Selfhosted

(my files are in one big folder, so albums are jumbled)

This doesn't give you anxiety?

Download Picard and get your music sorted and tagged correctly!

You want beets to organize your music https://beets.io/

You want to use the musicbrainz database

And you want to scrobble your plays to listenbrainz.

You will serve your music however you want. Navidrome is one of the best, you can't go wrong.

Navidrome does not take car eof tagging. You have to make sure your music is tagged properly. You can also use other software for it that uses beets under the hood. Someone shall chime in and suggest the best app for that as beets isn't end user friendly.

I guess this isn't what you want to hear... but like others here I'd recommend you organise and tag your music properly. Then software like Jellyfin or Navidrome should work properly.

I use MusicBrainz Picard and have seen people recommend https://beets.io/, which I still haven't looked into.

Lidarr might help, like other said you need to start by organizing your library first then look at hosting.

I've subscribed to YT Premium today.

If you're on Android there's InnerTune. It's basically YouTube music but for free ! Just to bad you can't directly access downloaded files to export them elsewhere. (Yeah that's practically piracy and illegal)

I like navidrome + Tempo as self-hosted solution. Works well without any issues. However, I read about horror stories people losing all their media or fucking up their media library ?

Also, that's a huge song library (20.000?)... Not sure this can be easily handled over to a self-hosted solution? But first you need to organize your songs

Jellyfin: Streaming works fine, but it doesn’t recognize individual artists (my files are in one big folder, so albums are jumbled).

Yeah, but like MusicBrains and AudioDB plugins. It should scan through and try to match the metadata to better organize your files.

Then for mobile you can connect to the Symfonium app.

Not sure if this fits your need, but if you just want to own the files, maybe try playing locally?

I don't have an unlimited data plan, so I use "Gelli" which can download from Jellyfin and play them offline. However, it's buggy and haven't been updated in a while, so I'm planning on ditching that, and switch to locally storing the music files.

I found an Android music player named "Symphony". It reads directories as album, as well as metadata. Importantly, it also saves the queue for me. I have a self-hosted Nextcloud so I can sync music to my phone. Symphony would read them from the directory.

Nextcloud Music (...) Downside: it is Nextcloud.

I use Synphonium on my phone, it links to my Jellyfin and I can sync/sort and download directly from there. I use just use Spotify free in Firefox with Ublock on PC, that way I get no ads

For jellyfin/Plex you can try downloading everything with lidarr

I use Emby and catalog my music using MusicBrainz Picard. Before Emby I used Ampache but I want to serve up as much of my media through the same interface as possible. Adding all the proper metadata and sorting the music can be time consuming, but it makes all the difference in serving up the music properly. Music is much more varied than Movies or even TV so it is a bit more difficult to get right and there are sooo many artists. MusicBrainz Picard makes it pretty easy though. I will be checking out Beets.io after reading this thread to see if it can help any more with organizing my library.

Seems like nextcloud is the weak link, can you access them another way? Through a network share?

I used a NAS and VLC for a long time. It's pretty easy and works quite well if the meta data is correct.

These are nice free options:

• Re-vanced YT Music
• Spotube

Not self hosted though

Plex is excellent, and even if you prefer the features or interface of Jellyfin, you should never expose any application (Plex, Jellyfin, or otherwise) directly to the Internet. This should be non-negotiable. Plex solves for external access with the mobile/desktop apps and app.plex.tv by brokering client connections into your network without a NAT/PAT on your router or firewall.

For a music library, even a small one, tracks should have proper metadata applied to them and be stored in directories. Plex provides guidance on this here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265296-adding-music-media-from-folders/

My own strategy: I deviate slightly from Plex's file and directory naming strategy, but it works perfectly. I start with high quality music, mostly from Bandcamp and process it through Musicbrainz Picard into ALBUMARTIST\YYYY - ALBUMNAME\01 - TRACKNAME.FLAC. Picard sets the metadata and ensures that there is an album cover image also.

Before moving the organized files to my Plex server, I run them through MP3Tag and overwrite any mismatched artist names with the album artist (getting rid of artist fields with 'feat xxxx artist's). This is important for when I sync files in Media Monkey to my iPod, since the iPod would break apart albums with multiple artists. My preference is to keep them grouped together.

Hope this helps good luck 👍. Let me know if you want to know a decent strategy on movie backups also.