Yeah, so the only custom aspect is this alias in my .bashrc:

  fetchplay() {
      git annex get "$@" && vlc "$@"
  }

Combined with the keybindings that ship with fzf, I can type "fetchplay [CTRL-T]", select some subset of the directory tree, and the files will play. Git annex will locate the files (in this case, on another machine in my apartment) and fetch them before playing only if needed (if they are already present, "git annex get" verifies that and exits silently). I have my music collection backed up on several different forms of removable media, across several machines, and on AWS S3.

Here is a recording of me fetching and playing three tracks:

https://asciinema.org/a/t0BfyKhU4PTAenwNH79IPzqD3

Thank you for the explanation, I thought it would be way more involved! I was just getting into git-annex yesterday, and now I see how absurdly powerful it is!

Awesome. Is there any way to stream them so they don’t have to be downloaded first?

Interesting question; I'd never bothered because I tend to focus on a few albums at a time and I just keep them locally. Waiting a second or two when I want to listen to an album I haven't listened to in a while is no big deal for me. But it turns out git annex makes it easy to do this:

https://git-annex.branchable.com/git-annex-inprogress/

This makes it even more compelling to try out...

I do wonder what happens with the temp file when the full file is loaded. The quick and dirty way that most people do it is to simply delete/move the temp file as completion, but of course that interrupts the media player as the file is now “missing”. I feel like I’m going to find out shortly when I research or test...