Bunch of questions

#1

I am sorry for the many questions, but thought it was better to ask all at once.
I have an extremely large music collection.

I want to upload music and store it as original albums or collections as uploaded. Then I want to break it up into Libraries (or upload it as libraries) to break the music up into manageable chunks. Can I do this?

Can I upload music as lossless (Apple Lossless or FLAC) and subsequently download it to devices as a (selected) high quality MONO format? Or must I upload music in mono to listen to it in mono? if so, can I keep separate libraries of each? (hi-res and “low-res”/mono?)

Re above, Can I set different target devices to different resolutions? Example, my carry around iPod would download everything in Mono. My “home stereo” iPod wants things in highest resolution stereo. My car iPod wants mid range stereo. etc.

I generally do not stream music. I prefer to create large playlists for iPods and use them off-line. Hence the need for multiple Libraries, or at least playlists. I assume you support setting a collection for each device and synchronizing it occasionally?

I saw comments about not being able to store music with the same name. Is that a bug (that will be fixed)? I may have music for instance, that is on several albums, several live versions, or different LP versions, some on the same CD some from different ones. Can this all be sorted by album?

I have collection CD’s (best Jazz, best 60’s, etc), that I want to keep together as a collection, and do not want to delete or lose the LP versions of the same songs. I can do that?

I assume you do not have any “matching” as like iCloud? If you do, will it work better than the crappy Apple implementation? the main problems is not so much music not being matchable, but iCloud matching partial CD’s and no reason why it cannot match the rest of the songs on that CD. there is no way to “force” a match, either.

If I have custom metadata, is that kept when uploaded? Is there an option to also gather other metadata from others/gracenote? (Like SongKong/Tuneup?)

How do you handle Classical music? Can it be stored by CD, and is there confusion when there are multiple versions of the same performances?

What about “analog” vs digital recordings? I may have CD’s of the “reissued” releases, and also original CD releases and ALSO a personalized LP version of an album. Can all three be kept? Is there a meta tag for LP versions? Tags for 96bit CD's?

I have a lot of music that is NOT on Gracenote or other online resources. How is this managed? (Probably at least 50-100 CD’s that are not in their databases)

Can I sort music by “bit density”? i.e, can i keep a library of lossless, vs 320/256/mp4/mp3/etc? Can I do “smart lists” of only lossless music that is created in your apps? (I hate iTunes these days)

I assume if I get a disk crash and lose my local hard drive library, I can download the cloud library as a backup restore?
If I have it structured locally by genre (i.e, master folders of Jazz, classical, etc), is there any way to redownload it in the same folder hierarchy, or would that have to be totally recreated?

With missing artwork, I would love an option to “select” the correct artwork when multiple are available. This happens a lot where what is online is not correct, and I have to do things like search Amazon for the correct artwork and paste it in. Making this nicer would be a huge bonus.

My collection is mostly jazz, but have a little of everything. It is about 3TB, and I am re-ripping a lot of CD’s into lossless. It would be great not to have to do that, but I am resigned to it at the moment, as ICloud is so useless.

thanks

#2

Hi Harry,

Absolutely, we do have a great feature called Loop which allows you to upload any kind of music and lossless as well without any space restrictions. You can find out more here:
https://coppertino.com/loop-for-vox

Regarding the mono - are you referring to iOS or OS X version of VOX?

And of course you can have separate collections on each device, we would suggest you to upload all music into Loop library and then create collections on each device.

Regarding your question about the tracks with the same names - they will be removed automatically if length of track and name are the same since it's a duplicate.

We gather the metadata from external sources like Last.FM. Currently you can't sort it by bitrate.

Please be sure to write us back if you happen to have any other questions!

#3

I am referring to organizing using OS X, but playback on IOS.

I received a call back from you guys, which was great. Essentially it was no, but it was interesting idea.

I am one of many who have deaf or extreme loss of hearing in one ear. (or only want to have one earbud in). Since the iPod does not support mono playback I need to create separate libraries with the iPod playlists to sync with that device. Its a hassle.

Duplicates are always going to be complicated. Especially when I can have “greatest hits” CD’s, or duplicates on multiple playlists.

Sometimes the difference is 96 bit vs standard, mono vs standard, “remastered versions”, or LP lossless vs. CD versions.

How does your system determine which to keep or delete? What if I upload or get a duplicate version with a different bit rate (lossless where existing is lossy?)
(I may have mistakes where there are two different bitrates in the same folder, fr example, 256k m4a, and 320k mp3! I have no idea which should be kept!)

The challenge is many users do not just collect music, older people collect “CDs” as their preferred listening mode, even if they are compilations. I guess this means that compilations will often be truncated?

I think your job is get something out there, plan additional capability for the future in your code base, and slowly add these complicated issues into the product. No one expects you to get it perfect first pass. the hard part is having an architecture that supports long term flexible implementation!

Don’t hard code yourself into a closet. Its near impossible to recover if you do. (as a fellow developer)

#4

We determine to combine them or to delete by the track name and lenght of the track.

In future we will detect the audio format as well.

Thanks a bunch for your detailed feedback, we're working on improving our player everyday.