I am at my wits end with this and kindly ask for assistance.

I cannot for the life of me decide on how to set up my music library for the foreseeable future:

  • I started out having my library on my local pc, managed by MediaMonkey
  • As I bought a NAS, I moved my library to it and used Navidrome to stream it to an android app (Synfonium)
  • This meant that I’d lose the MediaMonkey management, but I thought for now I’d just manually transfer new songs/playlists over to the NAS when needed
  • As I started streaming with Navidrome, I noticed that the speeds were really bad and music often buffered (no idea why, Jellyfin works fine), so I cached all the songs offline
  • This made me think that I don’t even need Navidrome since at that point I could just copy the music files to my phone if they’re gonna be offline anyway, but then I don’t have a backup on the NAS

And now I’m kinda lost, unsure what the best way to handle this is. I’d like to keep MediaMonkey in the flow for library and playlist management, and streaming is pretty cool for those times where I’m listening on other devices. However, having the music on my NAS just seems to create an extra middleman. What’s most important to me is a smooth mobile experience, with a good UI and no interruptions, as that is where I listen to music 95% of the time.

How do you do it ? Any suggestions for how to future proof my setup without too much of a hassle (still kinda new to all this stuff)? For reference I don’t have a huge music library, maybe a few dozen GB, so it still fits easily on my phone.

Sorry if this was too long or doesn’t fit the subreddit, but I hope someone can enlighten me.

  • @atzanteolEnglish
    4•2 months ago

    I’m not familiar with MediaMonkey so this may not be an option but…

    I’ve used Subsonic for a number of years as my streaming server. I don’t use tools to manage my files but one of the things I really like about Subsonic is that it will present the local file system structure to the clients (rather than only relying on ID3 tags). So if I create a directory called “1990s” it will show up in the Subsonic hierarchy (eventually - it scans periodically for new files).

    I’m assuming you could use MediaMonkey to manage the files on your NAS over CIFS? Then Subsonic could just read the filesystem over NFS as well and serve what you have setup.

    Subsonic clients offer the option to cache files or stream as well which is great for traveling.