strawberry VS mpd

Assuming you mean the pre-2.0 Amarok, you might be interested in Strawberry: https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/

It's a a fork of a fork of the old Amarok, supporting more features and modern support while retaining the original UI.

Strawberrry (https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/) is the fork, but I don't think it will do everything you want as far as plugins go. I would also like something that is Clementine but not 7 years out of date.

That doesn't always work on a Mac, so you might want to grab it's forked project, Strawberry (this is what I use on my Mac) -> https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org

If you use Clementine, I highly recommend Strawberry, it's a fork of Clementine which is updated more often, has a lot of bugfixes and QoL that I enjoy.

Strawberry for listening to audio files.

Winamp! Yes, it's a stupid option that wastes battery life, but I'm quite happy running my trusty old Winamp through Parallels. Been using it forever, and see no reason to switch. I've tried a bunch of MacOS native apps, but have never really been happy with them in the past. Strawberry shows promise though. I've had my eye on that one. I might give it another try: https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/

I use navidrome[1], its a music streaming server you can selfhost and then use a player that supports the subsonic api for playback. I use the strawberry music player on my desktop and substreamer[2] on android. Navidrome can also scrobble your music to last.fm if you tell it to.

[0] https://www.navidrome.org/

[1] https://github.com/strawberrymusicplayer/strawberry

[2] https://substreamerapp.com/

I use https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/

Last week I released v1.0.0 of MphpD - a fully-featured, dependency-free PHP library for the Music Player Daemon. It's my first take on a library so feedback and suggestions is very much welcome and appreciated.

mpd server + mpd clients? https://www.musicpd.org/

Eventually I'd like to continue with the other frontends I have planned, starting with festivald which will be a music daemon, similar to mpd.

It's not written in Java, but if you want to look at some source code and/or protocols to see how it's already been done, look at mpd (https://www.musicpd.org/). IIRC, it actually uses TCP.

Well, it’s a slightly odd use case in that normally the server would just be the server and not also the player, but given the kit you’ve got it makes sense. Probably what you want is MPD plus one of the MPD web clients.

You want SnapCast. You'd run snapserver on your Linux box and snapclient on your Pi's. Snapserver has support for Airplay (via shairport-sync) and Spotify (via librespot). I recommend using MPD for your music library, as I don't think PlexAmp can output audio in a way that's useful for snapserver.

If it is just music, have you considered MPD or similar? An entire DE seems like overkill. There are several good options for doing this and they're not difficult to set up. Even good ol' VLC has an HTTP interface option so you can set it to allow connections from your LAN, then launch in that headless mode, inside tmux or as a service, limited to files from a specific directory tree. It's then controllable from any device on your LAN has a web browser.