acceptance as MP3.
Does PowerAmp have any streaming ability? Seems simple enough to drop that library onto a cheap home server and be your own streaming service once SD cards are completely gone.
I've heard good things about airsonic (https://airsonic.github.io/). I used SubSonic before and i just didn't like the clients that connected to it. AirSonic is based on SubSonic but there's supposedly a bunch of improvements.
Android. I use GoneMAD Music Player 2.3.2 (the rewritten 3.0.X version is a buggy mess with no new useful features), but really any music player will do.
