Assorted music irritations

Yet another music limit that's getting in the way. Google's Play Music has a 20k song restriction on uploaded music. This has a side effect on Chromebooks, tablets and phones. Since they don't really understand local storage and especially local network storage, you're expected to store everything in the cloud. Except the cloud isn't big enough! Even within the 20k limit, actually managing and dealing with a 20k track library is hard with the UI provided. For instance you can delete/remove tracks and albums but not artists. Meanwhile the upload "Music Manager" program is still fairly brain dead and still doesn't understand .pls or .m3u playlist files.

The next problem is that DNLA compatible media servers and clients are universally horrible. It's the kind of thing that gets built into "Smart" TVs and home NAS. So why does Buffalo's NAS fail to index all the files? VLC locks up when trying to display them. The "smart" TV just gives you a huge long list of tracks instead of any kind of Artist or Album display. MS Windows Media Player fails to actually provide any kind of list when acting as a server and is just as useless at working as a client as all the rest. Just about the only bit of "Smart" in the TV I actually liked was the Youtube app.

Another year has gone by and Winamp still survives but there's been no developments, bugfixes or updates while the new owners try and work out the various licensing issues. It still works pretty well but runs out of steam somewhere around 50k tracks. Several people I know have given up and just use VLC with a sensible directory structure. The remaining problem is searching on track metadata rather than just filenames and directories. For actual desktop programs with library management I've yet to find anything as good as or better than winamp. 4 synced window panes for Artist, Album, Track, Playlist, just kind of works. And just kind of works better than tree or any of the other approaches like drilling down into a folder structure. VLC may be good for playing media, but it sucks for managing a library. As for Itunes, it's still horrible on Windows. Maybe it's better on OSX but I wonder. 

One tip for using Youtube. Open one tab to play your "Watch Later" playlist. Then use other tabs to find and cue up more music. Click the "Watch Later" icon on each and they'll get added to the end of the main playlist. It kind of works. And see above about the Youtube TV App.