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OK, serious question - why stream the music? Why not just sync between your computer and phone once a day or week or however often you obtain new music? Then if you don’t have a network connection, you can still listen to all of your music. Is the issue storage space? I did this with an iPod for years before the iPhone came out and it worked really well.

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I have a small mp3 (sandisk). About 16GB, around 4000 songs. I carry it with all the time (when travelling, when doing sports, when running, etc). The best thing is that it's small, so I can just hang it anywhere on my clothes and call it a day. I still download mp3s from here and there like in the old days (and have backups as well).

Why not using my smartphone? I don't carry it when doing sports, for instance (it's so uncomfortable).

Same. I keep a small playlist of mp3 files in Google Drive and sync when I update it. SanDisk is cheap and great for exercising. I hate lugging around my phone and letting it distract me.

This is easy to answer: my music collections add up to about 400 GB now. Phones are pretty stingy with storage, it just won't fit.

My solution is to have a pretty serious 20 GB/month data bundle, run Wireguard and some additional hackery so that the BubbleUPNP app on my phone can use multicast to discover some MiniDLNA/ReadyMedia containers running in my switchboard cabinet, and stream my collections that way.

Use BubbleUPnP server instead, and dump it behind nginx or other reverse proxy for https support (it also has an option built-in for https, I think). No need for wireguard, unless you're already using it for other things. If necessary, it can also do transcoding for you.

A 512gb microsd might also cost you less than a few months of cell service at $50, and if that's not enough 1-1.5tb is also available these days (micron's 1.5tb i400 costs a whopping $550+; 1tb is more reasonable at ~$100 from SanDisk) if you need more, and 2tb has been announced by Kioxia.

Thanks – I need the UPNP server to stream to other devices in the home too, and BubbleUPNP server is strangely not a UPNP server, according to their website. I'm actually about 99% happy with ReadyMedia (it should serve larger album art, and have some way of browsing recently added media), and also use the Wireguard to keep other services off the public internet, it gives me a lot of peace of mind to have a smaller attack surface that way.

Updating an SD card is something I considered, though my phone doesn't support that, and it ends up being fairly clunky to keep synchronized, and indexing 400 GB of FLACs and MP3s on a low-power low-memory device like a phone with storage as slow as an SD card is going to run a phone hot for a fair amount of time.

BubbleUPnP server is (asking other things) an authenticated DLNA proxy, for exposing your server to the internet. It works alongside a server like readymedia, rather than replacing it. It's unfortunate, imo, since I'd love to have a DLNA server that exposed my cloud storage and media library together, like the BubbleUPnP Android app is capable of doing, but without needing to have an Android device in the mix.

Yes I have 256 GB Sdcard and I use syncthing to sync between Android and Laptop

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