Back before I switched to streaming, I did the same thing. I had ~5k songs and zero playlists. I just dumped albums into the play queue (whatever I felt like in the moment) and shuffled them. I always knew what song was playing.
It gave me a level of familiarity and appreciation for my collection that I miss with streaming.
I eventually switched to streaming for a couple of reasons. One is that managing many tens of GB of FLAC files and syncing them between devices is a big pain. It was especially bad when I made the switch about 5 years ago, when 64GB storage was a lot for a phone.
The other reason is my musical tastes shifted away from stuff that's readily available on CD or download. Most of the artists I listen to now only publish to streaming, and the streaming apps just aren't so good at the ad-hoc play queue workflow.
One day I'd like to use the Spotify SDK and recreate the Amarok 1.4 interface with Spotify's library.
I feel you on curating and self-managing FLAC files. At the end of the day, it just wasn't worth the effort I used to spend managing them all.
I'm not sure what streaming app you use, but to accomplish your old method of listening on Apple Music at least, you could just go to each album you wanted to enjoy and add it to the Up Next queue a full album at a time. From there just set the queue to shuffle and it sounds like that would do what you're missing!
Maybe you've already tried that and ran into issues that I can't think of, but I've done something similar in the past and it was pretty capable at handling an ad-hoc workflow.
That Amarok 1.4 interface project sounds fun! Best of luck on it if you decide to tackle it!
It gave me a level of familiarity and appreciation for my collection that I miss with streaming.
I eventually switched to streaming for a couple of reasons. One is that managing many tens of GB of FLAC files and syncing them between devices is a big pain. It was especially bad when I made the switch about 5 years ago, when 64GB storage was a lot for a phone.
The other reason is my musical tastes shifted away from stuff that's readily available on CD or download. Most of the artists I listen to now only publish to streaming, and the streaming apps just aren't so good at the ad-hoc play queue workflow.
One day I'd like to use the Spotify SDK and recreate the Amarok 1.4 interface with Spotify's library.