Hey guys, I am a former wedding DJ, over 30yrs. I am retired now for 5yrs, but I still have all my tunes. Over the past year I have been re-organizing, moving music to proper folders, albums, genres...
I am curious what you guys use your music for? With my huge collection I am trying to stay away from Amazon Music, Spotify, etc.. - I have discovered a program "iBroadcast" and another "MyMedia" both allow me to store my music, my way.
Just curious to see what others are doing 
Hi Djerniehoule, I've accumulated a few thousand and store them on my NAS and play music and audiobooks from mostly windows computers using Plexamp.
My main library of about 26k songs is stored locally on a network server, which is just a repurposed desktop that now hosts my media for the house. Both Asset uPnP and iTunes are running to share the music library to all devices. There are four of us that have a mix of Google and Apple devices.
A full copy of all music is on a 1TB SD card in my iBasso DAP. And I regularly update a smaller selection of tracks to my phone.
I keep two full backup drives that are updated monthly and kept off the network otherwise. Because, you know.
Somewhere around 45,000 MP3 files. I keep them on my laptop, on an internal 4TB SSD drive. Backed up continuously by BackBlaze.
Most of my listening is on my phone, streaming bluetooth. I'll load a few albums once a week or so. Then delete them off the phone, and add some new ones. I use Musicolet, an incredibly simple yet full-featured Android player.
I'm at around 846k songs (mainly flac) that reside on my NAS (8 drive wide z2 zfs pool with monthly scrubs to ensure no corruption/bit rot etc. occurs and daily snapshots which are kept for 2 weeks for easy rollback in case of user mistakes) + 2 offline backups in different locations.
On windows, my family and I listen to it via MusicBee and Mediamonkey (v4, only my father still uses it), mounted via SMB. Refreshing the library takes around 30min per device.
On android we use Plex and Symfonium (Symfonium via the API of a Jellyfin server instance as it's the only android software I found that is still performant with my library size due to it creating an offline database instead of querying the jellyfin server for everything). Plex scans are quick, Symfonium syncs (via jellyfin) take around 50min to finish, which is a lot but worth the performance and functionality gain over plex imho.
I also scrobble to lastfm and a selfhosted instance of maloja via multi-scrobbler. On android I use Pano Scrobbler.
I'm also testing Navidrome and lms as sources for Symfonium from time to time (and give feedback to the devs of both) but the tag support (especially multi value tags) isn't as fully fledged as with jellyfin yet and there are still a few quirks in both. Once that changes they'll probably run circles around jellyfin and I'll switch to one of them.
Personally I'd never entrust a "cloud" service with my files. There are far too many years of work in there (also I'm a control freak). That's why there are only 2 PCs with write permission for the music. Every other device and piece of software has it mounted read only, including plex and jellyfin.
After reading what I wrote, that all sounds a bit technical but the main thing is this: whatever you do with your music, aim to enjoy it in whichever way works best for you and with whatever software and hardware fits your needs.
But never forget to back it up.
I am currently sitting on a measly 5k tracks. For a while now I've been the designated DJ amongst my friends due to my vast intrests in music I usually have a little something for everyone. I recently started a club which hosts events so whenever we need to make a playlist or mix for the event these songs i've been stockpiling come in handy.
I do most of my listening on my old phone as i primary use bluetooth devices & my car. I am currently undergoing (for me) a massive overhall of my library.
I've recently run into:
So I'm combing through upgrading tracks, fixing tags, formatting tags to work more effectively with this new player im using.
Ive also added quite a bit of custom tags to my files. My most recent addition is what I call the Explicit Score which gives me a numerical count of the choice words present in the lyrics.
This is extremely useful for me as I'm often around sensitive ears or playing music for a public audience so its nice to have this info handy so I know if what im playing is suitable.
One thing I am still struggling with is how I plan to store alternate versions (mostly clean/radio edits) of tracks. These arent always tracks I want on demand but when they are needed they're NEEDED.
Not long ago I was using Google Play Music & Samsung Music Player in tandem to play music. I had my local library & I could search most songs & alternate versions of them on the fly with Google Play.
Using two apps for music was a bit hectic but Google play was amazing for allowing your local files & files you were srreaming to be in the same queue. (Youtube Music, the bougie replacement does not allow this)
Similarly though I'd like to have those peakaboo tracks available at a search but not permanently present within the main library at all times if that makes sense.
Open to any ideas
hey man can I get a copy of your 846k mp3s? Do you do Vinyl conversions or mostly just EAC FLAK files? What is that like 6TB? Flac though...that must be about 10 times as much. 60TB of FLAC files...dag! I have thought about this before, just how much space it would take to save everything in HD audio.
I have a measly 50000 audio files I have collected and tried unsuccessfully to organize over the years. I keep them on microSDs, and SSDs on computers and backup drives. One day it will all be lost. It gets worse with every pass.
I also use the Musicolet app as the other guy above. It got WAY worse for me when Google introduced the awful and crippling SCOPED STORAGE along with Android 11. Any of you who don't know what that is yet? The Musicolet player which is hands down the winner for listening to a personally collected music collection, now is crippled by Google's Scoped Storage.
But I digress. I occasionally still listen to this old crappy music I collected in a former incarnation in a former life. Occasionally I try to fix the file art or tags or organize it. Usually like a Dutchman i stick my finger in a dyke only to have a outpouring of corrupted files shoot out from a brand new hole elsewhere. It is not great, but I can still listen to "Tim" or "One Day It WIll Please Us To Remember Even This" when I want to, even without Google's permission or verification of my biometrics or paying again or anything.
I am not a fan of Google..more the dissident that despises Google, but I remember the good things that Google threw away and destroyed because they were good. Google Earth Panorama photos. Google Music where I got a few nice albums for pennies and anonymously with Google Play cards I bought at a newsstand with cash. I got the Sonic's Rendezvous 6 disc box set there for about 5 bucks. That was a good place to pick up music. I guess you with your 846k songs..are competing with that place. Maybe you should be selling it. Sounds like you must have a pretty much like server type thing to contain all that stuff. Can you believe Google just selling everyone's music and giving it away for free on Youtube. Scumbags. Worst thing is I had like 100 albums wishlisted and they just friggin erased it.
I'm not sure how this affected Musicolet? I'm on a Pixel with the latest Android, and have no external storage (which I think is what Scoped Storage refers to, although I'm no expert). And Musicolet works great. I have thousands of MP3 tracks on my Pixel, and Musicolet plays them without any issues.
What issues are you seeing?
I used dbpoweramp to rip thousands of CDs as that performs far better than EAC when using multiple CD drives at the same time (in the end I used 9). EAC just loves locking up the system. Also I'm not one of the "it has to be a 100% log" crowd. If it is either verfied with accuraterip or read out twice bit identical it's good enough for me.
Currently my library is at 22.6TB.
That's usually a result of bad practises. I ensure that my files are not corrupt by storing them on a server that once per month reads out all files it stores and checks them against checksums. If a file fails the verification it is restored from parity information.
Also whenever I copy something I use verification, so it's not read once and written once but read from source, written to the destination, then read from the destination and compared to the source. Takes twice as much time but ensures that nothing is lost "in transit".
I'm quite happy with Symfonium. Haven't tried Musicolet, what in particular makes it stand out?
There are far bigger fish than me out there. 
Not familiar with Symfonium, but will check it out. Always interested in learning more about different Android music players.
Musicolet is easy to use, and clean. Very simple. Very clean. Doesn't connect to the Internet at all. Since my music is tagged by me, to my standards, I like the fact it doesn't go out to the Internet and try to find album covers or song descriptions or anything.
It uses Queues to play music, and you can have multiple queues active (although only one can actually play at a time, obviously). Anytime you play something (folder, album, whatever), it gets put in a queue, and played. You can leave that queue, go play something else, then come back to that first queue at any time, and it remembers where you were.
I might be listening to Taylor Swift, then decide I'm in the mood for some Dead, then want some Return To Forever, and then at some point want to finish that Taylor Swift album. All done thru queues.
Incredibly powerful, yet siple & easy to use program.
That's what backups are for, especially with personally curated music libraries that are often unique to each collector. It doesn't matter if you have 25 files or 846k, if you lose something special. I have multiple backups, including portable drives that are not regularly left connected to any computer, in case, you know... 
I don't think this boils down to Google's scoped access. It has created a few headaches, but many other Google app music players have worked with or around it. I've left some thoughts about several apps that I use regularly here.
While I personally rarely use that feature (with music at least, tv shows are a different matter), Symfonium did add having and managing multiple queues with one of the last updates.
Symfonium can be complicated, if you want it to be. It can also be extremely clean. There's a boat load of configuration options that allows you to set up your UI in a bazillion different ways. I love that the dev usually responds to bug reports or feature requests at the same day (or within a couple of days at the worst) and is quick to implement new features if they are reasonable.
I think my feature requests alone led to 10ish new options haha.
What personally sold Symfonium to me is that it creates a local database instead of querying the server (be it plex, emby, navidrome, jellyfin, lms or something else) for everything (which with my amount of files is usually painfully slow).
I can find and play any of my 846k files within a couple of seconds on my phone, download and cache that particular album to local storage or just search something else and it doesn't feel sloggish. No matter if I'm at home or out in the world.
No other app that I tried came remotely close in terms of performance or features and Symfonium is the only app that allows me to "enjoy" browsing for music on my phone.
Blockquote
I mean the Musicolet has gotten a lot worse over time. I am going to try another music player I think. You know, these scans used to complete instantly in Musicolet (pre scopes) Like almost instantly. Usually 1 minute, about. Yes certainly I need the MicroSD for my music. I have the 500GB version from Samsung, which is enough for my modest size collection.
Now the first big problem I saw with the scopes started in 2021 I'd say. It started taking a major length of time to just scan the phone storage, similar to in the old days 10 years ago using VLC player (v6.0.2 iirc) which took hours to scan all the files into. Well at least Musicolet doesn't store all the mp3 art in its 'cache' hogging 7+GB on the phone storage.
I do use the queues. I like most everything about Musicolet. Though it has failed me lately. I am going to try some of these other players mentioned here as I am currently with fresh files and coming up with missing artworks. Pretty much agree with Astrohip that the Musicolet not doing ads, and general amount of choices had the upper hand until recently I had got more into tagging and got mp3tag installed last year. Now that I have been messing with the tags this way I have run into a whole mess of other issues. The reason I made new files (in iTunes it took about a month to clean out extra folders and albums and make the new conversion files) was because post mp3tag, the files all showed up with extra minutes at the end of silence in Musicolet. Today my new files show spotty artwork, though the times are leastwise now solid and no silence (extra times) added, so I can listen on that phone again which had been basically impossible due to the way Musicolet played the next song while saying it was playing the silence of the finished song on the view. I don't know why.
I went on the browser version of Google Play Store and perused thru about 50 of the 1 star reviews for Musicolet, and found that one other person had experienced this extra time silence in there (back in 2021). There are over 10 million downloads for Musicolet.
Yeah I have a lot of backups here and there. The storage gets more affordable as I go too. I have a lot of things to store too much that maybe why I am developing a come what may attitude about the loss of certain files of mine.
Symfonium or GoneMAD. I wish that they would put these on fdroid because I really don't have Google Play Store on my phones it would require enabling all these options. Maybe those will be on the Samsung app store but I doubt it. Fdroid would be ideal. That is my app store of choice.
Blockquote
Surely I am more of a what I would consider typical music owner. In fact I always thought I was more fastidious because of this tagging compulsion and album art. But I didn't really get into this very early on (2000s even not) and did not really embrace computers back in the Vista or XP days (XP right?) I hear so many XP lovers I guess they know a lot more about the history and tagging and mp3s. I was strictly CDs till about 2011.
That's not going to happen I'm afraid as Symfonium is closed source.
Sounds like there are underlying issues with your files. My files are used with mediamonkey, musicbee, jellyfin, plex, plexamp, lms, navidrome, symfonium and foobar2000 (I probably forgot a few others) and length, artwork etc. work fine in all of these.
Maybe. Initially (2011) I made about 160GB of m4a in iTunes. Since then well, I guess with this recent reconversion I just did everything decreased to 320 so I guess it's doubled which sounds about right since it was 13 years before 2011 collected and it's been another since. There were a lot of sources I kept ripping with iTunes too. Of course those Google Play card purchases. Who knows. Never used Spotify, never used any of those things you mentioned. There are files that I just recently put the artwork to, and they have artwork on my Sony but the artwork won't show now in this newest converted iTunes version in my Samsung. Dang too cause I was hoping to screen record and show the difference in the Samsung and Sony in a scan with Musicolet but I am not trying it with this mess of files. I have started to look at this as an impossible task.
All the software I mentioned are players/servers to play/serve you your own music files.
Most audio formats allow checking the files for errors in one way or another.
You can check flac files for example with the flac command line tool.
Running something like:
flac --verify *.flac
would check the flac files in the folder in which you ran the command for errors (if the flac command line program is in your PATH).
It probably isn't. I suspect that you weren't aware of some of the side effects of some of the operations you performed on your files recently, which led to confusion and frustration. Which is usually where backups come into play to restore the last known moment where your files worked as you want.
If your files pass verfication steps like I described for flac files, the rest of your issues are probably "only" tags and embedded images and with a bit of patience that stuff can almost always be corrected.
This is a task I began 10 years ago. It only gets worse with each new attempt. I could write a book. These files are literally always going to throw up some kind of error. Every year I have gone into an attempt to get them fixed and looking right. Every year after that there has been a brand new issue. I really think it can't be done. Maybe a PhD in metadata could get this stuff to work, but a casual music fan is always going to have holes.
Got on my wifeys phone and checked that Google play store. Downloaded the GoneMAD and Symfonium apps and shot them over to my phone in a zipped folder on BT. Unfortunately both are requiring GPS and a payment to use. Unfortunately one can't simply count on an app to work from GPS after one has it paid for, if one doesn't also keep GPS on ones phone constantly. So I guess those are two very dead ends.
Shoot the dev of symfonium a message. I think he does offer activation for de-googled devices, just not "officially".
See here.
Foobar mobile is currently free in development. Neutron and Poweramp offer payment options through their websites if you prefer to avoid GPS, but neither are free.