So here's the conundrum. I set my Mom up with a Spotify account that my Dad agreed to pay for. He has now decided that it's too expensive. I'm in college (2,000 miles from home) so I don't have an opportunity to help her manually acquire music (see: questionably acquire MP3s). Spotify was a great low-tech solution for her to have music at home and on-the-go, and she used it a lot.
Her hardware access: An ASUS ZenPhone 2, a Nexus 10 tablet, and a 13" MacBook Pro circa 2012 or 2013. She can use these devices, but they're all sort of isolated. She doesn't know how to transfer files or really even how to download things. This is why Spotify was so great. She could just remain logged in on her 3 platforms and anything she added was added everywhere. Downloading/saving the music was a snap.
Do you guys have any ideas for how I could devise a system that would allow me to provide my Mom with music or empower her to acquire music herself in a manner that is super low-tech on her end? I'm just hunting for ideas so I can come up with a solution here. It's sort of heartbreaking to me to think that certain people don't have access to music when I consider it such a large part of the culture and media that I consume and appreciate.
It has some great networking features as long as you have the bandwidth to upload to your mom and the connection is stable.
The two major drawbacks relative to spotify are you need to have the music stored on your device locally, your tastes probably don't overlap 100%. And obviously unless you get a lot of music the choice will be relatively limited.
I paid 5 dollars to enable the app on droid and it works great locally, I haven't used to out and about yet tho.
If she's not picky she could just do free pandora.
Downloading music for her on your system, and set up Bittorrent Sync (Think it's called Resilio now) to automatically sync to all of her devices.
Alternatively, look into getting Spotify Family.
I set it up recently with my mates. One person sets it up, and the rest join the subscription with links. If you could get another 4 people on it with you and your mum, it'll be cheap as hell. Then you just need to get everyone paying their share to you.
Buy music for her and use something like what @Zavar mentioned. Or she could use amazon music, its pretty easy to buy stuff there and you can get a disk and mp3 normally.
Google Play music isn't a bad option as well. The web app is great and Android is even better. You can add music from one location and download it from another. I don't personally use it, but it may work well for her.
@tkoham Ad-free music and syncing of playlists so you can play them on the device with no internet connection.
So all you need is a way to sync her "acquired" bootey across all three of her devices, and at the same time find a way for her to acquire more bootey easily.
If the stuff she "acquired" is on youtube, she could just listen to it via the browser and the app. But if the provider of the music is lame, and limits what countries can listen and view the media ,your SOL. Unless if you could teach her how to view media that is restricted in your country. But the point is, if the music is there she can create music playlists, and that of course will sync across devices. ( presuming she has a youtube account )
Or if there is a music player that is also available on mobile and syncs across devices, you could use that. But then you would have to teach her how to broadside, board, and acquire the bootey she wants. Although you could do the acquiring. Then you could email it over to her to download and then add to the player. But that might be a little too difficult, unless if you enter her computer over the net and do it for her. Then she would have to do absolutely nothing, except, enjoy her bootey.
I would advise against emby, simply because its transcoder is not as reliable as Plex's. I found it to hang very frequently while I used it. It is definitely worth using Plex over emby, if a private server is the route you go.
Even with a free account you can upload 20,000 tracks to stream wherever whenever, which is a pretty reasonable number. Definitely worth trying out.