Well, I’ve maintained my music collection from the olden days, and acquire new music as I discover I like it. I mostly have trash vaporwave tastes so I actually buy most of my music cheaply on bandcamp. My music collection isn’t massive like some peoples, but it’s a decent amount of GB. Mostly mp3, I’m not fancy enough for FLAC.

As for hosting the music, check out Navidrome. It’s a great subsonic compatible service that can run on your OS of choice. I use Symfonium on Android to access the library. It supports playlist syncing, offline caching, etc. etc.

You already have Jellyfin, maybe test out adding a music library and using Finamp or Fintunes to access it?

I’ll echo what most people here are saying, Jellyfin (which is what I use) or something with the subsonic API, and Symfonium. It’s non-free, but it’s a cheap one-time payment and it’s genuinely an excellent mobile app.

As far as building your library, I do use Lidarr, but it’s a lot more hit-and-miss than Radarr or Sonarr are for their respective mediums. For music, much like back in the day, Soulseek is still the best option. In fact, you can selfhost slskd, which is a great modern web interface for it.

I’m still using MPD+ncmpcpp. For remote access, I use Wireguard and stream via HTTP on VLC. It’s amazingly fast and lightweight (26MB RAM for 30K+ songs).

MALP also works on Android, might be better with no physical keyboard (now supports streaming also).

How to aquire: Normal WWW, SLSK, Torrent
How to organize: Musicbrainz, Lidarr
How to play: Phone: Jellyfin or FinAmp, PC: Jellyfin Media Player or Jellyfin WebUI

Why not just spin up Syncthing, sync your music between your phone and server, and then use one of the countless good local music players.

You own the music anyway, you have a limited library, and there is 0 delay having your music locally along with no buffering, offline access, and it will always be at max quality.

(Of course, not realistic if you have 500GB of music and no SD card slot in your phone)

I use Bandcamp and redacted to fill my NAS, which runs Plex with a lifetime Plex Pass. For playback I use PlexAmp on Windows, iOS, and macOS. Very pleased with the radio / shuffle functions, sometimes it’ll absolutely nail a beat- and key-matched cross fade. Great for local library discovery.

My music library has continuity all the way back to 2000, I’ve still got a few vintage Napster MP3s from the 56k days.

I can highly recommend symfonium as a front end for a jellyfin music library on android, it’s super clean and has tons of nice features.

So I recently terminated my Spotify subscription and moved my library to Jellyfin.

For my phone client, I use Symfonium. There are other options available (even FOSS options if you prefer), but I liked Symfonium’s UI the best. It also has a rolling offline cache setting that I find very useful. However, it does have a one time fee of 5 USD. But the client is completely up to your preference - no right choice.

If you care about Last.FM scrobbling, use something like Pano Scrobbler on your phone.

For desktop streaming, Jellyfin isn’t required. Use which ever media player you like best.

As for accessing your Jellyfin server outside your home network, Tailscale is an option. It was relatively easy to set up, even for someone who’s dumb with networking.

I have about 1TB of music, and I’m listening to music all the time. My go-to has been a Jellyfin server with either the desktop client or Finamp on my phone. I used to use Gelli on my phone, but it stopped working a few months ago

I also use the Jellyfin+Symfonium combo. There is also Finamp as the free and open source option. And Feishin on desktop.

Subsonic (https://www.subsonic.org/) hasn’t been updated in years, but it still works perfectly for me. I’m mostly on Youtube Music these days just for the size of the library, but for stuff I have that YTM doesnt I still fall back to Subsonic that’s running on my HTPC.