I'm old school and prefer to listen and access my own music library stored locally, without being subject to any subscription services that can decide what music is available, when and how it's accessed. This is why I still use a Sony Xperia mobile phone, because it has support for MicroSD cards. With current prices, a 500GB MicroSD card is now less than RM340 (EUR70). Which can easily fit the 18,000 tracks or so I've collected from discount bins at music stores and bring my entire music library, in lossless FLAC format.

Here are a few tools that I use to manage this music library, some old, some updated.

Tauon

Replacing the venerable Rhythmbox music player is Taoun. More intuitive with a prettier interface, easy searching and management of tracks, albums and playlists. It also supports native Pipewire audio, automatically uses native bitrates and sampling when source audio matches default sound card settings, and better resampling when it doesn't. At least to me it sounds so much better. Taoun is available as a Flatpak package.  

Ripping Audio CDs

Asunder works for extracting audio tracks from Compact Discs, encodes it as FLAC and updates ID3 metadata automatically from Free CDDB library. I'm still adding new music now and then, and it works well. An optical CD/DVD USB reader can be found as cheap as RM50 or about EUR10.

Bulk editing and renaming music file metadata Easytag

For bulk editing of music file metadata and renaming files, Easytag still works really well.

Synchronising Music Library and Playlists

Music players on Android like Pulsar can load playlists based on track names, even if the relative paths of M3U files are different. So synchronising playlists between my desktop is now easy. Playlists are exported from Taoun to a playlist directory.

Music library file structure on desktop and SD Card:

/mnt/media/music/albums/
/mnt/media/music/playlists

This is how my I organise my music library files and playlists on desktop and home server.

When I need to sync it to my phone, I simply take out the MicroSD card and mount it like any other SD card on the desktop PC and rsync it with source library (desktop) on left and MicroSD storage of phone on right:

rsync -av --delete /mnt/media/music/ /media/music/

This way I always have access to my entire music library, without requiring any monthly subscriptions or ads, in full quality lossless format and personal playlists all the time, even without an Internet connection.

Additionally I  can move my MicroSD card over to a new phone, and don't have to pay a premium for internal storage of mobile phone manufacturers or cloud storage subscriptions.

I think a little initial inconvenience is worth it.

Hopefully Sony and other mobile phone manufacturers will always keep making phones with MicroSD storage card support, and that we always have options to buy to own digital music.