mp3fs VS Polaris

> But then I've got some scripts that maintain a copy of that collection, except converted to MP3 at a variable bitrate

Yes. I have / had been doing this for years, and just want to sing high praises of mp3fs[1], assuming some kind of Linux or macOS machine. It solves this problem in a way that I think more people should know about!

[1] https://khenriks.github.io/mp3fs/

I vote mp3fs.

One thing I tried (that unfortunately didn't work) was to combine a file syncing app (NextCloud/Syncthing/Resilio) with mp3fs. If it worked, I would have been able to simply drop a new FLAC onto my server and have a transcoded mp3 automagically propagate to my phone when it connects to wifi. Unfortunately I ran into a lot of issues with mp3fs crashing.

You could probably use mp3fs (homepage, github) as a model for what you're trying to do.

- No official iOS client (there is a third party client however)

[1]: https://github.com/agersant/polaris

If you have a big library I would highly recommend Polaris https://github.com/agersant/polaris

if you have a big library https://github.com/agersant/polaris is the way to go with easy to create large playlists and you can easy make a cloudflare tunnel or reverse proxy for it using caddy. They also have iOS and Android App

Polaris

It doesn't have a lot of features like complex searching and transcoding, but I like https://github.com/agersant/polaris.

I can't send a PR right now, but https://github.com/agersant/polaris is worth adding.

had a hard time too but I think it's this https://github.com/agersant/polaris