Thank you! Turns out the problem was something else, but I learned about the dbus today too.

SOLVED: So I plugged the BTD into the windows machine and did a firmware update, the update software is available on sennheiser’s website. (Not sure if that was needed)

In Pop_OS! I went into sounds settings and made sure the sound output was to “Digital Output (S/PDIF) BTD 600.” If it’s set to “Analog Output BTD 600” the audio is compressed. I could have sworn that I had tried this before, but apparently not.

The same thing applies to the C81. Make sure it’s using the digital output to the Avantree C81, not the analog output to the C81.

How do I watch the dbus? I don’t know what that is.

Are you able to download your purchases? I feel like the answer is “no,” but if they were serious about your library being “yours” downloading your purchases would have been part of their service plan from the start.

Who are you?

Are those… cheap? They don’t look cheap.

Airsonic, which is a fork of a fork of subsonic. It works great for music. Video support is there, but finnecky.

On Android I use DSub, which is/was a paid app. It works great, best airsonic/subsonic app I’ve used (all subsonic apps work with airsonic).

When you add music to your “now playing” on your device it cashes the tracks and doesn’t delete them until the cache reaches a certain size, which you can set in your preferences. So you could set the cache to 50 gigs or whatever and pre-load 50 gigs of your favorite songs from your server. Or just cache/stream on the fly from wherever via your phone’s data or random wifi.

Does anyone else self-host their music? (I suppose this would also be a thing if you stream from Spotify) but my music device greatly benefits from having some form of Internet connection for when I want to update it.

I self-host, so when I add music to my server my phone sees it automatically. I wouldn’t want to copy my music onto my server and onto an mp3 device, nor do I want to pay for separate internet service on an mp3 device.

Yeah, I get the joke in the post, but anyone who listens to RatM should very quickly understand what “the machine” is.

Funkwhale is interesting, but feels more like a plex/subsonic/jellyfin server than a social media place. I can’t follow artists on Funkwhale and listen to their latest posts. There isn’t a “feed” anywhere, it’s more like a giant shared-music server (unless I’m missing something).