cirdanlunae

You pretty much calculated spot on! ;)

Storage is cheap, and music (even in FLAC format) is small. You can fit tens of thousands of songs into a terabyte.

I download anything and everything. An artist I enjoy? Entire discography. I've only heard one song? Entire discography--there may be more I might enjoy! An artist in a genre I like but I've never heard? Entire discography.

I'm at over 125k songs, and I still feel like my collection is a sliver. I eventually want to reach 1m songs and truly become my own Spotify. Finding songs I've never heard before and that I end up loving in my own collection is a joy I can't describe.

While a bit expensive, the Fiio BTR5 sounds phenomenal over USB

Man, I miss being on r/thepack

My data stays with me. I support Musicbrainz itself plenty

I scrobble to a self-hosted maloja instance. No fear of your data ever disappearing if a service goes down!

For my pi, PC, and phone, I use Squeezelite. For the pi specifically, piCorePlayer is the OS that I use to run Squeezelite

For the pi, and DAC will do. I personally use a Hifiberry DAC which connects via the GPIO, but any USB DAC will do the job

I'm using a Raspberry pi, my desktop computer, my phone, some Logitech Squeezebox devices, and Google Home Minis all through my house

Logitech media server, every day of the week. Despite its name, it is open source and in the hands of the community. Then, with cdrummond's Material Skin and LMS Android Wrapper, it's next level good. I can't ever imagine going back

Edit: if hosting the server on a RPI, check out piCorePlayer. It can host your server and also serve as a player simultaneously

Ram does not deserve such disrespect

Omg, it's Limewire, I can't believe it! I used you when I was a kid! Can I have your autograph!?