Are there any decent third party Spotify clients or other solutions that would allow me to start migrating my collection back into something I own and curate without giving up the ability to discover music in the same app?
How are you handling this?
There are no ads in MusicBee, and it has all the bells and whistles expected of a modern audio player - it does way more than music collections, as most modern players do.
One thing I found by accident, is if you change a file name (to put it in the right format for artist album name, etc format) it just simply rebuilds the local database pointing to the files. It does it fast enough I didn't notice at first.
MusicBee is Windows only, so if you have Linux or whatever, the main takeaway is having a home server that houses these things. Ours runs on a Raspberry Pi with a 3Tb USB drive connected to it. Pretty inexpensive, and painless to maintain. Of course have a backup plan so you can restore your collection if bad things happen. I literally just have a duplicate of the disk that I take on occasion, so "restore" is literally plug-and-play if the disk stops working. It's a simple matter to use Linux on Raspberry Pi to keep them in sync, and of course there are a lot of solutions ready-made for that.
Oh, and it works with Spotify as well. I don't use Spotify so I can't tell you what it does there, but it's on the link I provided above.
Any help? https://freeyourmusic.com/transfer-spotify-to-file-backup-ex...
There are plenty of communities on the web who want this curation control like r/MusicHoarder (although it's dark at the moment!) - also look into self hosted tools like Plex who have other like minded people.
I've always ripped my collection or downloaded what I wanted.
Rip your CDs or use soulseek (slsknet.org)...as for the ability to discover new stuff, use discogs for simialr artists, etc?