I was just adding some music to my Plex server and thought about my experiment with using Jellyfin. Plex is a commercial media server that used to be open source. Jellyfin is a fork of early Plex code before it became closed proprietary software.
I decided to try Jellyfin because of a few annoying features of Plex around music and audiobooks. At this point I don’t even remember what they were. Anyway, between that and the idea of supporting open source I thought Jellyfin might be a good option. It was fairly simple to start and I want to say it was lighter on my resources, though I don’t remember exactly.
But the funny thing was: Jellyfin was even worse for my usage. The app had some pretty serious bugs around music playback, and the sync functionality just downloaded to a local folder so playing “synced” music was not transparent. I have some very large .flac files that don’t stream very well. Since music is what I primarily use Plex for, that was a deal breaker.
The sad part of this story was that my media files moved when I came back to Plex, so I had to completely start over on the Plex-specific library management. But at least it works!