I’m using navidrome and symfonium and tempo, symfonium is worth to pay for, it does offer support for other protocols to plu into. What you could do with navidrome, is to create a m3u playlist of your random stuff, either manually or a script that would keep the playlist updated.

Mostly these systems are based on organizing by tags/artists, if you really want the “old school” folder approach then you, I suppose, keep looking.

Or see how to get ehat you want with music library systems

works fine for me, didn’t really see any big issues.

At least, for me, Nix was never attractive, and it should be by all means, the features it provides. I still see this as an alternative, where I’m more than satisfied with my bash scripts and git repos, syncthing backups to rebuild the whole system.

And, on the second part, this schism that happened in Nix is the same recipie that happened in other projects. I just find it funny.