How I manage my music

2026-07-12

Introduction

Where I get my music

Managing and tagging my library

Accessing music

Playing music

Since Navidrome is available from anywhere and can play music via a OpenSubsonic client or the website itself.

On desktop, I prefer Feishin installed as a local application over the website, it has more features than the website and music playback is more stable. Both Chrome and Firefox like to reduce performance of inactive tabs and the music starts stuttering after some time. Feishin can also edit smart playlists, which makes using them in Navidrome much easier.

On the go, I mostly use my phone with DSub2000. Since I don't always have access to the internet (for example on an airplaine), offline playback is important to me. DSub2000 has an offline cache and can even upload scrobbles when network is available. I have also tried Symfonium, which has much more advanced cache controls and in general more features, but had issues with sporadic offline playback (where network access is intermittent). It is also much more complex to configure compared to DSub2000, which only does one thing.

To go old-school, I also own a HiBy R3 II to have a disctraction-free music experience on the go. It works great, but syncrhonizing music is a pain and it's impossible to track scrobbles. If I ever get the chance, I want to get Rockbox running on a device again (I used it many moons ago) and setting up a sync from its .scrobbler.log to Navidrome.

At home, I also use Music Assistant to play music on our TV connected to a good speaker setup. It also uses Navidrome to access my entire collection and works quite well (including scrobbles). This is also my soft alarm in the morning, it's nice to have music start up automatically.