I really like this band.
There isn’t anything particularly knew in their sound for me but the whole package works and I really like the dance/funk vibe they infuse

Oh! I should turn off my laptop. Thx for the reminder

I’m using airsonic, a foss alternative to subsonic. It can have multiple accounts and shared playlists

I use bandcamp regularly, although i tend to just buy and download from the webpage, and then I let beets organise and copy the files into predefined directories. It also can do zip files.

Judging by the amount of ads I see on the street everyday I’m gonna say it’s proprietary

Yesterday I got into a “funny image” post showing someone who couldn’t use the correct date format online and quickly found a comment, with tailors, about the most efficient way of searching through a date-time format. I stopped and just thought that was the most "Reddit"moment I’ve had so far here and it felt nice

Bandcamp is where I do most of my shopping. Not sure where you are located. In Europe, for alternatives I use Qobuz and have used Bleep.
I tend to use it for more “commercial” albums.

“The cargo bike cult really thinks most of the world is a small town in central Europe when most of the world on avg is mountains in Indonesia.” - agreed, they can still go to other countries in Europe and make the same claim. I’d love to see them bike in winter on the Atlantic coast.

I’m currently using beets to tag my music and airsonic for streaming

I’m using airsonic with symfonium, gotta check Gonic (it’s been mentioned twice in the comments)

As others have commented, stick with the Mac.
I recommend installing proxmox on it and run the apps you want. You can run pihole in a VM.
Do you need a NAS? Not really, but if you have cash available maybe get a used tower, use the disks you have and install TrueNAS. And this will only cost you max €200

https://www.alpinelinux.org/about/ Check out Alpine. Might just be enough for what you want

https://konstakang.com/devices/rpi4/LineageOS20-ATV/

Maybe this might be something to consider

Have you tried enabling the FtInTitle Plugin? https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins/ftintitle.html

Nice picks. I would also recommend Adrian Younge, such a great artist. The man is very cultured in music and I also like him as a “DJ”, although I would call him a Selector.

Great album, one of my favourites.
Where I’m from Narayan was a summer hit in the dance clubs when it came out, although my friends and I were more into Firestarter and Breathe. I venture saying that it helped bridge punk and dance in a big way.

Well, its a way to preserve music history, show them to younger audiences.
I remember falling asleep to this album when I bought my first Walkman

Slskd - https://github.com/slskd/slskd/
It uses the soulseek network (an old favourite of mine) installed though docker accessible through a browser.
If you want a desktop app, I recommend Nicotine+ for Linux or visit https://www.slsknet.org/news/node/1 for Windows.

The artists I like don’t come around where I live, so I can’t support through live music. I’ve done it in the past when I lived in a large city. In the end we’re all trying our best. And we all have our use cases, there’s no right way to listen to music.

The best way might not be a perfect one. Still a little bit better than most other options.