I am trying to set up my own such NAS, currently using Plex to manage movies & TV and for streaming on my PS4. Haven't figured out a solution for music and just use Spotify. Any software you can advise to help me create a better setup?
Movies: I use Radarr. Radarr searches public movie databases for movies, and then talks to another piece of software I use called Jackett to actually initiate the download. Jackett searches for and obtains torrents from your favorite (completely legal of course) trackers.
The end UI is super simple. Search for a movie. Click Add. The software takes case of the rest. It automatically downloads the movie and replaces it with a higher quality version when one is available.
TV: Switch out Radarr for Sonarr above.
Music: Still working on this, but set up an MPD server on the NAS and listen using an MPD client on mobile. A good client seems to be Rigelian for iOS.
All super easy to set up. All the software is dockerized (check the linuxserver docker repo for most of this) and secure to access - set up a VPN server on your NAS and use a client like Tunnelblick on Mac or OpenVPN on iOS to access it.
So now I can have lunch with my coworkers, and if we're talking about a movie that sounds interesting, I open up Radarr on my phone (it has a nice mobile web interface), search and click download. It'll be ready for viewing in all its Blu-Ray HDR10 7.1 surround-sound glory by the time I get home.
I'm surprised at all the recommendations for Plex here considering its subscription model. It's a good product but I recently switched to Kodi and it offers all of the functionality I need and then some. It doesn't seem to randomly lose access to my NAS like Plex did either.
I've been using Airsonic for music and podcasts, hosted on a headless Linux server. Supports caching, gapless playback,and more. DSub is a pretty solid client for android, with the Play Store version supporting Android auto and casting to chromecast. Everything's FOSS, too
I use a computer running FreeNAS with a shared NFS amount for the audio and video content. You can use SMB (Windows shares) too. I use a low powered set top box and a Mac Mini both running Kodi as clients. Works great.
Why rent with Spotify? Amazon still has DRM-free MP3 sales (don't pay for a Music Subscription, buy albums), and Bandcamp, CD Baby, and Magnatune are even better places to shop.
