So I made the switch to Youtube Music several months ago. I really tried to make my peace with it but not having my library via an artist-album view is a deal breaker. I also wind up getting advertisements as it always defaults to playing the music in Youtube music and not in my library. I'm also thinking that storing my music in my phone's memory card would be easier for me as I still have quite a few CDs to rip and it takes quite a bit of time to upload to Youtube music.

So can anyone recommend me a replacement app that uses local storage? I don't mind paid apps as long as there is a trial version. I'd like to see all my music via Artist then all the albums I have with that artist. I usually clean up my files using mp3tag so I assume that there won't be a problem with the album art.

Also, how does an app know what music files are in your phone? Does it require a special folder to put your music files in or does it just scan for all music files? I usually use sub-folders for the artists, will it be a problem to copy it to the phone's sd card this way?

So to answer my own question, somebody recommended BlackPlayer to me not long after making the above post.
I'm using the free version as of now but so far so good.

Anybody using this app? There's just 1 thing I can't figure out. For example, if I have an album of XXX, I put the Album Artist as XXX and Artist as XXX. However, if one of the track has guest vocals, then I put the Artist as XXX feat. YYY. This then creates an additional entry in the Artists tab. How do I get rid of this?

Put the "(featuring YYY)" in the song title instead?

I don't know the app, it doesn't allow for multiple artist names?

FWIW, I will typically put the "(with YYY)" or "(featuring YYY)" in the song title instead to eliminate those issues. Doesn't look like BlackPlayer has the option to designate an album as a compilation, so this may be your only option.

I'll try Blackplayer. I've had the same question about a replacement. Hated losing Play Music for the horrible, resource heavy, slow, YouTube music.
I've been using Omnia. It took a few refreshes to recognize my whole library (~20,000 songs) but now it does. Pretty "light" and low-frills. It's got a perfectly fine freeware version, or can be purchased for a 3.99 one-time fee.
I have all my music copied from my PC's hard drive to the external memory card on my phone, in directories (Artist -> Album). I just told Omnia which folder to look at and it included all subfolders.

Can't help with the compilation thing, sorry.

We've used Amazon Music the last... two years? Three? Whatever that summer was when both they and Spotify had three months for 99-cents we did both and Amazon won for us because Spotify's interface just didn't click for us. I know it's cooler and hipper, but we're neither. It seems to do the trick for us. Some albums disappear and it's annoying (not what we bought but what we have access to) but that's any given streaming platform.

I'm not an expert, but I use Spotify. You can add local folders to your library, which is great for all the hard-to-find/rare/local bands that aren't online anywhere.
The paid version is pretty inexpensive if you get the family plan and split it between 6 people, comes out to about $30/year.

Mediamonkey