--- I've been experimenting with some Pi-based music players lately, and I'm not well pleased with the available selection.
Runeaudio is old and dead. rAudio is not dead and not terrible, but could be better, particularly the interface, which has some major issues (mainly in how it relates to the back button - sometimes it takes you back in the player, sometimes it exits to the previous page, and they need to fully integrate it into their app, at minimum, before I will be able to use it without frequently screaming).
Volumio is nice, but locks a couple of "premium" features which rAudio does have for free behind a too-pricey subscription. Subscriptions are mostly bridge troll shit, though I respect the model used by Jetbrains, where if you pay for a year you get to keep the version you paid for. That's pretty equitable, all in all - if the company is still developing the product, paying for programmers is expensive. But Volumio is just standard chokepoint capitalism stuff, I'm afraid.
If I didn't find javascript pure hell to do I would maybe join the rAudio project and try to bring some improvements, but javascript is pure hell and I am still learning to be good at Python, which is currently how I make my living, so if I'm gonna join any FOSS project just now, it'll definitely be Python-based.
I run Linux everywhere except my wife's PC, and I got on there to do the taxes yesterday, I don't know how people live like that. My audio solution does not have to run on a Pi but it does have to run on Linux.
I know rAudio is basically just MPD running on Arch with some decorations, and I could definitely just get that wrangled how I personally like without involving any of these special OSes, but I would ideally like something my wife can use too, and I'll never get anything that polished by myself. My PCs are like the cars that mechanics drive, other than the lethality, junkers. She's definitely not gonna open a terminal to launch a playlist, but I am definitely the guy who will do that forever instead of improving the UI.
Why I like the Pi at the moment is that I got a HifiBerry card for it and I am seriously impressed with the sound quality relative to every other PC DAC I own. They really did an excellent job on it, and it's not even the top of their line.
At the moment we just play stuff off the Jellyfin server. The only feature that's really missing from that on a practical level is the ability to get generated playlists/radio functionality, and I still haven't figured out how to do that efficiently, if I could figure out how to get that integrated into any player that is not based on a streaming platform, but integrates a streaming platform to fill gaps in my collection, it would be a huge win.
Anyways this has been my off-time obsession for the last few weeks, I'm either not looking in the right places or else this is, shockingly, still a problem the FOSS community needs to solve, but I assume it's the former that is actually the case.
I have a few different sql scripts that just tear through the mopidy sqlite database and build daily playlists using mood, genre or pure random so each day I get a few "discovery" playlists.
Then, for real discovery, flip through the year-based lists on rateyourmusic.com (https://rateyourmusic.com/charts/top/album/2020/) and the world is your oyster.
[1] - https://ampache.org/
I expose the /Music directory over NFC.
I use https://kodi.tv/ to stream music to my amp. I manually pick the album I want to listen to.
Kodi also has a fairly reasonable web UI.
Keep it simple.