That’s not very helpful for connecting family, friends, and especially grandma.

Jellyfish cannot to setup to securely and safely be exposed to the Internet. It is only safe to access through a VPN. That rules it out as an option for sharing with friends, family, or even my own spouse. You call it phoning home to the mother ship; I call it paying Plex to manage user authentication for me. Until Jellyfin’s security holes are patched and it becomes clear that the Jellyfin developers actually care about security, it stays locked down to my LAN. Setting up a VPN is difficult for the average user on a good day, impossible in some circumstances on even the best of days, and is not access I want to hand out (and support) to all the people I share my Plex with anyway.

So edgy.

If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.

Plexamp has gotten better lately. It can save your progress on audiobooks now. It’s a per library feature, so I have one library of music (that does not save progress) and one for audiobooks (that does save progress). I used to have trouble with some audiobook formats (M4Bs needed to be converted (really just renamed) to mp4s, but that wasn’t necessary for the last few I loaded. Plex still has a little trouble with standards around multiple authors and different productions (and different readers) of a single book, but that’s more of an ID3 tag problem and is resolved if you’re consistent in normalizing the tags on your library. I’ve also used the syncing features a bunch for offline time (like on a plane or on long trips). For a large library, I see syncing offline files as a necessary feature.

And before the Jellyfin fanboys chime in, if Jellyfin could match these audio and syncing features (and be easier to setup for access outside my LAN and sharing with family), I jump ship in a heartbeat.

“pretty easy” is a bit of a stretch

Songs are cheap. Ever heard of buying something for a song?

It’s because that recording industry, the RIAA vs. the MPAA, has had a stranglehold on the industry and artists for much longer. They are much better at exploiting artists while paying them next to nothing.

Mpd + a frontend of your choosing, I prefer ncmpcpp, will run on just about anything and is remotely controlled through apps or ssh. Mpd is great when the server is physically connected to the audio output device. I use it to remotely control a speaker connected server that can also run Plex (because I prefer plexamp for streaming and syncing to my phone, other android devices, and smart speakers). They both look at the same directory of a collection near 30 years in the making with hundreds of thousands of files and a wide array of formats.

Hardlinking files to their new destination and your normalized naming schema. Using symlinks would be madness.

It’s a lot easier to setup and get non-techy family to join. Setting up Jellyfin is easy until you want access outside your LAN. Setting up TLS or a VPN is a hassle I don’t want unless there is no other option. Plex has features I (and my family) use that jellyfin doesn’t support by default yet. Last I checked syncing of files for offline viewing in the official app wasn’t very good yet. Plex has a bunch of ad supported live streams baked in that aren’t too bad. There is a “How It’s Made” channel, a Mythbusters channel, and Top Gear channel. PlexAmp isn’t perfect, but it’s better than any of the Jellyfin options I’ve seen.

I like your schema. I’ve used something similar. My hosts have always been sci-fi space/time ships/stations, user accounts are characters from or Captain’s of said vessels. Over the years I’ve had a TARDIS, Serenity, Moya, Out of Bands II, Galactica, Millennium Falcon, Rocinante, etc. It’s usually whatever I happen to be discovering or binging at the time I setup the machine. For nearly a decade the TARDIS was my server/NAS because it was bigger on the inside that survived through several generations of smaller devices like laptops and raspberry Pi’s named after smaller lighter vessels like Serenity and Rocinante.

Ah yes, the modern day equivalent of recording radio broadcasts to magnetic tape. Made a few mixtapes that way myself. They were absolute garbage quality and I never listen to them anymore, but it was an interesting exercise and my only option for some stuff at the time.

Now I just buy as directly from the artist as I can for things that are rare enough that they are difficult to pirate.

Let this be a lesson to you then. Checking the logs should be your first troubleshooting step, not installing a variety of distros until one “just works”. Good luck.

I’m not biased and I’m not picking a side, but there is a lot of whataboutism is this thread and I stand by my stance that it is a weak argument and a logical fallacy.

Whataboutism isn’t a very convincing argument.

Just organize your library properly and pretty much every software will manage it better. There are options for organizing and renaming them mostly automatically, like EastTAG or filebot. Some people use Sonarr and Radarr to organize shows and movies, but those are probably overkill for you. The various *arrs will be more useful if you’re consuming new media through a server hosting Plex or Jellyfin. Kodi is also a waste if the library isn’t already meticulously organized and you don’t need a 10 foot interface.

If you’re only consuming on desktop and you insist on being disorganized, then why even bother with anything other than VLC? It runs on Linux, Windows, iOS, and Android.

Yes, I’ve done almost exactly this while traveling. You can even carry around a couple variously configured sd cards for different use cases. I had one with jellyfin for sharing locally and also Kodi for direct HDMI connection to TVs. There is a in app on Android for jellyfin called findroid that allows offline copies from the media server, which allowed me to not need the thing powered the entire time I wanted to watch something on my phone, just long enough to download it. Adding samba shares adds a other layer of accessibility. I had another SD Card with video game ROMs for retro gaming, but this one got left at home because it requires controllers and I didn’t think I’d use it that much. I had another with “little backup box” installed for automatically backing up my photos and videos after a day out exploring with my camera.

I used a Raspberry pi 5 for all of this, running from a battery backup, because I didn’t really need a keyboard once I had remote connections to my phone sorted out. Pick a rugged case and you case just toss it in your bag of chargers. It took up about as much space as a pack of cigarettes. Another option would be the Raspberry Pi 400, built into a keyboard. A little bulkier, but maybe more resilient in the face of technical difficulties.

Oh yeah, I totally support the local copy. That will save you in times up hardware failure or fuck ups. I could just never keep up with the maintenance and kind of gave up making automatic backups and syncing. But reorganizing often translates to integrating deletions into rsync or whatever syncing protocol you use, and that has caused me headaches and heartaches.

Yeah, that was a typo. Thanks, I’ll fix it.

I have a very similar setup to yours, a relatively large music library around 1.7TB of mostly flac files on my server. I’m able to organize these files locally from my laptop, which at various times has run either OSX, various GNU/Linuxes, or Windows. However I do not bother pushing the files themselves back and forth over the network.

Even if I did, I wouldn’t automate the syncing, I’d only run it manually after I’d done my organizing with Picard for that day. After all, it the organization with Picard isn’t automated, why should the syncing be? I’d probably use rsync for this.

In actual practice I do this: Connect to my server from my laptop using ssh, forwarding X. Run Picard on the actual server through this remote connection. Picard runs just fine over ssh. Opening a browser from a Picard tag for occasional Musicbrainz.org stuff is a little slower but works. I would then use a tmux or screen session to run the rsync command when I’m done with Picard for the day for syncing to a backup if necessary.

I don’t really bother keeping a whole copy of my music collection locally on my laptop or phone though, since It’s been bigger than is practical for a long time. Managing multiple libraries and keeping the two in sync turned into such a hassle that I was spending more time organizing than actually listening (or making mixtapes/playlists). To listen to my music locally I’ve used either Plex or Jellyfin, sometimes MPD (like when my server was directly connected to my stereo receiver), or just shared the folder via samba and NFS.