Yeah that was the tough pill to swallow, moving away from folder based (the old *sonic gang) to tag based navidrome. Not for everyone, but getting your tags in order opens up some nice doors.
They publish a container image as part of their releases, and you can manage everything with environment variables. If you’re used to running containers I’d say this is even easier for testing and playing around.
I think Emby failed to get a lot of momentum due to having hardware acceleration behind a paywall, and then having jellyfin out there offering it for free. When I was first getting away from plex, emby was my first stop, and then I moved over to jellyfin shortly after because of the hardware acceleration situation.
Library scans and picking up added/removed media, kill me. I love kodi, but how such a basic function can be so squirrely I’ll never understand. Maybe it’s just a quirk with NFS back ends.
Maybe you’ve tried it already, but navidrome is a great purpose built music streamer. I was using subsonic back in the day, then airsonic, then airsonic advanced. When I first got on navidrome it was a tough pill to swallow since I never maintained my tags, but I gave a little time here and there to comb through it and in the end it feels like a worthwhile investment. It paid off a little bit more when I adopted lyrion music server and squeeze players for local playback around the home since this organizes by the same tags (mostly), so the whole library is kind of plug and play with things that honor the same tags.
Same here regarding *arrs handling the data movement/layout and nfo files. I even have the “Connect” sections for each set to trigger rescans, but it seems especially for files that get replaced by a more optimal version, a duplicate is left over in kodi alongside the new one which only goes away when you try and play it. I tried switching to a dedicated mysql instance for shits and giggles, no effect. Some day I’ll actually dig in the logs.