Finally managed to have a go at a new collection, and think I ended up with a setup that isn’t all that bad 😊

• Lidarr (Plugin Edition).
• Tubifarry plugin (so much better than my last attempt, which was with Soularr).
• Tubifarry uses SLSKD as indexer and client.
• Set up an extra metadata profile in Lidarr with most release formats added, for those rare occasions where I need to find something obscure for a specific artist.
• When needed, I manually tag and import files. I haven’t had good experiences with Beets or Picard (neither desktop nor Docker version), so for re-tagging I just use Kid3 on my Mac, accessing the music files in situ on the server. Most things go pretty smoothly, though, and I just use Lidarr for renaming files (and moving, if necessary).
• I’ve made sure that Lidarr has access to a Bin folder, though, for those occasional times when it decides to just randomly delete something 🙄
• For Navidrome, I’ve figured out that the best way to fix missing album art is to just add it directly to the music files through Kid3.
• For persistent missing files in Navidrome, I’ve realised there’s a ‘Missing files’ function when you click the profile icon (top right), and this solves a lot of the gripes I had with Navi previously.
• For playback, mainly on Android, I’m using Symphonium, which seems happy as long as Navi’s happy.

All in all, I think I’ve got everything a bit under control this time around 😊

Now I just need to remember to get the backup situation under control … 🫣

Again, thanks for your help! ❤️

Thank you for the suggestions! I’ll give it another go, see if I can make it work 👍

I was using Symfonium as my client on Android, maybe that was part of the problem.

I used Beets for processing/tagging, which was also troublesome; never could get it to do anything on its own, had to manually initiate every session, and lots of stuff needed handholding to get tagged correctly. Never could get Picard to work at all, neither in Docker nor on my desktop.

I managed to get a pretty decent collection going, accessed through Navidrome and have to admit I wasn’t a fan. Artwork missing, multiple profiles for the same artists, the inability to remove albums that were no longer on the server. The whole thing just felt like a struggle.

Then the disk my collection was on kicked the bucket, and hadn’t gotten around to setting up backup, so I’m starting over from scratch 😅

Bit miffed Navi is still what people are recommending 😔