Streaming music from your own server

[isuldor]

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:

1. Encoding all my music from flac to something more compressed and storing it locally on my 32Gb phone (ugh).
2. 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.
3. 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. 

[vanished]

My first suggestion would be to think outside the "music app" box.  A filebrowser like CX that supports browsing smb network locations will also play any file you pick, and automatically continue through everything else in the folder (album).  Perhaps this would work since you are browsing by only files and not tags anyway?

 

Second, though this is a bit of an aside, using a tool like MP3Tag, you could automatically fix all the metadata based on the filenames, since it sounds like you have your filenames and structure properly worked out.

 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cxinventor.file.explorer&hl=en

https://www.mp3tag.de/en/

[isuldor]

1 hour ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

My first suggestion would be to think outside the "music app" box.  A filebrowser like CX that supports browsing smb network locations will also play any file you pick, and automatically continue through everything else in the folder (album).  Perhaps this would work since you are browsing by only files and not tags anyway?

Brilliant. Samba is quite simple to setup and this will get me going.  Thank you  

 

Edit: Well it even supports both FTP and FLAC playback.  Sir, you have made my day!