I’ve been self-hosting my music in Navidrome for the last 3 or 4 years and in general I’ve been very satisfied. Before that I was using an old iPod. The key difference I haven’t been able to recreate in Navidrome is a feeling of my own curated library where I scroll through and recognize all the artists. When I set up navidrome I ended up integrating a bunch of mp3 libraries (my father’s, my own, and a few of my friends). Because many people share the Navidrome server with me, I let them add stuff that they listen to. When I browse the artist in the iOS client play:Sub I end up not recognizing about half the artists. I’ve found that I forget about a bunch of music because I rely so heavily on the ‘search’ function and don’t scroll through my artist library like I did on the iPod back in the day.
I’m not sure how to address this, and I think it pretty significantly affects my relationship to my music library. I’m not sure if the solution is server-side or client-side, but essentially I want to be able to have all the music accessible in some way, and most the time I want to just browse a selection of artists that I choose. I feel like creating a playlist is not sufficient because I don’t know how I would browse by artist within a playlist (at least within the clients I’m familiar with). Has anyone felt this way? Any recs?
Thank you!
I run Jellyfin, but I’ve got a similar situation with our music library. Mine, my mom’s, my sister’s, my wife’s and her mother’s music has (mostly) all been uploaded to our Jellyfin. Before I got married I used to say my music library had everything from A to Z. With as diverse as our tastes are that may now be close to being true in fact.
Jellyfin has the ability to favorite artists, albums and individual tracks, as well as the usual playlist functionality and that has helped a lot. My wife makes big use of the collections function as well.