Well, I’ve maintained my music collection from the olden days, and acquire new music as I discover I like it. I mostly have trash vaporwave tastes so I actually buy most of my music cheaply on bandcamp. My music collection isn’t massive like some peoples, but it’s a decent amount of GB. Mostly mp3, I’m not fancy enough for FLAC.

As for hosting the music, check out Navidrome. It’s a great subsonic compatible service that can run on your OS of choice. I use Symfonium on Android to access the library. It supports playlist syncing, offline caching, etc. etc.

You already have Jellyfin, maybe test out adding a music library and using Finamp or Fintunes to access it?

How to aquire: Normal WWW, SLSK, Torrent
How to organize: Musicbrainz, Lidarr
How to play: Phone: Jellyfin or FinAmp, PC: Jellyfin Media Player or Jellyfin WebUI

I’ll echo what most people here are saying, Jellyfin (which is what I use) or something with the subsonic API, and Symfonium. It’s non-free, but it’s a cheap one-time payment and it’s genuinely an excellent mobile app.

As far as building your library, I do use Lidarr, but it’s a lot more hit-and-miss than Radarr or Sonarr are for their respective mediums. For music, much like back in the day, Soulseek is still the best option. In fact, you can selfhost slskd, which is a great modern web interface for it.

So I recently terminated my Spotify subscription and moved my library to Jellyfin.

For my phone client, I use Symfonium. There are other options available (even FOSS options if you prefer), but I liked Symfonium’s UI the best. It also has a rolling offline cache setting that I find very useful. However, it does have a one time fee of 5 USD. But the client is completely up to your preference - no right choice.

If you care about Last.FM scrobbling, use something like Pano Scrobbler on your phone.

For desktop streaming, Jellyfin isn’t required. Use which ever media player you like best.

As for accessing your Jellyfin server outside your home network, Tailscale is an option. It was relatively easy to set up, even for someone who’s dumb with networking.

I have about 1TB of music, and I’m listening to music all the time. My go-to has been a Jellyfin server with either the desktop client or Finamp on my phone. I used to use Gelli on my phone, but it stopped working a few months ago

I use spotdl to download mp3s from Spotify playlists. 300 files shouldn’t amount to much more than about 1GB so you can probably just use Syncthing to copy the files across devices and then use VLC or some other music player to listen.

I can highly recommend symfonium as a front end for a jellyfin music library on android, it’s super clean and has tons of nice features.

I use Bandcamp and redacted to fill my NAS, which runs Plex with a lifetime Plex Pass. For playback I use PlexAmp on Windows, iOS, and macOS. Very pleased with the radio / shuffle functions, sometimes it’ll absolutely nail a beat- and key-matched cross fade. Great for local library discovery.

My music library has continuity all the way back to 2000, I’ve still got a few vintage Napster MP3s from the 56k days.

In the past I used airsonic. It has the best support for different music files and good support for albums ripped as single track, like most classical releases.

The problem with airsonic and its protocol is the lack of good android clients.

If you need to listen through the phone for most of the time, go with jellyfin + finamp. Otherwise try airsonic + its web ui.

For music acquisition:

• torrent for the mainstream stuff
• niche trackers for niche stuff
• nicotine+/soulseek for everything
• bandcamp to support the artists

I use Jellyfin to stream both video as well as audio. Media is stored on my NAS via a samba share.

Much like yourself, I’m more frequently streaming music. The default apps aren’t great for music (and horrid for audio books) but there are music specific apps for most iOS, Android, and most PC OSs. Can’t remember what app I use on Linux (don’t use it much) but I use FinAmp on iOS a lot.

Navidrome is probably a better self hosted music service , but I didn’t see the point when Jellyfin plus FinAmp and met my streaming audio needs.

As for where I got my music collection, I’m an old fart whose music collection predates digital music. Early stuff was ripped from whatever format it was on to digital a while ago. Nowadays I tend to buy CDs and rip them to flac or buy digital from Band Camp or Amazon.

I haven’t seen the need since iTunes and Amazon Music came around, but if you wanted to go sailing you can find popular releases and discographies of popular artists on public torrent sites easily enough. There are also several programs available that can take a Spotify playlist and automatically download the music from YouTube.

While you didn’t ask about audio books, it might help someone else. While I can access my audiobook collection from Jellyfin, it is so bad at audiobooks that that I don’t bother. For audiobooks I use a service called AudioBookshelf. Great for podcasts as well. The audiobooks themselves I generally buy from Audible and then use Libation to strip the DRM.

Why not just spin up Syncthing, sync your music between your phone and server, and then use one of the countless good local music players.

You own the music anyway, you have a limited library, and there is 0 delay having your music locally along with no buffering, offline access, and it will always be at max quality.

(Of course, not realistic if you have 500GB of music and no SD card slot in your phone)

I’m still using MPD+ncmpcpp. For remote access, I use Wireguard and stream via HTTP on VLC. It’s amazingly fast and lightweight (26MB RAM for 30K+ songs).

MALP also works on Android, might be better with no physical keyboard (now supports streaming also).

I’m using NextCloud Music 🎶

Subsonic (https://www.subsonic.org/) hasn’t been updated in years, but it still works perfectly for me. I’m mostly on Youtube Music these days just for the size of the library, but for stuff I have that YTM doesnt I still fall back to Subsonic that’s running on my HTPC.