Trying to ditch YouTube Music & Spotify for self-hosted music has been a struggle. I've subscribed to YT Premium today.
Here's how my attempts have gone:
Nextcloud Music (with Recognize): The web UI is great, has all the features I need. Downside: no transcoding and playback through Subsonic or Ampache clients is slow, sometimes causing server issues.
Jellyfin: Streaming works fine, but it doesn't recognize individual artists (my files are in one big folder, so albums are jumbled).
Navidrome: Similar to Jellyfin, artist recognition is off and playback isn't as smooth.
Not sure if this fits your need, but if you just want to own the files, maybe try playing locally?
I don't have an unlimited data plan, so I use "Gelli" which can download from Jellyfin and play them offline. However, it's buggy and haven't been updated in a while, so I'm planning on ditching that, and switch to locally storing the music files.
I found an Android music player named "Symphony". It reads directories as album, as well as metadata. Importantly, it also saves the queue for me. I have a self-hosted Nextcloud so I can sync music to my phone. Symphony would read them from the directory.
If you're interested in an alternative to Gelli, check Finamp (https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp): it is a Jellyfin client for Android that can also download music to play offline. Try the latest beta version, it is way ahead the stable version and works perfectly for me as a daily driver.
Mmmm, did you try the latest beta or the stable version?
The stable version is quite outdated and download doesn't work great there. With the beta version (0.9.11) I'm able to download full albums, full artists or individual songs. I'm very happy with it. I'd recommend you give it another a try if you have time.