Navidrome: the music specialist
Navidrome does one thing: music. It is a single small binary, scans large libraries fast, reads tags carefully (MusicBrainz IDs, ReplayGain, multi-artist), and speaks the full OpenSubsonic API — which is what every serious mobile client, RoadSonic included, is built for. It has no video, no account service and no paid tier. Remote access is yours to arrange with a reverse proxy. If you only want music, start here.
Plex: convenient, with strings attached
Plex Media Server is the easiest to reach from outside: sign in on plex.tv and the server is discovered, with Relay as a fallback when direct routes fail. Music metadata is good, and if your family already uses Plex for films, adding the music library costs nothing. The trade-off is the plex.tv dependency: sign-in goes through Plex's account service, and some server-side features are gated behind Plex Pass. RoadSonic uses the official PIN flow and never sees your password.
Jellyfin and Emby: the media servers
Jellyfin is fully open source, free, and handles music alongside films and series with per-user libraries. Quick Connect makes signing in on a phone painless — approve a code on the web UI. Emby is its commercial sibling with a similar model. Both are excellent if you already run them; the music-specific polish (tag handling, artist metadata, lyrics endpoints) is a step behind Navidrome, so expect to lean more on RoadSonic's own enrichment for biographies and lyrics.
The Subsonic family: Ampache, gonic, LMS, Airsonic, Nextcloud Music
All of these speak the Subsonic API, so RoadSonic treats them like Navidrome. gonic is the smallest and fastest for a Raspberry Pi, with per-client transcoding profiles. LMS is strong on classical music. Ampache is the veteran with a big web catalog. Nextcloud Music is the zero-effort option if your files already live in Nextcloud. Pick by what you already run, not by the client — the client is the same.
How RoadSonic handles each
OpenSubsonic servers are validated against a real Navidrome instance (thousands of FLAC, MP3 and Opus tracks). Plex, Jellyfin and Emby are implemented against the official APIs with protocol contract tests, and a validation campaign on real servers is in progress — if your server version misbehaves, write to us and we add a test. Whatever you choose, you get the same merged library, the same verified offline reserve, the same CarPlay interface — and you can connect several servers at once and let RoadSonic deduplicate by MusicBrainz and ISRC identifiers.
