If you are already into, or want to get into self-hosting you could set up a media server like Jellyfin or Navidrome and use a mobile client that works with the one you choose. I am using Jellyfin with the Finamp beta on Android. I use it only in offline mode when I am out and about.

I sometimes hear people complain about some issues with Jellyfin, although I have not had any of those myself (I have a comparable collectiom to you). I run all music through Musicbrainz Picard before adding it to the server, so I think that may be a pre-requisite for a smooth experience. Navidrome is perhaps more forgiving.

Can it be used without arr-integrations? As just a way to keep track of stuff users would love to have available, but currently isn’t?

I like FreshRSS - I also have some readers that connect to my instance, like FluentReader that provides a better full article view, but I mostly use FreshRSS directly these days.

Do you run the files through something like MusicBrainz Picard first? I want to uniformly tag all my music anyway, so I would do that regardless of which media server I used, but it could be doing a poor job if it does not have a MusicBrainz ID associated with it?

What kind of issues are you experiencing with Jellyfin? It has worked perfectly for me, but I see the sentiment repeated many times so I guess it’s not that uncommon to experience issues. I run it via Docker, mount volumes like I do with other media types, and add properly tagged music in an Artist/Album directory hierarchy. No special tweaking.

You can export your data from Spotify, and use that as a basis for downloading songs via for example yt-dlp (this can be automated), or slowly build it up again over time in whatever system you set up by buying the albums/compilations containing the songs.

While most of my library is pirated, I make it a point to buy directly from the artists whenever possible - whether that’s digital downloads, vinyl, or merch, direct support goes much further than streaming services ever will.

You might already do this, but I’d suggest to further prioritize buying from up and coming and independent artists. You don’t need to support whatever random person/corporation owns the rights to the discography of a dead musician unless you have a compelling reason to so, and you don’t have to deepen the pockets of already loaded superartists/bands. Is there a Bandcamp Friday coming up, then you can wait until then to make sure a larger chunk of your money goes directly to those who made the music.

Hosted on Jellyfin, Feishin on laptop and Finamp on mobile.

I tag all my music through MusicBrainz Picard before adding to my server. I think most of the artists are good after that (i.e. if there is a featuring artist, it becomes a separate entry), but I typically use the album artist field to browse by artist.

ETA: I have run into enough cases of Picard wrongly tagging my music that I wouldn’t want it automatic. It is not often, but enough that I would be annoyed.

And this has actually happened before?

And apart from an undesirable bandwidth usage resulting from someone guessing their way to my file structure, how can this be used to compromise my server?

I’m not overly concerned about my instance running behind a reverse proxy. Perhaps I am just naive…

Why would they need to connect to a VPN every time they connect to Jellyfin?

Ah, got it! That sounds like an unhealthy amount of trust to give to a container, but I understand the need to give that access to the mastercontainer.

rsync from one server to the other.

When actually loading in the backup from the Nextcloud AIO interface, I specified the path on my local system (not the container).

I don’t see the difference

I consider storing articles more as building a starting-point for research, rather than something I definitely think I will read at some point. I store by topic that is of interest to me, and when I want to do a deep-dive, I already have a bunch of articles waiting for me.

I use Zotero for this. Used to use it as purely a reference manager for scientific papers, but started storing all kinds of stuff for archiving or later reading. My workflow is getting all news/articles I might want to read from RSS, and add to Zotero what I want to keep.

With the browser plugin you can store snapshots as well, so you can preserve it if it changes or is taken down. Not sure how a mobile experience would be as I only filter RSS-items on my phone, but no reading.

You can use file sync through a paid subscription or use youe own WebDAV server for it (I will be moving to this). Other than that, it is a database and folder with files, so you can probably use SyncThing or store it directly in Nextcloud also I would think.

I am a folder-person, but it also supports tags so you have flexibility in how you organize.

Oh boy, I got my units mixed up. I am used to reading bits per seconds as bps and bytes per seconds as B/s. However, the network activity on Linode is given in Mb/s. Now the numbers make a lot more sense, and the transfer speeds are well within the limits of my network and what I am used to seeing on my laptop on WiFi.

Thanks, I didn’t consider something like that. Would have wanted to see some more detailed graphs from Linode to see how long these max speeds were sustained, but I can’t seem to find it.