Music on Mike Bell - Blog & Stuff

My Music in 2025/26

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 21:13:11 +0000

Spurred on by this great article from Jessica Journals I’ve decided to document how I handle my music collection in 2025/26. I’ve split the post up into what seem like logical sections.

Getting Music
#

Bandcamp is still my primary means of getting music at the moment, I’ve spent a lot of money on music over the year. It feels good knowing that the artists are getting something for their work. A by-product of this is that I also get notified when new releases come out so I can keep up to date with my favourite artists and labels. It’s meant I can pick up releases like “||cↄc||oo3|| by CONDUIT” which was only available for a limited time for charity.

Storing Music
#

All music goes on my NAS, I don’t back it up yet, I’m going to make it a priority for 2026 since I have a second smaller NAS at a remote location now.

Organising Music
#

I did used to use beets but I was never really happy with the results, it’s too opinionated for me and I never got around to configuring all the different plugins to make it work exactly how I wanted it. Instead I use Musicbrainz Picard which I is a really powerful tool (it’s incredibly dangerous as well so take backups first!). I just point the app to my music share mounted and then go through every album I have to update the metadata. Some more obscure releases are a bit difficult to identify but it’s managed a large part of my library with really good results.

Library
#

Late 2025 I was managing three music libraries:

Navidrome
Jellyfin
Moode

As of 2026 I’ve ditched Jellyfin and Moode for music playing and managing for Symfonium more on that later. My goal when designing this whole setup was to have one canonical source for my library and I’ve finally achieved it.

Software Player
#

For software players I use Feishin on Mac/Linux (I use Arch btw) and on Android I use Symfonium. Both support the subsonic api which is what Navidrome uses meaning that I have one source of music but multiple methods of playing. Today I found out that Symfonium also has an Android TV app which works really well meaning I can finally ditch Jellyfin (amazing for TV and Movies!) and Moode. Even my wife likes the look of Symfonium on the tv shame she doesn’t like my taste in music.

Hardware Player
#

Early in 2025 I was using my Pixel 7 Pro and a Qudelix-5K and while it was a really good setup I found the distractions of having music on my phone annoying.

I ended up getting a Hiby R4 digital audio player so I have a dedicated way to listen to music. I really like it but it’s a bit slow and janky in places. I use Symfonium set to download any new albums from Navidrome onto the SD card (no transcoding, pure flac!) so I can have high quality music with me whether I have an internet connection or not. I’m currently looking into buying a Fiio M21 because an audiophiles journey is never over!

I finally got rid of my Raspberry Pi Zero w2 and hifiberry dac in favour of playing through my TV to my Cambridge Audio Azur 540a via optical to dac. I’m really happy with this setup.

If you have any question feel free to get in touch on Mastodon!

Thanks for reading via RSS!

Send me a message on Mastodon or email me

Moving Away from Spotify

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 09:51:56 +0000

Spotifys quality sucks, it’s UX is horrible and it pays it’s artists pretty much sod all so it’s time to move away and build my own cloud music service. It’s a lot easier than it sounds!

How do I get my data?
#

Replacing each and every album I have saved on Spotify is no mean feat, I have hundreds saved on there. My first problem was getting all that data out of Spotify into something easy to understand, you can request all your data from Spotify here. You request your data then wait a few days for it to show up, you get a boat load of badly organised JSON which isn’t great.

Parsing all that data is the next job, I ended up using Your Spotify. It connects to your existing Spotify account and downloads the last 30 days (I think) of data. You can also import your existing data from the json files you got earlier. This then builds up an accurate picture of what you’ve been listening to over your entire Spotify existence, in my case around 10 years.

Where does the music come from?
#

This is where Your Spotify comes in really handy I can search around my data and find albums that I want to buy first. Most of my music is purchased from Bandcamp, it turns out that supporting artists properly (ish) is quite a lot more than £17.99 a month. It’s a slow process as I’m not quite ready to drop thousands on all the music from my Spotify account but I’m getting there. I reckon it’ll probably take me around 5-10 years at the rate I’m going to fully rebuild my collection. I’m ok with this.

Where do I store it?
#

I’ve lost my music collection once before many many years ago and it’s heartbreaking so this time everything is a bit more secure. I have a 20tb NAS which has redundancies in case of failure, I’m also planning some form of cloud backup in the future.

How do I sort it?
#

For this I’m using Beets a CLI tool has plugin support. When I grab an album I use beet import to import which renames the files and if possible downloads a cover.jpg file. Navidrome scans my music folder once an hour for new music, although I can do this manually.

How do I listen to it all?
#

I have an NFS share from my NAS to my Proxmox server which then connects to a dockerised Navidrome setup. This acts as my music server. I can play music through Navidrome but prefer to have third party clients connect:

Windows 11 and OSX - Supersonic
Android TV - Jellyfin
Android - Symfonium

All these apps (apart from Jellyfin) connect to Navidrome.

Symfonium and transcoding
#

The neat thing about Synfonium and Navidrome is that it transcodes on the fly so when I’m out and about and I don’t want to use gigs of mobile data it transcodes down to Opus Audio:

ffmpeg -i %s -map 0:0 -b:a %bk -v 0 -c:a libopus -f opus -

I need to play around with Opus Audio to get an idea of what it’s capable but the file size vs quality is pretty damned good at the moment.

Conclusion
#

I’m really happy with this setup, I’m not tied to any one application and any component can be swapped out at any time giving me the freedom to try different things.

Discuss at
#

Thanks for reading via RSS!

Send me a message on Mastodon or email me

Music that shaped me

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Sun, 20 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Back when I was a young kid I remember being influenced by so much music. My Dad with heavy rock from the 70/80s, my mum with Elton John and random Christian based music. Stand out album from this period has to be:

The Waterboys - Fishermans Blues - Stand out track has to be “We Will Not Be Lovers”, to this day I love this track. I was recently reminded of this while watching Dom Hemingway, Doms daughter covers “Fishermans Blues” quite well.

As a grew up I found the sounds of electronic music. I remember buying so many Euphoria CDs and listening to them non stop. Electronic music specifically trance and house represented a feeling that was totally new in my musical history.

My teenage music tastes varied widely, from electronic music I found myself listening to more and more emo/screamo. I remember a friend in secondary school lending me a Limp Bizkit album which was pretty good for the time. I then moved on to Linkin Park, Hybrid Theory was pretty much a well rinsed album during that period of my life. I also moved on to Metallica and their earlier stuff. I coveted Master of Puppets and Ride the Lightning as must have albums.

When I went to university my tastes altered towards Deftones, I remember falling asleep to their self titled album after many a drunken night out. Deftones will always have a special place in my heart for all their amazing music. I was also massively into Alexisonfire, I dragged my brother to a gig of theirs in Leeds and remember watching one of the band members constantly snorting white snot out of his nose while the entire place moshed out.

In what can only be classified as my working years I’ve found a home in more electronic music, I started listening to more trance again and from there moved solidly into Drum and Bass.

Now I’ve come to appreciate all types of music, I’m currently listening to Burial. I tend to listen to quite a wide range of music and realise now how much it’s shaped who I am.

Thanks for reading via RSS!

Send me a message on Mastodon or email me

Music podcasts to checkout

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Since I’m commuting a lot more to Manchester I figured I’d start downloading more music podcasts to listen to on the train.

Here are the ones I’ve found so far:

Blu Mar Ten - Music Podcast - Sound Cloud | iTunes

Bulb - Into The Deep - Sound Cloud | iTunes

Hospital Records - iTunes

John B Podcast - Sound Cloud | iTunes

Chillstep Works by Ideal_Noise - Sound Cloud

If you have any recommendations then let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading via RSS!

Send me a message on Mastodon or email me

Music on Mike Bell - Blog & Stuff

My Music in 2025/26

Getting Music #

Storing Music #

Organising Music #

Library #

Software Player #

Hardware Player #

Moving Away from Spotify

How do I get my data? #

Where does the music come from? #

Where do I store it? #

How do I sort it? #

How do I listen to it all? #

Symfonium and transcoding #

Conclusion #

Discuss at #

Music that shaped me

Music podcasts to checkout

Getting Music
#

Storing Music
#

Organising Music
#

Library
#

Software Player
#

Hardware Player
#

How do I get my data?
#

Where does the music come from?
#

Where do I store it?
#

How do I sort it?
#

How do I listen to it all?
#

Symfonium and transcoding
#

Conclusion
#

Discuss at
#