Currently I'm using Jellyfin (since I already use it for other stuff), but it isn't ideal. No option to download entire albums easily, and if the server is offline then I can't even use the music downloaded to my phone.
I use Navidrome as the backend and DSub to connect to it. When I'm on the go I use a site-to-site wireguard VPN connection back to my server to listen to music and it also caches the songs so even if I don't have reception I can still listen to my music.
Navidrome is great. I use Substreamer on my Android device while my wife can use the same on iOS. Started off a little buggy when it released but it's very stable nowadays. I think many have moved to it from DSub according to Google Play reviews.
I mainly use DSub simply because I don't need constant updates for my music player and it already pretty much does what I need it to. The other plus it's on F-Droid so I don't have to use Aurora store to download it.
Lidarr to dl and plex/plexamp for listening. No issues so far. Haven't got to use sonic analysis yet but it's interesting that you could choose 2 songs and it will use sonic analysis to make a Playlist bridging between the two.
Right now I'm using Plexamp. Really nice app, offline features work really well. Sonic Analysis is awesome. Only issue I have is it crashed sometimes when I'm using Google maps.
I’ve been using navidrome since the start of the year. It was my first instance of self hosting my music and my main focus was to have a dedicated project for it and to not use something like Plex, Jellyfin, etc. I’ve been liking it so far, it’s simple and just hosts and streams music. Doesn’t have any client side apps or any tagging or smart algorithmic playlists, which is fine by me. Plenty of iOS and Android client side apps with varying features that can download. Worth checking out!
I use Plexamp with a lifetime Plex Pass subscription and love it. I mostly use it steam and keep some sonic analysis based radio stations downloaded for offline use.
I use Plex with Plexamp and love it other than the forced online account, which is minor enough in my opinion that it's been hard to justify looking for an alternative. What did you move to?
Yes there's something particularly sketchy about an app that makes those kind of anti-user corporate decisions when it owes its popularity to the piracy community
I use Roon ARC to self-host my library. It is paid, but, I bought the lifetime subscription because there is really no other music app that has the features Roon has.
Other than that, I have HiBy R3 Pro that is useless for Bluetooth, and when I'm hiking I want Bluetooth.
This. I just returned to Roon after a years hiatus when I saw that this feature (streaming outside the home) had been added. And the just added "MUSE" to the streaming as well. The sales pitch for MUSE is: MUSE is the new name for Roon’s sound engine and audio processing suite. And now MUSE has landed in ARC – with bold styling and sound quality never before seen or heard in a mobile music app!
I use Emby(jellyfin broke with the amount of music i have and couldn't parse it properly so i actually bought Emby subscription) + Symphonium on Android. Just checked, full album download worked for me
Symphonium actually works with Jellyfin and has trial period so you can check it out
I use Owntone server and various airplay devices around the home. That way I can just use the built in Apple Remote and streaming from iOS devices. I think there is similar apps for iPhone or you can use the web ui of Owntone.
I use jellyfin, just have the webui on my phone so I don't need to download an app. I have a bunch of music videos that use different mixes than an album release that I listen to as music, so having the mixed media on one server is great for me.
On your second point, if you download the music to your phone why can't you use the files directly with some other music player?
Currently I use Plex and plexamp on my phone but it's not that great. I used to use Subsonic with dsub on my phone and that was awesome for both podcasts and music. Only issue was podcast watch status didn't sync and now it's no longer being maintained. Might try out airsonic and see if it works the same
I use PlexAmp with Plex and Deezloader (now deemix!) that directly downloads into the Plex Folders so it instantly gets tagged and picked up ready for listening.
I had a multi-hour session with musicBrainz Picard to fix the tags, but now I dont have to manually fix anything. I even got Pokemon OSTs running sorted by Editions
I have the same exact setup running on my server, and it's great. I also like having my entire library downloaded on some devices (some of which are more storage constrained), so I also have deemix setup to automatically transcode the flac files to opus and put it into a folder that is synced with a cloud storage.
Yeah I love the useability of PlexAmp combined with the "it just works" from deemix that has all the tagging done already
For reference, here is my library "summary" and the work I put in was basically finding duplicates, fixing tags to be Artist feat. Other Artist and stuff like that and that took around 3 hours to get the following script for the Picard Renaming Script part
I hadn't found any good options, so mainly use Spotify + Plex when I can't find what I need on Spotify. Will check out some of the options mentioned in here though.
Ampache with DSub for mobile clients. It's a bit clunky and dated, but I've been running it for about five years now, so it's been a successful setup by that measure.
I currently use Jellyfin with the Gelli App from F-Droid. It does support downloading complete Albums to the cache but you can't navigate your music library while offline so this doesn't seem to be very useful (only to save data if you have a metered connection)
I used to use gonic with Ultrasonic as a client app but as I have Jellyfin for video files anyways I don't host this anymore. This setup did support offline playback though and is pretty lightweight so it might be worth a look for you.