I really want to ditch spotify, but its just so convenient to be able to search and stream music on any device at a moments notice. Not to mention the fact that its integrated with a music player that can quickly queue up, or add to playlist a searched song. Is there any software (or collection of software) that can emulate the convenience of spotify?
Your problem requires 2 separate solutions:
My suggestion is Pulse Music because the user interface is a clone of Spotify, with all the features you already know and like.
Spotify plays from “the cloud” (which is just a fancy word for “someone else’s computer”). You can’t keep many MP3 on your phone internal MicroSD, so you need to play them in streaming from something which is always turned on (i.e.: a NAS, or a Raspberry Pi). That means having a “DynamicDNS” to access this device, a music streaming server (or a filesharing server), and a port forward on your modem-router. If you can’t do that on Linux keep in mind Synology and Qnap NAS already include the DynamicDNS for free and the music streaming app, and also the torrent client! The price is very low for single bay drives (for models with RAID drives the price goes up to hundreds of €$)
I disagree, if you’re storing your music in MP3 or any other lossy format, such as AAC or Ogg Vorbis, with a bitrate of 320kbps, a 4 minute pop song will take up 10MB of storage in my experience. 32GB of storage is going to get you storage for 3200 songs.
Maybe that isn’t enough for you, but I’ve been using a 64GB SD card for years now and it still hasn’t filled up completely. I’ve got 1557 songs on there, good for 3 days and 7 hours of music, taking up 27.80 GiB of space. Less than I told before, but I tend to store most of my music as FLAC with average filesizes of 30MB per song because I’m to lazy to re-encode the files.
I wonder what the size of your music library is if it doesn´t fit on a SD card.
You are assuming the whole SD is only for music. It was supposed to have space for other stuff.
I use Droidsound-E this means I have hundreds thousands hours of music in few megabytes 🤓