oh dang @kde 's KDEConnect is a very good program actually.

Easy sharing of files/clipboard across phone/desktop, media control with MPIRS, notification sync, run arbitrary pre-selected commands, find my phone, use phone as trackpad/keyboard, the whole shebang.

my usual solution for remote music has always just been sshing in to the machine playing music and using my various control aliases which isn't bad, but this is certainly a little neater.
@kalium
At the risk of sounding like an idiot, what's wrong with VLC?
@DHeadshot cmus has some nice tools like good filtering and categorization tools, an easy to use play queue and I like the terminal interface, because I sometimes run my machine in tty only mode and I still want music. Also there's some nice support for scripting cmus with cmus-remote and it's own internal plugin stuff. There's nothing wrong with VLC, but to me it's better suited as a general media player than to managing a big music library.