Spotify Finally Seems Like It's Making Extended Range Portable Music Collections a Possibility

I went down the route of trying to find a music collection playback software the equivalent to iTunes - and ended up on the Vox Music Player for a while. But I found out that not enough had been invested in that platform and the syncing from backup and to mobile devices is just horribly unreliable - for instance it refused to recognise the 'ö' character in Björk etc. so none of the Scandinavian stuff got synced across. That which you can get to work works fine - but because of some weird cacheing glitch the Playlists don't update properly - meaning older versions over-write new changes somehow and you loose tracks along the way. I also could never get the sync to mobile working properly. I think I still pay a subscription fee to Vox in the hope that they might one day improve - but it does not look like it's ever going to happen - so I'm definitely mothballing those efforts.

After becoming frustrated with Vox - I then discovered that I could save and sync my rare tracks to Spotify. Note that a significant part of my collection is based on rare tracks, mixes and remixes that have never been officially digitised and don't exist on any music library - not Amazon, Apple Music, BeatPort, TraxSource or any equivalent. I've had to rip so much of my own music from my vinyl and CD collection. And weirdly there are strange licensing restrictions in place with lots of conventional material - meaning that I can't access several of my favourite albums on Spotify UK as they're not licensed for that territory for some bizarre reason. When I go back to Iceland - all those childhood favourites are available - and we're talking International bands here with a global presence. It's not altogether dissimilar to Digital Video Content which has its own weird and wonderful territorial licensing foibles.

So I was delighted when I came across the Spotity function that allowed me to load up all those tracks that Spotify could not provide me with from its core library - which is probably 30-40% of my collection. Yet my delight was short-lived as I soon crashed into the barrier that was the 10,000 track limit. This meant that of my 23,000 former iTunes collection - I could carry less than half with me.

Several years have passed in the interim and Spotify has started to become more unreliable too - at times I deleted dozens of albums of downloads in order to add newer material - but Spotify would still not allow me to upload any in their stead. I thought these might be cacheing issues - but several months later and yet further download deletions - I was still unable to upload any more. A pet peeve in all of this is that Spotify never tells you what your number of tracks total is - which would be very useful for knowing how many downloads you need to delete etc.. And when you get the 'All Filled Up' notice - deleting a tonne of downloads seems to have no bearing on proceedings at all - so it looked like Spotify was becoming as unreliable as iTunes for me.