They kept jacking up the prices and making the streaming services worse so I finally pulled the plug and went offline. It’s a pain in the ass, to be honest, but once it’s all set up it’s really quite nice. The only long term issue is discoverability. I feel a bit like I’m stuck with the music I have now and discovering new music and listening to it is such a hassle that I just don’t do it. That said, I no longer pay for streaming, and I like what I have, so I’m not complaining.

I can strongly recommend Plexamp, which integrates well into an existing Plex setup.

Lidarr is a great complement to an existing Arr stack. And if you’re going to host your own music, you might as well look at Sonarr and Radarr, which are so great.

There are two definitions:

S: (n) capitalist (a conservative advocate of capitalism)

S: (n) capitalist (a person who invests capital in a business (especially a large business))

No. See Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Tidal. They all contain something like 99% content overlap. You can subscribe to any of them and access almost all music. The difference is price, performance, UX, and features.

I’m a capitalist but even I think visual media needs a come to Jesus. If they had adopted the Spotify model everyone would be a lot happier. I would be paying for content still. Instead they broke up into a dozen different services with walled content. This is so stupid. I have no qualms keeping my own collection when this is the paid offering.

I hit my limit years ago when Netflix removed the (then) very good rating system in favour of their algorithmically gamed thumbs up/down. Then they started auto playing content when one hovered over it. Then they started cutting third party movies and shows in favour of their own… content. I was paying a lot for the privilege of an inferior experience. Now I have a Plex server with everything I like in one place, no ads, and real ratings on the content. Sonarr and Radarr are my favourite apps ever.