Jellyfin

★★★★★

Jellyfin works great for playing music across my wireless LAN, and it stays on my wireless LAN. It doesn’t require me to connect to a remote cloud account, or constantly push me to buy a subscription to a remote streaming service. I tried Jellyfin out after getting frustrated with Plex doing both of those things.

The server turned out to be easier to install than Plex, allowing me to set it up on my Raspberry Pi without hooking up a local display+keyboard or resorting to SSH tunneling. The initial import handled albums better. And best of all, I didn’t have to hook up my local server to a cloud account.

The players are a little tricky to find, because they’re not on the download page (that’s just for the server), they’re on the clients page. That’s where you’ll find links to various store pages for Android, iOS, Roku, FireTV, and so on. And way down at the bottom, a link to the Github page for the desktop player, with Windows, macOS and Linux installers. (Because the installers aren’t signed by a “known developer,” you may need to jump through some hoops to give it permission on current macOS systems).