See my previous comment, I’m 100% on board with Lyrion server and client these days.

I only use Plexamp now for local music when I’m driving.

Disclaimer: Plexamp used to be great, but it’s stagnated badly. It was a good reason to buy plex pass at one point, though I don’t think it’s worth it now.

I’m not familiar with Symfonium, but the major defining thing with plexamp is the DJ features for exploring your local music library.

Unfortunately, some months back Tidal support was removed from Plexamp and that was kind of a deal breaker because now it’s only local library, and its “killer app” feature was using the DJ mixes in conjunction with Tidal to do real time mixes with your local and streaming music together.

I’ve switched to using Lyrion instead, along with the Blissmix and “Don’t Stop the Music” plugins with LastFM support. It integrates with Tidal, Deezer, or Qobuz (and I think Spotify, but not sure, I only use hifi streaming services). They work similarly, and in some ways better because you have full control over Blissmix’s functionality for chroma, timbre, tempo, album and track repeats, and more. Also, Lyrion can stream directly over DLNA to a client, whereas Plexamp was just Airplay/Bluetooth/Google Cast (I have Apple stuff, but Airplay is terrible quality).

It’s sad, but plexamp is just my “local download” player now on my phone for when I’m driving, since it downconverts flac to Opus at higher quality than MP3 and at smaller sizes.

I highly recommend trying out Lyrion. I’ve used nearly everything for music in the past, including even having a year of Roon, but Lyrion has replaced pretty much everything.

They have sales, and it’s not really worth paying the “MSRP” price. My wife got Plex Pass for $80 back in 2023, and I got it late last year for $90.

Plexamp is (or at least was) pretty awesome. It requires plex and plex pass for its full features. Jellyfin doesn’t have anything remotely comparable (though you could always just run Lyrion).

That’s great, until you want to switch devices while still keeping your progress.

I knew it was gonna be Audiobookshelf as soon as I saw the headline. Great software. My wife has all her books hosted on it on our NAS, and it barely takes any resources. I have it hosted alongside Plex in a VM on a teeny tiny Ryzen 5500u Mini-PC.

Edit - I’m even more amused that I have almost the same configuration as the article author, Proxmox server hosting the guest, just mine’s an Ubuntu 24.04 server VM instead of LXC. That little server hosts Plex, Audiobookshelf, Lyrion, and AssetUPnP, pretty much handles all my media stuff, plus a separate Home Assistant VM, and has resources to spare.

You didn’t mention your budget. That will impact things.

If you have a closet with a rack you have a lot of options, hardware-wise. If you’ll be running this in your living room, for sake of your sanity, something like an AMD mini-PC with a small NAS for additional hosted storage via NFS would probably be your best bet.

A PC with Proxmox could do this handily. I have a cheap Ryzen 5500u mini PC hosting my Plex server, audiobookshelf, home assistant, and DLNA server (AssetUPnP). It’s only 6 core/12 thread and32GB RAM but still has resources to spare. You could totally do an 8c/16t one and throw more RAM at it.

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Edit - oh, and don’t forget that if you’re going to be hosting a public instance, you’ll need a good internet connection (with good up and down speed, generally fiber is good for that) and a public IP.

You’re not likely to do that for $150. You might be able to pull an old Dell Precision T5500 tower with a weak Xeon on eBay for cheap and refit it with more ram, better CPU and cheap non-redundant storage for $200 - $250.

For sake of power requirements though, seriously consider your use case and needs. You can get by pretty well with cheap mini-PCs like Intel NUCs or AMD minis like Beelink for pretty cheap and just cluster them with something like Proxmox to scale out instead of up when you need additional resources. This will be reasonably priced and keep the power bill and noise levels down.

If you have Plex pass there’s a built in auto leveling setting, but it’s not available on the free version.

Alternately foobar2000 or other tools can apply replaygain but you’ll need a tender that will actually use it. I use Asset UPnP.