#that ends with a nas and redundancy and monitoring and stuff and like 50 docker containers

[breadstyx]

For the power users, there's also Lidarr, who can keep track of new releases and automates download/metadata gathering/renaming. That's the equivalent of aforementioned Soulseek and MusicBrainz Picard, bundled together.

And that can then be fed into a Plex server if you're really about that life, which will allow you to listen to your home library on the go - like a sort of homemade spotify (but this a bit more advanced). That's an equivalent to aforementioned Lyrion Music Server (and syncedlyrics, but with a subscription).

here's a list of programs/sites/whatever that were helpful to me when i was moving away from using spotify & back to downloading music:

soulseek - peer to peer downloading program, has most music you'd want. there's "rules" to it though and the UI is a little confusing, but you can figure it out. there's tutorials. i believe in you

cobalt.tools, ytiz.xyz, yt-dlp - mp3 downloaders, for the songs that you can't find on soulseek

musicbee - music player, extremely customiseable. reminds me of when i used itunes back in the day. has a lot of good features, including syncing music over to your phone

lastfm & listenbrainz - sites that keep track of your listening stats. i'd recommend this even if you still choose to use a music streaming service

syncedlyrics - cmd thing that gets you timed song lyrics, like the ones spotify has. there's no UI but it's easy enough to use. just grab the lyrics and timestamps it spits out and paste it into musicbee

music presence - program that shows what song you're listening to in your discord status, in case you use discord and enjoy the thought of other people seeing what you're listening to, which i do for some reason

i'm not going to lie to you and say that switching away from spotify/streaming services is an effortless task, it took me half a whole day of nonstop Work to get all my music downloaded and sorted out, but i will say that it was worth it!! and you should do it 👍 if you want to