Great recommendation on Feishin. Navidrome alone works for most of what I want as it does respect multiple artist tags, but the default web UI is subjectively bad and lacks any way to add smart playlists. Feishin solves both of those issues. I’ll be testing this further, it may just solve my browsing problems! I knew about Beets from a long time ago but never checked it out, I’ll have to see how that goes for my back-end needs. I have a feeling the disconnect between front-end and back-end will likely annoy me for a while as I try adding new files, but we’ll see.

I assume this is what you are trying to achieve by using a visual artist tag?

The display artist (a MusicBee-specific feature) is just an easy way to keep multiple artists in the artist tag while retaining a nice readable tag. For instance that artist tag would be Apashe; Wasiu but the display would be Apashe feat. Wasiu. MusicBrainz does something similar but uses artists instead of artist and artist instead of displayartist. Feishin displays the raw data nice enough I don’t mind losing the display though (it’s all in the tags anyway, no actual data loss there).

Also a little fun thing about Navidrome, when checking the community packages entry: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/installation/packages/
There’s a package for Termux, which is a terminal emulator for Android. Navidrome is in its official repo.

So it’s pretty simple to run Navidrome directly on a phone too. I’ve been doing that for a while now. Also, Navidrome now finally has CLI user management.

Not relevant, you can stop reading here.
When I forgot my admin password in the past and I didn’t want to reset everything, I had to do a weird thing. I utilized the External Authentication (formerly called Reverse Proxy Authentication) to login into the admin account. I did so with proxy_set_header Remote-User "admin" in NGINX config (yes, still on a phone, in Termux) to get automatically logged in. But even then, I couldn’t change admin password without the old password… but I could change regular users’ and also create another admin account. So I did, removed the proxy auth, logged into admin2, changed admin to regular user, set the password, changed it back to admin and then from it deleted admin2.

It’s the closest we’ve got, but it does not have multiple tag support that I can see. :( I am not surprised that it lacks multi-artist, that is niche, but even the genre only supports basic strings. So to create an auto playlist that only matches the “Rock” genre, you have to use contains which then matches Hard Rock, Alternative Rock, etc etc. I know I’m picky lol, but worth documenting this to save time for anyone else as picky as me.

Rhythmbox unfortunately does not support multiple tags, that I can see. It combines genres into one and any artist tag beyond the first is completely ignored and unsearchable.

Amarok is a similar story, artists and genres are combined into one string. You can search them via “contains” but that is very imprecise.

I’ve used it a lot on Windows! Quite handy for preliminary tagging. I haven’t used its file organisation though, but it could do the trick. I found the scripting language so obtuse though that I decided I’d rather tackle Python’s Mutagen library jank instead >_>

This is the closest local app I’ve found yet, thank you! The UI is different from what I am used to, but it has support for all tags in both the editor and the browser including support for adding custom tags. I thought dynamic playlists don’t exist and was technically right, because they are accomplished with saved searches. I realised that after checking docs. Thanks for the recommendation!