I ditched Spotify and set up my own music stack

I really want to do this but like any hobby it takes too much time. My biggest frustration as a youtube music user is that the app doesn't appreciate that it might not always have a good internet connection and takes forever to fallback to your downloads when loading the library.

If I used an open source app or my own app I could fix this stupid bug but I don't have any control. :(

If you just want independence, just start collecting MP3s or CDs or whatever. I've been collecting physical music since the mid 90s and my whole MP3 collection is still under 128GBs, so I just copy it anywhere I want it now. Unless you really put some effort into it, storage will probably grow faster than your collection will.

Also, you don't need to think of it as an all-or-nothing proposition, or something you need to drop in one month. Just start. Peck away every so often and in 5 years you'll have enough independence to tell any streaming service what it can do with itself.

I want to do this too, and have a feeling that it's not as hard or time-consuming as it seems. 15 years ago, all my music lived in a /Music folder and I could play anything in there, instantly. It should be easy to just move that folder to a networked drive, get some sort of mp3 player app on my phone/devices, and point it at that folder. If the app is allowed to download files as well, that's even better. Otherwise, plugging in my phone/mp3 player and uploading songs manually was never particularly difficult, even back then.

If I remember correctly, all my playlists were really just text files used by Windows Media Player or iTunes, so it should be easy to support that type of functionality as well.

You can more or less do this with apps that will stream your library off Google Drive. The one I tried demanded permissions to read everything in my Google Drive which seemed too dangerous, but if you had a separate cloud drive somewhere you could set it up pretty easily.

Not sure what platform you're using youtube music on but there are a few open source third-party apps for android that may have better offline functionality (though I have not either of them, I just came across them while searching different streaming music options)

InnerTune: https://github.com/z-huang/InnerTune

Musify: https://github.com/gokadzev/Musify

The VLC app can read and play from networked drives, at least on my iPad.

It’s been a long time since I used it but an iOS subsonic client I used to use (I think it was iSub) had better local-first / offline behavior than Apple Music or Spotify.

The large flac/mp3 collect I have from my ripped CDs is the reason I even consider it. I just find the toil to be not worth it over minor foibles I have with streaming music. It would sure be nice though to have the time.. I operate software at work for a living. I don't want to come home and operate it too :( Was all about it in HS and college though.

that's cool. those apps are one google backend update away from death though :/

I did this to a 500 disc colection in fits and starts and it was a bit of drudgery for the final push with three drives running at once. the biggest issue is ensuring metadata is up to snuff. Lots of CD-text has garbage capitalization. Cover art can be crappy or unavailable. Musicbrainz hashes have occasional collisions forcing you to manually enter titles.

Run a DLNA server and you client options grow.

Navidrome is really simple to set up in a Docker container, if you already have some kind of system for self-hosting. If not, it's a good opportunity to start!

I believe it's too risky to have DMCA-able content in Google Drive.

Maybe, though I will point out that Google did/does offer this as a service:

https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522?hl=en

If you've already got it, I'm not exactly sure what you think the toil is? You just copy it places. Maybe just the MP3s for things like phones. Then use an MP3 player.

If you mean the inaccuracies of the metadata, again, you just peck at it as it bothers you. You don't have to fix it all at once. Any decent MP3 player can do searches for specific songs. Nor do you have to do a hard cut from streaming services.

I do have it all hooked up on Syncthing so my changes stay in sync but that's not exactly a hard thing. It's only marginally harder than a straight copy, and sometimes honestly even a bit easier given how dodgy phones can be about large normal copies.