[mayneack]

Like several other comments here, I had the same experience as you and decided to go with plex. What no one mentioned is that plex allows you to add a tidal library in addition to your self hosted content. It's not a perfectly seamless experience because you have to mark tidal albums one at a time to add to your self hosted library and I don't think you can cache them offline on plexamp (for android at least), but it's the best I've found.

I'm hoping to give Roon a try someday, but plex works well enough that I haven't quite gotten up the activation energy: https://roonlabs.com/downloads

[lowbloodsugar]

Roon is great, both for personal listening and for parties. I've discovered great music by leaving a cheap tablet with the Roon UI open at parties, and hearing what people come up with. Several times we've had groups passing the tablet back and forth with comments like "Well, if you like that, then try this..."

[busterarm]

I found Plex fairly useless for managing my music library but throwing everything into my Synology's Audio Station and connecting via DS Audio has been amazing.

[amanzi]

The new PlexAmp music player from Plex has revitalised my music library on Plex. I would have agreed with your statement prior to using PlexAmp, but I now listen to way more of my old music library than before.

[oregano]

I somehow have completely missed the announcement on PlexAmp. I’ve just been using their standard ‘Plex’ iOS app all this time. I just now downloaded PlexAmp and it looks great. I love to rate and add tags to my music while listening so I hope this app provides a good UX for that (in addition to the obvious needs like sorting and organizing). In terms of initial impression it looks waaaay shinier than their standard app I’ve been using all this time. Excited to start using it more.

[ascagnel_]

Plex can also handle audiobooks reasonably well if you play them with the app Prologue.

https://prologue.audio/