[Veratyr]

Seconded. There's nothing that even comes close to Beets in terms of metadata management. Thanks to MusicBrainz, not only does it get metadata right most of the time, it keeps it right by syncing from MusicBrainz to the tags when you tell it to (mbsync).

Plus it'll (reliably) find and embed album art and do transcodes if you want it to.

> I yearn for the ability to use a Beets library as a source for streaming

Beets + MadSonic [0] blows everything else out of the water for me. I use DSub on Android and the web UI on desktop (although JamStash and Polysonic are good too).

This doesn't meet your "combine with other sources" requirement though. For that you'd need Tomahawk (which supports Beets and Amazon but not Pandora) [1].

[0]: http://madsonic.org

[1]: https://www.tomahawk-player.org

And EDIT: You can actually use Clementine with Beets through Subsonic/Madsonic as well.

[unhammer]

I tried DSub the other day as an alternative to the standard Subsonic player on Android since it can play podcasts. I set it to wifi only streaming, but it still somehow managed to use 1.5G of my 300M data plan even though I only played a single 60M track with it; so caveat emptor …

I like Tomahawk so far for the "other sources" part (also I find the UI easy on the eyes compared to … just about anything else out there), but of course I can't get it to stream from my Subsonic collection :-/

Why do you use Madsonic instead of plain Subsonic? (Does it work with Tomahawk?)

[Veratyr]

> I set it to wifi only streaming, but it still somehow managed to use 1.5G of my 300M data plan even though I only played a single 60M track with it; so caveat emptor …

That's really odd. Perhaps it was precaching extra tracks? I haven't had any issues with it, certainly not 1.5GB of data (although I have unlimited so likely wouldn't notice anyway).

> Why do you use Madsonic instead of plain Subsonic? (Does it work with Tomahawk?)

I found that regular Subsonic just wasn't moving much at all. Madsonic seemed to have active development.

I haven't tried regular Subsonic with Tomahawk but Madsonic certainly works for me. I also hooked it into a Beets server without any issues.

[throwanem]

What's the actual difference between Subsonic and Madsonic? I haven't been able to find any more detailed description than "[Madsonic] adds features and bug fixes", which is hardly helpful.

[Veratyr]

That's basically it. SubSonic hasn't seen much major work in years while MadSonic seems to be an active project adding features and support.

[throwanem]

What features? What bugs? I haven't been able to find any substantive answer to either question. Until I do, I see no reason to care about Madsonic.

[Veratyr]

There's a comparison page for features here: http://beta.madsonic.org/pages/compare.jsp

And a changelog here: http://beta.madsonic.org/pages/changelog.jsp

[throwanem]

Neat, thanks.

If you're anything to do with Madsonic development, you might think about making that comparison page a lot easier to find. It doesn't seem to be linked anywhere very much.

I'm also uncertain how "optional video player" isn't listed as a Subsonic feature, when 5.x (and I think later 4.x as well) can stream video. I mean, I've actually streamed video from my Subsonic 5 instance, so...