I am also using Navidrome and Symfonium. It’s about as good as local library playback can get! Thanks for a new one to try Feishin, never heard of it before. I have tried setting up Lidarr, but I never got it to grab stuff and rename it to what i like, so I stopped. I’m sure I probably could, but I didn’t want to spend the time trying.

My current setup is grab from Orpheus or redacted, run it through program generically called tagscanner (been using it for years and love it) then drop everything into musicbrainz Picard with custom setup to only grab genres for everything and will attach up to 5 different ones. From there, i move everything to the music library by artist and subfolder for albums. Once there, i load Musicbee, which is my pc app of choice because of the customization and audio playback quality. Once there, if any album art is missing, it’s easily discoverable and then loaded into navidrome.

The hardest part was discovering that I should organize properly after a decade of collecting music, and it took months to reorganize and tag everything properly. I had to do that once more with genres. Once I figured out how to automate that and would take chunks at a time and have it do it over days, which also took months. It’s been about 10 years of me doing it this way and has worked great if not a bit tedious.

I honestly don’t have too much to back up, so I run one full backup job every Sunday for different directories I care about. They run a check on the directory and only back up any changes or new files. I don’t have the space to backup everything, so I only take the smaller stuff and most important. The backup software also allows live monitoring if I enable it, so some of my jobs I have that turned on since I didn’t see any reason not to. I reuse the NAS drives that report errors that I replace with new ones to save on money. So far, so good.

Backup software is Bvckup2, and reddit was a huge fan of it years ago, so I gave it a try. It was super cheap for a lifetime license at the time, and it’s super lightweight. Sorry, there is no Linux version.

I learned this the hard way as well… I did a big OS update on mine once and it broke almost every application running on it. Docker worked perfectly still. I transferred everything I could to Docker after that.

Everything I do is manual, I don’t really have duplicates unless I get singles then get the album once it releases. Even then, unless the single comes with extra bonus tracks (seems to be a lost past time, never see this anymore) I will delete the singles after.

Here is the forum post I originally found years ago to setup music picard to tag multiple genres, which is the only setup that I have that took extra effort and not just use out of the box defaults.

https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=35975.0

I have a library that’s been growing for about 20 years now. I don’t think I got too serious until around 2009, which is when I discovered music servers to host my library and quickly realized how bad its structure was. It took years of me getting folders done correctly followed by then working on tags. Automation scared me to much since the results were not always 100%. Once it was done I have kept a system to keep it that way the best I can.

So for me once I get new content I use the app tagscanner to edit everything to the way I like, then I drop them into music Picard were I found a tutorial online a few years ago to set it up to just edit music genres. I found the one thing I never got right was music genres so finding this tool was incredible. Took months to run large sections of the library though. Now I got every track labeled with up to 5 genre tags. Once that is done I change folder names to what I want, drop them into my music directory folder which is root > artist > album (don’t care about year since it’s tagged). Scan music into my musicbee app and if any are missing covers I right click and tell it to find them. Then do a scan with navidrome to add it all there.

It’s only a little over a year old by now and even the first release was better than most of the stuff out there, but what it is today makes it better than anything I have ever used before on my phone and that includes premium apps like Spotify. At this point, I can’t even think of stuff I would need anymore, but I can’t wait to see what the next year brings.

Another note, the developer also created yatse, which I used over a decade ago as my remote control for kodi. Also equally as awesome as this is. He is very good at what he does, haha.

I currently use Navidrome as well, but I really don’t use smart playlists like that. For me, I use Symfonium on Android, which offers a ton of options and is incredible. In all my years of using a personal server to host music, this app has been the best by a lot. As for desktop apps, I don’t use them much, but when I do, I use Musicbee, which also offers unlimited customization if you’re willing to put time into it. It used to have a subsonic plug-in, but I have no idea if it’s still active. I just use the local file location and treat it as its own entity. If the subsonic plug-in still works, it may allow you to do what you want since everything seems possible in Musicbee from my experience.

Wow that’s still active? I remember getting one when they had a kickstarter way back and realizing quick that it doesn’t matter how nice the hardware is if support is non existent. Glad to hear they are still around and I am guessing the community is much larger these days. I’ll have to see if I can dig my original model up from somewhere and see what I can use it for these days.