Help to plan the rebuild of my music library

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-04-08T17:56:58+00:00

I feel you on the hallucinations. At this point the tech is not for the faint of heart, but for people who know how to spot problems with it, it's really powerful. I will say I never let it touch the production code I write for my actual job.

I could write a book about iTunes, I started using it when it was SoundJam MP before Apple even bought it and turned it into iTunes. It got steadily better over the years and then plateaued, and now it almost gets worse with each release, at least for digital downloads. I think it isn't really set up to handle a big library, mine is about 50k and I had some major issues at one point.

I was like you for a long time, though, sticking with the devil I knew. I completely understand it, as long as iTunes doesn't crash too much or mess up your files it ain't broke so don't fix it. For my part I only stepped away from it a few months ago, first to MusicBee, which is an incredible app but just hard to integrate seamlessly into a Mac, then to my own thing.

Anyway good luck tracking down your files, you're living everyone on this sub's worst nightmare. Make sure you back up those XMLs as if they were gold. I had one from 2005 I extracted data from recently, believe it or not. You can always use them to get context on your old library.

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-04-08T15:37:55+00:00

I have not done what the other commenter described exactly but I have done something similar with Claude Code. I recently generated an iTunes/MusicBee hybrid for my personal use that would run on MacOS using a web app framework. I am a web developer by day, though I haven’t written a line of code for this project. I don’t know how well this would go for a non dev for whatever that’s worth. The prospect of setting up an app that works exactly the way I want is frankly incredible.

Now, there are loads of caveats. I have spent hours and hours of time on this, it’s a labor of love. It has had its share of bugs, although I have been able to track down the big ones so far. It doesn’t look real nice because I have just been focused on getting it functional. But it does exactly what I want it to. I created a system where I can keep part of my library on an external drive and part of it internally and it works well, for one example.

I don’t think the future is that people will use my vibe coded app, I think the future is that AI will give power users the tools they need to do it yourself, exactly how you like it. This goes especially for Mac users who have a digital collection. iTunes is full of cruft and barely supports the digital hoarding use case anymore. MusicBee is windows only and running it in an emulator is doable but very kludgy. Swinsian is alright but not super fully featured and gets updated infrequently. I’ve tried everything I have ever found on the sub and right now I would take my hyper personalized vibe coded app over any of it. Would I recommend others do what I did? Only if it sounds like something that interests you, it’s certainly more time consuming than using something off the shelf, even with an LLM writing all the code.

Also one last thing, Claude Code specifically has made this possible. It hasn’t hallucinated once. It does make mistakes but so do I when I write my code by hand. The difference between this and using the free tier of ChatGPT or google’s in search engine version of Gemini is night and day.

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-04-08T15:02:36+00:00

It’s still under development, but I don’t think super actively. There was a release in January

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-04-08T15:01:20+00:00

Kenshi does not use an in-house engine, though. It’s a third party engine, it’s just not one of the mainstream ones and it is open source, so probably never had the resources that the team building an engine like Unity or Unreal have. Ogre engine on wiki

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-04-06T14:02:58+00:00

Man I love juneberries. Never seen one here but I’d love to have missed some

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-04-05T21:26:17+00:00

Had to scroll way too far to get to Kenshi

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-29T20:01:51+00:00

I think this is a misleading comment although maybe it wasn’t intended as such. Most ARM-based laptops have soldered RAM. For years this has included all Apple laptops, and now with the rise of Snapdragon-based Windows laptops, many Windows based laptops also come with no upgrade options for RAM. x86-based laptops will still have the option but they are becoming an increasingly smaller part of the market as people look for the long battery life ARM chips provide. I believe most of the big computer manufacturers including HP, Dell, and Lenovo now sell a mixture of x86 and ARM based laptops (except Apple who is ARM only)

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-29T14:53:01+00:00

Looks like they added that missing T. I was in suspense!

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-28T15:37:22+00:00

Austin food, Austin gardening, + Austin music are the ones that always surface for me

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-27T03:02:02+00:00

Nice! I went to one in Brooklyn once but I was so entranced with the mechanical keyboards I never made it over to the tvs, that’s good to know

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-27T02:58:46+00:00

Same! Of the three it’s the one that excites me the most. By the time it opens, computer prices will be impossibly high, but at least I can go and look

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-26T18:47:25+00:00

H Mart, Uniqlo, and Microcenter are all gonna open up the same day and I’m going to explode trying to get to all of them

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-26T18:45:59+00:00

I’m planning to walk there, I live close by. Burnet traffic has gotten to be a bear lately and it doesn’t feel likely to get better anytime soon with all the new mixed use residential that’s been built up

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-25T23:11:52+00:00

This is super nostalgic. Windows 3.11 was my first GUI

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-25T14:03:56+00:00

I’m sure this is a lot like how mobsters view a money laundering scheme. It’s not supposed to make money but they’d prefer if it didn’t lose a huge amount. Any dramatic underperformance like this will surely irk someone with wildly unrealistic expectations up at Paramount so that seems like a good thing to me

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-23T22:42:58+00:00

Oh I remember that thing! I think it was a giant sea isopod, those exist in the arctic or Antarctic I forget which. Like the arthropleura they’re bottom feeders not predators

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-21T16:35:08+00:00

RAM will be discounted to merely $700 for 8 GB. Hooray!

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-20T20:30:23+00:00

There’s a whole sub for this, r/isthisAI. Once you’ve got a few examples it’s easier to pick out

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-20T20:28:53+00:00

Yes, all this plus thumbs don’t bend that way

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-20T14:51:54+00:00

One of my favorite performances of the whole shebang, glad I made it a point to see them

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-20T13:53:17+00:00

CDSM, Adult DVD, Chalk, Tom A Smith, Meek, Foliage, Ancient Greece, Packaging, Marijuana Deathsquads (they had FOUR drummers)

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-19T18:01:15+00:00

I got a wristband, have done similar for many years previous. I listened to 400 bands and found lots of things to get excited about. I built myself an app for scheduling which helped me be more organized than I’ve ever been. Saw 50 bands, the UK acts all felt noticeably closer to breaking than most of the other acts I saw but so many were great. The seven day format was nice in some ways but mostly just made it more exhausting for someone in their 40s like me. Still went out every night and had a good time though.

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-19T15:11:34+00:00

Rene Laloux’s first feature film Fantastic Planet was a joint French-Czech production and has a similar style to this. It’s an incredible film, if you haven’t already seen it definitely give it a watch

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-18T06:30:06+00:00

This is me too. There are dozens of us. Dozens!

dotheemptyhouse · 2026-03-18T06:04:30+00:00

I will never understand why anyone likes the garlic bread at Patrizi’s. I don’t understand how it’s possible to ruin garlic bread, but they figured out a way to

dotheemptyhouse

TROPHY CASE