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!"

Yeah, symfonium is paid, but almost universally recommend.

I switched to seafile from nextcloud, much faster and I never used all those NC features anyway. Native photo syncing and backup support on android.

I recently got that big CD box out and ripped everything as flac for archival.