Last summer, I ditched listening to music using streaming services (Spotify, then YouTube Premium) to go fully local. I wrote an detailed post to document my journey: Listening to Music the 2000s Way.
One year later, I still listen to my music locally on my phone but made a subtle change that has made the experience even better and removed one of the drawbacks I mentioned back then.
Solving the Stats Problem: Hello Last.fm
One of the things I missed the most by listening to music locally was the lack of listening stats. Favorite albums, artists, listening time… I’ve always found it interesting to dig into my listening habits, and for the last year I couldn’t fulfill this small pleasure of mine.
I had indeed heard of Last.fm and the scrobbling functionality, which would be a perfect way to have stats, but the app I was using to listen to my music, foobar2000, wouldn’t allow me to scrobble my music.
What is scrobbling?
Scrobbling is when Last.fm tracks the music you listen to and automatically adds it to your music profile.
But after doing some research, I finally found an app that would allow me to listen to my music stored locally and connect to Last.fm to enable scrobbling.
The App Evolution: moving to Doppler
foobar2000 is great and free. It served my needs very well for one year and I’m grateful for it. But I finally replaced it with another app: Doppler.
It’s not free though, with a one-time payment of 10 euros, which to me is totally worth it. It has a slightly different interface, more polished and modern but effective, and it offers more functionalities, like the possibility to edit ID3 tags directly from the app… plus the one thing I was desperately looking for: scrobbling!
I just had to migrate all my music files from foobar2000 to Doppler. I thought it would be a seamless task, given the number of hours I meticulously spent last year tagging and organizing my music. But things turned out to be not that simple.
The ID3 Tags Saga: Round Two
To tag my music, I use a simple piece of software on my Mac which does the job very well, it’s called Tagr. A great tool on which I spent way too much time filling fields to make my music library pretty to look at. After all, it’s a part of the pleasure of listening to music!
However, there was something I hadn’t anticipated that made my switch from foobar2000 to Doppler a bit painful: there are different versions of ID3 Tags. When I imported all my music to Doppler (which was a breeze, by the way), I noticed that a lot of my music would show weird artist, album or track names such as )ÿpL or AÿbB.
So, I turned to ChatGPT and asked it:
I’m migrating my music from foobar2000 to Doppler (iOS). When I look at my library within Doppler, I have a lot of albums/artists/tracks names that show weird names like “)ÿpL” or “AÿbB”. Everything was fine with foobar2000.
And here is what it replied:
Ah, I see the problem 👀
When you get song titles or albums turning into weird stuff like )ÿpL or AÿbB, it’s not Doppler randomly making up names: 👉 it’s an issue with the ID3 tag encoding in your MP3 files.Why does this happen?
- MP3 files contain metadata (ID3 tags) that store the title, artist, album, etc.
- These tags can exist in different versions: ID3v1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4.
- If a player reads a version that another one doesn’t interpret correctly (e.g. wrong UTF-16 vs ISO-8859-1 encoding), you end up with random characters instead of readable text.
- Foobar2000 can read almost all variants just fine, so you don’t see an error there. But Doppler (like many iOS apps) is stricter and may get confused if the tags are malformed or ambiguous.
It gave me a few instructions on how to clean and convert the ID3 Tags with the macOS version of foobar2000, which I downloaded and installed.
I was a bit afraid of doing something wrong and wiping all the tags I had spent hours filling in last year, but I did what it suggested I do… and it worked well. For the most part, at least.
I sent a few albums to Doppler to check how it would look on my phone, and this time no more weird names, yay! Except for one thing: all the cover art of my music was gone. Ugh. I checked my local library on my Mac and indeed, all my files were now showing a boring grey placeholder as a cover art.
That’s when I realized I had to do it all over again, by hand, one album at a time. Of course, it was 9pm on a Sunday evening and I had to wake up at 5am the next day, but deep down, I knew there was absolutely no way I would leave home without a properly tagged library displaying the beautiful artworks of my music.
I had no choice. I spent almost the next three hours fixing it with Tagr — during which I also discovered I can prevent it from writing ID3v1 tags and only use ID3v2.3.
Some album folders already contained the cover art as separate image files, but most were missing. Tagr does include a feature that searches the web for the cover art (and all the other tag information, if needed), but it’s very slow and, in my opinion, not well designed. So, I spent a hell of a lot of time going back and forth between the Finder and my browser, copying and pasting album names into Google Images, looking for decent cover art that I would drag and drop into each album folder. For some homemade compilations or somewhat unknown and obscure music, I made quick artwork with Photoshop.
Before dealing with my entire library, I ran a few tests by updating the cover art for some albums that I then sent to Doppler, and to my great relief, it worked and displayed properly. After that, I dragged and dropped each album, one by one, into Tagr followed by its corresponding cover art. And sent everything to Doppler once again, by USB through the Finder. It was quite a tedious chore, but I eventually had artwork for everything and it looked beautiful.
My Music Library Today
I used this migration from foobar2000 to Doppler as an opportunity to remove and add music to my library. To this day, my Doppler library contains around 47 GB of music: 341 albums and almost 6,000 songs. That’s more than enough to keep my musical appetite satisfied!
Like in my previous article, I recorded a video showing my entire new music library:
Scrobbling: It Just Works!
Now that everything was correctly set up, I was finally ready to try that scrobbling feature I had read so much about, and for which I spent way too much time migrating from foobar2000 to Doppler.
It was a piece of cake: I created an account on Last.fm, switched on the toggle in the Doppler app to activate the feature, and… that’s all.
And after a few listens, I checked my Last.fm account, and it just works like a charm!
I subscribed to a free Last.fm account, and for now it fits my needs. One of these days, I’d like to explore what I can do with it, possibly using the free account to build something via the API to retrieve my listening stats.
For now, I’ll let it sit and do its work, and have fun checking what my listening stats will look like over time.
Updated Pros and Cons After One Year
The Pros and Cons remain the same as the ones I listed in my last year’s post. Except for one drawback, obviously: the “No more stats” one.
As written above, I’d like to try to take advantage of the scrobbling feature to build something that would display my music stats, in order to try to have my own weekly/monthly/yearly recaps, like those that streaming services offer.
Conclusion
Well. Again it was quite a journey!
Doppler is a great app. The interface is sleek, the features are good, it’s well made, and it finally gives me stats! Also, I don’t know if I’m imagining things, but the audio quality seems better than with foobar2000. I must be seeing things, the files are the same. Anyway, I don’t regret spending ten bucks for it, not at all.
That being said, listening to music locally, in good conditions, requires some dedication and a few hours to devote to it. But it’s totally worth it, and I’m not sure anything could make me go back to a paid music streaming service. I’ve saved hundreds of euros, and the entire process is just fun. I’m in total control of my music, and I now have a side project: using the scrobbling feature to build something fun for my website.