I used to use Subsonic, but it’s become too outdated for me sadly. I switched to a fork Navidrome which updates a few times a year and enjoy the improvements it’s been providing. I use it with the mobile app Symfonium and love that they are both improving the API to add additional features and options over what Subsonic offered. I run it on my Synology in Docker so you should have no issues either.
Everything I do is manual, I don’t really have duplicates unless I get singles then get the album once it releases. Even then, unless the single comes with extra bonus tracks (seems to be a lost past time, never see this anymore) I will delete the singles after.
Here is the forum post I originally found years ago to setup music picard to tag multiple genres, which is the only setup that I have that took extra effort and not just use out of the box defaults.
I have a library that’s been growing for about 20 years now. I don’t think I got too serious until around 2009, which is when I discovered music servers to host my library and quickly realized how bad its structure was. It took years of me getting folders done correctly followed by then working on tags. Automation scared me to much since the results were not always 100%. Once it was done I have kept a system to keep it that way the best I can.
So for me once I get new content I use the app tagscanner to edit everything to the way I like, then I drop them into music Picard were I found a tutorial online a few years ago to set it up to just edit music genres. I found the one thing I never got right was music genres so finding this tool was incredible. Took months to run large sections of the library though. Now I got every track labeled with up to 5 genre tags. Once that is done I change folder names to what I want, drop them into my music directory folder which is root > artist > album (don’t care about year since it’s tagged). Scan music into my musicbee app and if any are missing covers I right click and tell it to find them. Then do a scan with navidrome to add it all there.
It’s only a little over a year old by now and even the first release was better than most of the stuff out there, but what it is today makes it better than anything I have ever used before on my phone and that includes premium apps like Spotify. At this point, I can’t even think of stuff I would need anymore, but I can’t wait to see what the next year brings.
Another note, the developer also created yatse, which I used over a decade ago as my remote control for kodi. Also equally as awesome as this is. He is very good at what he does, haha.
I currently use Navidrome as well, but I really don’t use smart playlists like that. For me, I use Symfonium on Android, which offers a ton of options and is incredible. In all my years of using a personal server to host music, this app has been the best by a lot. As for desktop apps, I don’t use them much, but when I do, I use Musicbee, which also offers unlimited customization if you’re willing to put time into it. It used to have a subsonic plug-in, but I have no idea if it’s still active. I just use the local file location and treat it as its own entity. If the subsonic plug-in still works, it may allow you to do what you want since everything seems possible in Musicbee from my experience.
Wow that’s still active? I remember getting one when they had a kickstarter way back and realizing quick that it doesn’t matter how nice the hardware is if support is non existent. Glad to hear they are still around and I am guessing the community is much larger these days. I’ll have to see if I can dig my original model up from somewhere and see what I can use it for these days.
I use a combo of Roku and Firesticks through the house. Since I have a raspberry pi with pihole on it all the ads and telemetry is blocked, or at least majority of it is.