I got to thinking about my music locker problem, because it causes me anxiety. I know that I'm the weird one, and call me old school, but I tend to think of the files that I purchased, along with those that I ripped from my significant CD collection, to be my music collection. I don't want to keep moving stuff around or have to start paying monthly to people to listen to what I already own. So what if I built my own thing?
Here's the way that I look at it. Storage is insanely cheap at this point. My music occupies about 50 gigs, which would cost a dollar per month on Azure. If I wrap an API around accessing the files with a serverless resource, that's essentially free. I could probably manage the catalog and playlists in some flat file format, and that would be free, but I already pay for a database pool for my sites, so I could go full relational database for free as well. (If you're wondering, solving the issues with concurrency with a flat file, or indexing with a doc database, seem like problems I don't need.) Wrapping a web-based front end around it would be pretty easy with Vue.js, though I'd need to build something native if I wanted to persist files to my phone.
Of course, you have to secure all that because it has to be for personal use and not for others, but that's easy enough. The bottom line is that it would let me own my own music service forever. The only outstanding question I have is whether or not there are .NET libraries that will read the metadata on AAC files, which is a third of my collection because that's what iTunes defaulted to back in the day and I didn't know any better. I also don't know if there is a .NET Core library that will play them back, in the event that I built a phone app (because I'm sure not using Java).
That would be an interesting science project. Because I don't have enough of those.
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