I’ll weigh in since I started hosting my own subsonic server.

I dropped lidar because, like you said, its full album based and doesn’t play well with partial collections. I dont want to collect music albums, I want to listen to music. I’ve not found a good solution for it yet, but I don’t even think I even need it. Once I get music, I tag the files with a desktop app which uses musicbrains for data and then drop the files on a SMB share. Navidrome picks them up and makes them available for streaming in 2 seconds.

Bandwidth is free and file storage space is cheap. Any convenience I gained from spotify is lost when music gets removed from it. Most recently it was king gizzard who removed half their library from spotify and I actually purchased some of their albums from bandcamp before. I own the mp3s already, but used spotify for convenience. Now I host them myself. Now I’m in control.

Obviously though, I’m the odd man out. Not everyone will be able to do this. But if I can, I will. And since I can, I do.