Symfonium's Continuous playback completes my music stack
I've written before about the software that makes up the part of my personal stack that handles music:
Most of that is still relevant, with one tweak: I've replaced the previous Android apps (Substreamer and Ultrasonic, and even my beloved, offline-only Musicolet) with Symfonium.
Here's a recap of how I use Symfonium and which features I rely on the most.
Symfonium lets me customize almost everything: from the UI to the server sync behavior to the playback pitch and speed. And they're constantly adding things.
There were only 2 things I missed that Spotify could do and my self-hosted stack couldn't:
First - music discovery. This one I can't fix; I don't just dump music into my collection randomly; only deliberately selected albums or songs. By definition, that precludes my finding music I don't know.
Second - automatic, continuous play of similar music. All streaming services let you just start with a song you like, and then continue with similar music. I'm not sure whether it's new, or I just missed the feature, but apparently, there is a toggle somewhere in the settings called "Continuous play" that does exactly that. Problem solved!
But it highlights one of Symfonium's problems: the settings are so complex and complicated! And not always well explained. It's my only gripe against the app. Sometimes I can't find a setting even when I know it's there because I've used it before. They've added the ability to save a snapshot of the style settings, download new ones from the net, and provide a few default ones. So maybe that will help? The presets are not just of the "we changed the colors for you" variety - many of them completely change the look and feel of the app.
My favorite features and 'tricks'
The smart playlists didn't sound that thrilling at first but ended up being useful. They let me generate playlists based on criteria such as "all songs that I rated more than 3 stars".
This also resulted in a new favorite way to listen to my music: the "not yet played" playlist. When I loaded my library into Navidrome, all the "play count" counters were naturally set to 0. I made a smart playlist that contains all the music I haven't listened to yet (i.e. play count = 0), and am revisiting the entire library. This alone makes the entire hassle worth it to me; I love it a bunch. I have already rediscovered plenty of old favorites I forgot about.
Then there's the (super complicated) offline caching. Those were perhaps the most confusing settings to get right. Of course, you can do the usual 'keep these albums and my fave tracks always available', that part was straightforward. But with more tweaking, I can tell Symfonium to keep X gigabytes of music cached and keep the most recent music available for offline play. That's perfect for me: When I'm out and about, I know I will have not only the music I specifically downloaded but also the things I just randomly listened to recently.
I can tell the app to go into offline mode, where it won't repeatedly try and fail to communicate with the server when there is no connection; instead, it only shows cached songs in the UI and plays them seamlessly. (Though the offline mode could be better indicated visually: I once didn't notice it was turned on, and wondered why some of my music isn't showing up in searches.)
And these features synergize well: for example, I made a smart playlist that contains all the songs I gave a good rating to (> 3 stars) and marked it to be downloaded and kept for offline use. Now anytime I like a song, I can hit the star rating (or fave button) and it will just automatically stay available on the phone forever.
I never thought I'd completely stop using offline-first apps for music, yet here we are. I didn't weaken my requirements; Symfonium just handles them. It's the best music app I've ever used by far, and I only wish it were available for the Web, or Windows.
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