Jellyfin as a Spotify Alternative

Summary

When I stopped using Spotify I tried a few different solutions until I found the perfect replacement for me. If you want the tl;dr: I now use Jellyfin. But if you want to know how I got here, follow me through each step of the way. I started gathering all my music files (mp3, or flac) in my computer, and from there I wanted to just listen to them the old way. The first issue I encountered was that none of the available music players were any good. Winamp 2 default Base Skin We all love the nostalgic look of Winamp in screenshots, but in reality those players are very limited. They work (kinda) okay for playing a single album, but I struggle to browse my library or create a playlist with them. I tried tons of programs, but none of them satisfied me. I guess music players left the zeitgeist so the technology of playing files locally didn’t improve much lately. For a few days, I went along with the good old VLC player, but I was surprised to find how bad it is at handling flac files. I gave foobar2000 another go, and remember how much of a clusterfuck setting it up is. After a few days of trial and error I decided that it wasn’t worth the effort. foobar2000's Midnight theme that probably took hundreds of hours to make. Since I was feeling adventurous and I wanted an excuse to learn htmx, I ended up building a rudimentary web music player that worked surprisingly well. The player streamed music from my library on a browser, so I could spin up a local server and access to all my music remotely from anywhere. This worked well for a while, and it was a nice learning exercise, but it all fell apart when I had to go on a trip. Without internet or having the laptop running to host the server I wasn’t able to listen to any music on my phone, so it made some flights particularly long. I knew I could take the project to the next level and add some sort of “download to listen offline” feature, but the browser storage is not enough for that, so I would had to bundle the website in...