Hello Android users,
After a few years of using the limited libraries of Spotify, Google/Apple music, I'm missing my old not-available-for-streaming music collection. As a sysadmin, running a restricted-access server with ftp or http-indexing on my old music library is trivial. So I have the following bad options for streaming music from my own server, and I'm hoping to come up with a better solution:
Encoding all my music from flac to something more compressed and storing it locally on my 32Gb phone (ugh).
Mount remote storage (smb/ftp/sftp/sshfs/etc) to trick music apps into thinking the music is local. This is both overkill and totally lame, since I only need that storage mounted when I'm streaming. And my past experience (ancient though it is, at this point) is that FUSE is fucking buggy on Android.
Upnp - Besides the fact that upnp is awful, my stuff is organized by folders and I am simply not taking any responsibility for whatever metadata there is anymore. I still remember spending hours fixing up mp3 metadata back in the day and I'm never doing that again. I've seen purchased music that I've downloaded from the label with half-assed metadata.
Which brings me to why I'm wondering if there's an app for this. Is there an app that I can give a http url, and it'll let me navigate and start playing music out of indexed folders with a tap? I don't even mind re-encoding flac to OGG or MP3 if that's all the app supports. Of course when I search for "music player" in the app store, the results is a shit-ton of crappy looking apps. My goto apps for local music are DDB2 (ye old deadbeef) and VLC. Neither really handle this use-case particularly well. DDB2 ceased development a couple years ago and the best I can get VLC to do is play one song at a time.
