enjoying the Trove music player

With the semi-exception of internet radio, I don’t stream music, preferring to play files that I own. As I’ve written before, I use iCloud as my main (personal) file storage, and these days, I float between four different Apple devices (iPhone, work laptop, work desktop, family laptop) as the computers where I spend the most time. There is no good reason—except profit-focused artificial restrictions—that Apple couldn’t make its decent, ex-iTunes Music app play nice with iCloud Drive so that I could update my music library on one device and let those updates sync to the other three.

This has been bothering me for years, but something finally broke several weeks ago, and I iterated search terms for what felt like hours over the course of a weekend to find some independent app that would just allow me to sync a music library over the cloud and play that library on multiple devices. I explored a few options but have landed on Trove, which does that one thing well. When I dump new music files into a folder on one computer, iCloud does its syncing magic, and the local install of Trove on each device does what I want it to, importing new files or changed metadata.

To be clear, Trove does a lot of things poorly right now. It’s a good thing I’m fairly album-oriented in my listening these days, because I have never successfully gotten playlist creation and use to be a less-than-terrible experience. I’m also not interested in its AI offerings and a bit grumpy about them being there in the first place. However, it has calmed the absolute rage I was feeling about my previous music setup, and that was worth every penny of the $10 I spent for the Pro version.

We shouldn’t have to live in such a world some dumb and enshittified that it took me so long to find Trove (and that Trove is basically the only practical option for what I want to do). So, I guess there’s some lingering rage about the broader situation. It’s still pretty nice, though, to have found a way of just syncing a music library back and forth.

• Trove
• music
• Apple