I’ve previously also tried airsonic, gonic, ampache, LMS, and funkwhale, all with some problem I couldn’t solve. Maybe embarrassing but for the handful of minutes I tried funkwhale, I couldn’t figure out how to add my music files…

Happy if metadata file names are checked externally with something like last.fm to calculate the playlist, just want the music files to be local. Does jellyfin do playlist generation with the plugin you mentioned?

Everyone is saying subdomains so I’ll try to give a reason for paths. Using subdomains makes local access a bit harder. With paths you can use httpS://192etc/example, but if you use subdomains, how do you connect internally with https? Https://example.192etc won’t work as you can’t mix an ip address with domain resolution. You’ll have to use http://192etc:port. So no httpS for internal access. I got around this by hosting adguard as a local DNS and added an override so that my domain resolved to the local IP. But this won’t work if you’re connected to a VPN as it’ll capture your DNS requests, if you use paths you could exclude the IP from the VPN.

Edit: not sure what you mean by “more setup”, you should be using a reverse proxy either way.