My collection is store on an old mac mini (with debian). It’s directly linked to an home theater setup via optical. I have MPD on it that I control with Rigelian on my phone. But I often just ssh and use MoC to play music.

I also have gonic (subsonic server) that uses the same library. I use Amperfy to play music from my phone. I could use navidrome, but I don’t like web players.

As for the management, it’s all manual. I’ve tried beets but the overhead wasn’t worth it. I have several collections which have different filesystem organization schemes.

This allows me to use Kodi's native front end when I'm listening on my home sound system, to use a web front end to play on any web-connected computer, and to stream from my server to my smartphone when I'm out and about. It's the best of all worlds. I have all the convenience of a streaming service, but I actually own the music and it will never become suddenly unavailable or replaced by inferior versions, and I don't have a fixed recurring cost just to enjoy music. Plus, a ton of great music is simply not available on any commercial streaming platform and this eliminates that issue.

I don't tend to use MP3s, though. I go with FLAC instead. Kodi will transcode the FLACs to other formats if needed.

Back when I still used exclusively MP3s, I used Music on Console Player [0] on my personal computer and Snae Player [1] on my school's chromebook, since we were only allowed to use web apps on our Chromebooks. On my phone I found VLC [2] to be the best app since it has so many features. I can highly recommend both programs.

I still have all three installed and use them whenever I don't have internet. Although I haven't updated my local music library in a while, so I am reminded of my old music tastes whenever I open either of them.

[0]: https://github.com/jonsafari/mocp

[1]: https://snaeplayer.com/

[2]: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-android.html

I never stopped. If there is something I like listening to then I must have local copies of it or it does not exist as far as I am concerned. The internet is too fragile to depend on. Companies come and go. Songs get censored, altered or cancelled based on societal identity politics. The internet and power distribution could vanish in one gamma ray burst. Nobody will believe it can happen until it does.

App: I put the songs on MP3 players connected to a tiny mixer and my 1990's sound system. I keep several MP3 players in metal containers and boxes to shield them when not in use.

It's nice having a device not connected to the internet.

In the past I used jellyfin.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=jellyfin

They also repeatedly offload my music off my phone. It’s super irritating. The FTC should investigate them for the practice. Making my music inaccessible after I repeatedly tell them not to in order to force me to subscribe to listen to the music I already own should be illegal.

For listening I've mostly used xmms over the years, but recently I've been using Audacious[2] mostly.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMMS

[2]: https://audacious-media-player.org/

The little players also have discrete "stop" and "volume" buttons or rockers, which means I can pause or adjust volume without having to see the player. Much better than hauling a phone out and spend time navigating menus.

Nobody ever says a word to me, unless I have the earbuds in; then complete strangers will walk up and start talking. Pause the player, remove an earbud, ask them to repeat what they said; they get angry. The usual.

And it almost never plays a song that causes me to hit next. Of course, it took a long time to get the channel tuned just right - but now I play music for 5+ hours without interruption of nothing but music I love.