I use Jellyfin, it's about the same thing as Plex, but free. I host it on my homelab along with a half dozen other services, and I can stream any of my media from anywhere. There's even pretty nice third-party clients. I use finamp on android, it's specifically a music player frontend for jellyfin, and has options to download your files and play offline.
So far, the biggest problem is simply learning how to find music again. Spotify was too convenient for discovery.
But, I've been happily streaming my collection for a couple of months now, and removing Spotify and the radio has gotten rid of most of the last remaining advertising vectors in my life. It's nice. I very much enjoy knowing that I own and control my media and the data about my usage of it. There will never be ads or a creepy business model. If something goes wrong and knocks the server offline, I have my music cached on my phone.
I wish this were more accessible to everyone. Setting up a public-facing server, or even a private one with a VPN tunnel is too much hassle for the average person. It's so very worth it though. Owning your own services is so liberating
I've found out the best places to find new music are the ones on the illegal side of things. There are still torrent sites with amazing communities, recommendation systems and all the possible music available in all qualities.
Too bad it's not really OK to mention them by name, but if you dig a bit, you can find them.
I didn't know that, but glad to hear it. I've just been using Bandcamp because it's got a very simple straightforward interface, isn't bloated, often has better pricing, more formats available to download. Most importantly many of the 'smaller' artists tend to be there.
I also use Jellyfin along with an Android app call Synfonium. It has heaps of customisation and works with many media providers including Emby, Plex, Subsonic etc.
Soulseek seems to be still around because it was adopted by serious music lovers who are also techies. Browsing the libraries of some of the users on there can be breathtaking as to the size of libraries and amount of care in curating and categorising them.
I dont think anything bette came along so people are just still there sharing their libraries.
I'd love to try Jellyfin and Finamp at some point. Last time the biggest issue was how it would not transcode the music from flac to opus in realtime. Plex can do it pretty fast even with a super low power Intel Atom. The provided AAC is quite a bit slower, so I'm still staying with Plex and Plexamp.
So far, the biggest problem is simply learning how to find music again. Spotify was too convenient for discovery.
But, I've been happily streaming my collection for a couple of months now, and removing Spotify and the radio has gotten rid of most of the last remaining advertising vectors in my life. It's nice. I very much enjoy knowing that I own and control my media and the data about my usage of it. There will never be ads or a creepy business model. If something goes wrong and knocks the server offline, I have my music cached on my phone.
I wish this were more accessible to everyone. Setting up a public-facing server, or even a private one with a VPN tunnel is too much hassle for the average person. It's so very worth it though. Owning your own services is so liberating