This month in digital music libraries - April 2025
April 25, 2025 in digital music by Dan Gravell
This month’s roundup includes news on Plex, articles on musical history and MusicBrainz’s continual progress.
Plex feature-gates remote streaming
When I first started working with Plex I thought it quite cool how they solved HTTPS based encryption for self-hosting - by providing a stable hostname they were able to provide a specific certificate.
However, this delegation of location also means Plex has more control over your service. Which means they can do things like feature-gating… And they’ve only gone and bloody done it, for the very popular remote streaming feature.
Plex has started charging for remote streaming...
— bliss - automated music library management (@blisshq.com) 25 March 2025 at 16:01
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Music history; style and sound
This is a really immersive, well told story through musical history:
An immersive exploration of musical DNA
— bliss - automated music library management (@blisshq.com) 6 April 2025 at 16:00
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Meanwhile, breaking down the meaning of “distortion” to its purely audio characteristics leads to some interesting history:
Interesting thing here is how distortion can be introduced via non electronic means, even vocals. There's me thinking it was all about My Bloody Valentine... Thanks @psmaldino .bsky.social
— bliss - automated music library management (@blisshq.com) 12 April 2025 at 16:02
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And this analysis of chords and chord progressions for different genres and periods was interesting:
Chord progressions across genres and time www.cantgetmuchhigher.com/p/i-analyzed... thanks @cdallarivamusic
— bliss - automated music library management (@blisshq.com) 20 April 2025 at 12:01
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MusicBrainz are trying to solve audio outside of just “music”
As a parent of pre-teens I rip a lot of audiobooks to Astiga, so this is invaluable!
I maintain that audiobook/drama editing is one of the most satisfying things to edit in #MusicBrainz. Now it’s even better - and podcasts have been formally added into the fold. Listeners of words, come get those mouth sounds tagged and catalogued! -a blog.metabrainz.org/2025/04/17/u...
— MusicBrainz (@musicbrainz.org) 17 April 2025 at 06:17
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… and overall they’re maintaining a high rate of continual additions to their database. Great for music hoarders!
Seems like a pretty awesome rate of addition to me...
— Astiga - the streaming service for your own music (@asti.ga) 23 April 2025 at 11:15
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And finally…
Just a bit of fun…
yeah why not
— bliss - automated music library management (@blisshq.com) 2 April 2025 at 16:01
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More next month!
Photo by Bruno Bučar on Unsplash
