Incidentally, I just installed Navidrome on my Alpine Linux server for test, and it's currently scanning all my local music library. The heck if I'm going to depend to any proprietary device/format that is going to become a brick, then e-waste, as soon as the company behind it makes it obsolete. Happened a million times and will happen again.
Yes, I would totally push for legislation forcing manufacturers to unlock bootloaders and release tech info when they stop selling devices, so that hardware can be repurposed; landfills are already full of perfectly functioning stuff that could be put again in operation if manufacturers weren't so stubbornly hostile to anything Open Source.
Are you going to hook speakers up to your server? I'm planning my Google Home replacement strategy for if/when they add a subscription like Alexa. I want an offline whole home sound system with independent room controls, seems like Navidrome might work...
No need to use the server, Navidrome allows any client to connect remotely (WAN included) and play music that is hosted on the server. It also can be set up to transcode on the fly uncompressed music when it is accessed from a metered connection to minimize bandwidth usage. I barely scratched its surface, but it looks promising. The only requirement is that it needs the correct metadata to identify songs and download the correct lyrics, album images etc. There's a software called Musicbrainz Picard however that can be used to identify songs with incomplete or missing id3 tags data and it works using audio fingerprinting against a remote database so it should be accurate.
Back to your post, if you need to play music from the server, take a look at the mpd daemon and its remote interfaces. It does the opposite as it plays from the server while the clients would be used as remote controls so that you can for example install mpd on a small single board computer (or more scattered around the house), configure them to access local or remote mount point, then grab your phone and tell the server to play the desired song.
https://www.navidrome.org/
Yes, I would totally push for legislation forcing manufacturers to unlock bootloaders and release tech info when they stop selling devices, so that hardware can be repurposed; landfills are already full of perfectly functioning stuff that could be put again in operation if manufacturers weren't so stubbornly hostile to anything Open Source.