Beets is amazing. The fact that it exists is a blessing for those like us who maintain our own music library.
I've been wanting to build my own Plex alternative for a while now. I've tried all the other tools out there, but Plex is definitely the least bad tool that let me enjoy my music without subscribing to Spotify and others.
I've already spent hours trying to figure out all the things that are required to make this new system. And it's unbelievably complicated. From parsing metadata to converting music, to understanding how deep and complex tagging work for music (yeah, it doesn't sound like it at first, but it truly is infinitely complex), I'm overwhelmed by how hard it would be to build a tool that compete with a combination of beets/iTunes.
There are a lot of alternatives for music servers in the world. Can I ask if you've explored Plex alternatives (Jellyfin, Emby, Lyrion, Navidrome, various Subsonic/OpenSubsonic-compatible servers, etc.), and if so, what you need that they don't do?
I ask because I'm working on a new music app for iOS which has pluggable sources, and so my bias is that most of the issues preventing me from easily enjoying my music library are actually on the client side.
I can install Plex, all my movies, tv-shows, anime and music is there.
Then I can drop Plexamp on my phone, log in with my Plex account and all my music is right there and if I rate a song on my phone, it's updated on Plex and vice versa.
Plexamp is what I settled on too, before deciding that I was only going to be happy if I built something better.
Plexamp is quite good as a standalone app, but as close to greatness as it is, it's a React Native app (better than a Flutter app, but still) that doesn't play well with the iOS ecosystem — no widgets, virtually no Siri/App Intents support, no Apple Music integration, etc.
I also decided that it shouldn't matter where my music "lives", and so it supports any local, self-hosted, or cloud-based source. (These are working today: https://imgur.com/szrkeIJ)
I've been wanting to build my own Plex alternative for a while now. I've tried all the other tools out there, but Plex is definitely the least bad tool that let me enjoy my music without subscribing to Spotify and others.
I've already spent hours trying to figure out all the things that are required to make this new system. And it's unbelievably complicated. From parsing metadata to converting music, to understanding how deep and complex tagging work for music (yeah, it doesn't sound like it at first, but it truly is infinitely complex), I'm overwhelmed by how hard it would be to build a tool that compete with a combination of beets/iTunes.