The reason I gave up on MP3's and subscribed to Spotify was because Spotify was easy. I've been listening "Iron Maiden - Empire of the Clouds" song every day and like a week ago, its removed. This was the last straw for me. Right now I'm trying to find "Stremio" of the music world. Can someone assist?
Key features I'm looking for:
Synchronization between devices
Offline play
Playlist support
Both desktop and mobile apps
Wide music library (optional if I will upload music)
Lyrics (optional)
Update: thanks to everyone who shared their solutions 🙏
I think a mixture of Jellyfin and Lidarr are what you're looking for, but I haven't tried out Lidarr personally. If it's as good as Sonarr then it probably works well.
Jellyfin is a media server, so can be access from any device. Most use it for TV and films but its music player and library work well also.
-Arr services are used to crawl usenet/bittorrent trackers for different kinds of media.
I'd imagine the process for this would be you add an album you want to Lidarr, which will then look around for the audio files, use a downloader you point to in order to download it, and then move it into your Jellyfin library.
Edit: I've pointed at Docker repos because I'm a container whore but I believe they all have bare-metal builds also.
I have Lidarr on Steroids to automate downloads. It uses Deemix to download automatically. Deemix will download in MP3 with a free Deezer subscription, but if you want FLAC you need the premium suscription, or the month trial.
In Lidarr you can import a spotify playlist and it will add all the artists for you, which then downloads through Deemix. You can even download the entire discography if you like. Plus extras like album art.
For streaming I use Airsonic from my PC, then the Substreamer app on my android for the front end. You can create playlists in here and can also download songs on your device for offline play.
When I'm done downloading the majority of my playlists Artists and want to get rid of the Deezer subscription, I'll probably switch to Usenet and Soulseek to download.
It payed off today, we had a mobile/internet outage for most of the day and I was still able to stream music.
I've been downloading tons of my Spotify music using spotdl and sticking it on Plex, which kinda accomplishes most of what you want. I then organize it with lidarr. Spotdl doesn't actually download from Spotify but it uses Spotify metadata to tag files after matching with and downloading from YouTube music, it might just use youtube-dl/p under the hood but being able to give it a Spotify playlist, artist, or album url from Spotify makes it super convenient. For some artists I just download the entire artist in one go.
I don't know if there exists a solution with all your requirements. You could host your own music library via Plex or something, and aquire stuff via lidarr but this doesn't have the instant availability of Spotify.
I'd probably use ViMusic (android) if we didn't have a family apple music sub going. It basically uses the YouTube music backend. Super easy to set up and use, has on-device playlist and download support. I don't think it does synchronisation though.
My setup is lidarr+airsonic. This setup fulfills all the requirements you listed. The webplayer is really good and you can use free apps to stream your library on mobile devices. Highly recommend “substreamer” for iOS and android. To access my library at home, I use Twingate (Zero Trrust Access VPN that uses the QUIC protocol and it’s lightning fast). Also, the mobile app allows for offline playback and has cool playlist builder features.
iBroadcast lets you upload your music and listen to it anywhere - phone, browser, or offline access. I have like 42,000 songs and I've been using it for years. It's awesome.
To get the mp3s, I still use the website that's often referenced in old /mu/ memes/instructions.
I'm pretty sure it hits all your features - I'm not sure about lyrics though.
Tidal-dl on your phone using sharable links on tidal. Then ftp your flacs to a Plex server. It's all in order with artwork that way and is super easy to do
I'm sorry to hijack this thread, but does anyone know of any other mp3 players that work with foobar2000 other than classic ipods? I would need lossless support too, either ALAC or FLAC or something.
I personally use MetroPlayer and downlpad songs with spotiflyer. Spotiflyer just takes a link whether it be spotify or youtube and downloads it. You can put the link of your playlists or just individual songs. Some songs might give errors when downloading from spotify so if that happens use youtube as a backup. I have only had 6 songs fail so far with a playlist full of 700 songs.
I use ViMusic, front end for Youtube Music (I think) for Android. Needs to be sideloaded (obviously). You can search up existing playlists. I have not found a single song that can not be found on this app, since it also includes the normal youtube library. It just works. There are other open source front end for spotify that are similar to this, but I've been using this for a while, and not found anything bad about it. So highly recommend. Also, the radio function is the best radio function I have ever tested.
why not buy the album and then use it locally on your device? vlc runs pretty much everything and you could fit thousands of songs while offline (could even remove the gsm/wifi/bluetooth from a phone running some FOSS os and turn it into your offline media device). or just get a cd player for $1 at a thrift store, offline, private, full access
thrift stores sell albums for $1 and there are a few sites that sell new music to be downloaded for cheap
I use Spowlo in my Android phone to download the songs. There's an offline music player known as Harmonoid which fetches lyrics over the internet. It's available for both Android and Windows.