Interesting that they prefer syncing. I went the other way and stream everything, but locally. Music acquisition is 95% bandcamp (5% is Amazon or Qobuz or physical CDs I rip), the FLACs gets transferred to the N100 server in my living room, where it gets picked up by Navidrome[0]. Navidrome then streams it to the kitchen (via Music Assistant to a pi3 with USB-connected speaker), to my phone (via Symfonium), and to my browser (via the web app). The server has tailscale for remote access as well.

[0] Until recently I used Jellyfin, but the performance of Navidrome is far superior.

I did the same thing, except my navidrome is a VM in a DC. Also run nextcloud, too; so my phone (camera) gets backed up on local NAS and in a DC. there's no way i have enough storage on my phone to tote my music, too. I have "thumb drives" for cars, one with some music, the other with OTRR radio programs (from archive.org). My car has a disc changer so i have 3 days of stream rips from 10 years ago, as mp3 cds.

Streaming was good, when pandora was free - and even when they first asked for money, it was still good. I never saw the appeal of spotify, and i'm glad $0 of mine went to their product.

I have file boxes full of audio CDs that haven't been backed up yet, who knows how long any of the stuff in there will be available in that format? My favorite anecdote is that some songs on official music streaming platforms will have the same artifacts as kazaa/limewire tracks 23 years ago.

I forget if symfonium has a paid version, but i think i sent money to them. There was another app for android that i tried (and probably gave money to as well), but symfonium never does the wrong thing, although i haven't figured out how it weights songs for random track shuffle.

i'm frazzled from this week, apologies for rambling just to say "hey, me too!"

Same setup, minus the Pi. That includes originally starting out with jellyfin!

When on Jellyfin, I used to manually transcode the entire library to ogg and use syncthing to replicate it to my devices. Symfonium's ability to cache transcoded files is quite handy (although the initial backfill of ~20K songs took a few tries)

moving away from streaming honestly. recently i was without net for a bit and i found actually i dont have a lot of music anymore locally because i switched to streaming when it came out, happy to ditch a lot of diskspace/cupboard space.

now i slowly build it up again ;') its nice some streaming apps offer cache thats handy for offline, but its often a bit limited unless you play with it a bit.

Yes, Navidrome is great! and very lightweight. It's your own private Spotify, and has various players on each mobile platform. Recommended.