October was a month for music players. Sony’s first CD player turned 44, and a new iPod-inspired machine turned up to remind us what dedicated hardware can feel like; between them arrived a small avalanche of free software based players for Mac, Windows and Android. Elsewhere: three gorgeous ways to look at music, a history of “slop”, a Microsoft Office 2000 promo CD that has to be heard to be believed, and a hard drive report for anyone whose library is getting tight.

ASUSTOR NAS devices make great homes for a music library, and if you have an ASUSTOR that supports Docker you can run bliss on it alongside your other apps. There isn’t an App Central package for bliss yet, but the official bliss Docker image works within the ASUSTOR Docker integration. This walkthrough covers an ASUSTOR running ADM 5, using the Docker Engine and Portainer CE apps published by ASUSTOR.

New local music players arrived this September: a cross-platform upstart, a polished macOS app and an open-sourced mobile client for self-hosters. Meanwhile, on the Web, ListenBrainz hit some serious growing pains, a new site maps classical concerts around the world and a beautifully crafted site documents how far the comforts and technologies of our domestic environment has come. In the real (physical) world: audio player hardware, a car industry experiment proved how much we care about phone integration and someone stored music on paper (and its not what you’re thinking).

August contained a number of developments in music streaming; some about costs, some about the content. TIDAL and Apple Music both nudged their prices up, AI-generated music is getting labels, and prediction markets are muscling in on the charts. On the brighter side: Winamp is teaming up with Deezer, some new discovery tools launched, a shiny-new-thing from Sonos and… MusicBrainz has a new leader!

July was a big month for the music ownership question. Overall, the arguments for local files keep stacking up. Elsewhere, two fresh music servers arrived, Beatport doubled-down on downloads and we took a nostalgic trip from Windows Media Player to the click-wheel iPod.