Eventually I reached a volume that cut down on the amount of searching I do as old lists become tolerable again.

> What would you like to see in a good solution?

Tidal is in the right position to be a solution but it's recommendations, playlists and UI all need improvement. They're not useless but fall well short of what they're capable of.

To expand on that, I should note that crafting playlists for others is hard. A large selection of playlists is the way to go and maybe a voting system.

I think Tidal's playlists are curated by their users - which is good. But given the size of Tidal's userbase, the selection of playlists is thin. IDK why that is; I haven't tried to make my own playlist.

I searched for sleep playlists on tidal and found 2. One seemed like it's creator had never experienced sleep. Some of the tracks would have made decent alarms.

For a free discovery system, music-map is pretty good. I used Gnoosic long ago but it's primitive. I don't know what else is out there.

The former has potential to become become distressing but is trivially treated with distraction. Drugs are my primary goto for the latter but the right music/noise is a real help.

I have a machine running Kodi as my music server, using a high-quality external DAC for the output. That allows me to play directly through my stereo with the native UI as well as stream to my phone or over a web interface to any computer. Although with my phone, I rarely stream. I usually just download a selection of albums so that I don't have to have internet connectivity to listen to them.

> So a DB of mp3 files that are tagged?

A mix of MP3 and FLAC. The MP3s were added to my collection years ago. I switched to FLAC after that. But yes, all tagged. Not with great detail -- my tags are Focus, Party, Mellow, and NoPlay (NoPlay means that it's not suitable for randomized playing -- I have some nonmusical tracks that I don't want coming up at all when I'm listening to music) [I edited this because I forgot that I switched my system from a tag saying "this is music" to the NoPlay tag].

> And then simply suggested to you with seamless playback?

I have dynamic playlists that key on the tags. The playlists are a random selection of tracks with the respective tag [or, with NoPlay, a selection of tracks without that tag]. The way it works is that the playlist always has 20 items, so you can see the next 20 tracks coming (and remove them if you wish). When a track is removed from the playlist, because you removed it or it was played or skipped, then enough random tracks are added to the end to bring it up to 20 again.

I've been doing this for 30 years or so (not always using Kodi, of course), so my music collection is very large and encompasses a wide range of genres. According to Kodi, it would take about a year and a half of constant listening to listen to everything in the collection. And I'm constantly adding more as I find music I like.

All of my collection is kept on a NAS.

Hope this helps! I don't mind sharing any further details. None of this is terribly sensitive information. :)