This article fails to mention the absolute butchering of features that takes place moving from a typical music streaming subscription to a self hosted Jellyfin library.
A large part of my listening on YouTube Music is going to a particular song or band I like and clicking "Radio", which generates a playlist of similar sounding songs. You can then fine tune it with a filter i.e "Popular songs, deep cuts" or specific elements of the song "More emo", "Slow paced" etc. This exposes me to a lot of new music and keeps it fresh and if I'm lucky I'll discover a new artist or song to add to my rotations.
You lose that.
A lot of these services overtime build mixes which takes your listening habits and tries to categorize them into specific mixes made up of your existing library & new music.
I don't browse any music forums and so apart from my favourite bands, I have no idea on when artists I like release new albums and would not encounter them on a self hosted solution, etc.
I would have agreed with you 3 years ago. But now not so much.
Spotify "Radio" feature just tends to want to give me music I've already listened to over new music. Whatever algorithm they are using has waaaay overfit to what I have already liked.
There used to be curated playlists done by humans, now almost everything is "made for you by Spotify" playlists which, have the exact same issue as the radio stations, suddenly it's all the same music you've already been listening to, very little new music. If you want new music, you need to find a playlist made by a user instead.
This! I recently ditched Spotify and rediscovered radio in the past few weeks. There are so many great songs I've come across from bands I enjoy that I had never heard of because, as someone else said, Spotify's algorithm is way overfit.
It's also great sometimes to discover great music from genre you usually don't like, or... just be exposed to songs you don't like. This is what helps building a musical culture.
Please allow me to recommend FIP, as a human (it's a classic here but there's no such thing as recommending too much FIP) : https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip
FIP and NTS are my goto's. The discovery features for shows on NTS and the "in focus" specials are great, so many good opportunities there for serendipitous listening. Will def check out radio paradise
FIP is broadcasting in FM in France, so no big news on that one, for me.
But i will investigate NTS. I knew their radios streams, but it seems they also have some pretty niche podcasts !
And remember you can always get the audio steam through HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), on its M3U format, or others with better quality.
There are many Android apps like Transistor to enjoy the stream, and even VLC can open these, in order to avoid using a web browser.
Likewise, I prefer online radios than big tech algorithms that craft my music experience.
I respectfully disagree. If you're into classic rock those stations are pivoting around here to 90s and 2000s rock since that's "classic" now. Then you're left with ButtRock stations that play mostly the same thing every day at the same times in the same order. The best radio we had in our area was a college station that has an hour or two of stuff I'm interested in or as close to a legal pirate radio you can get (100w tower) that shut down - THAT was amazing. Had a ton of DJs who played things they liked.
Outside of rock you're left with automated pop and country stations who have computerized playlists.
Community radio DJ. Community being the important part.
Most of the radio stations here in Columbus, Ohio are what you described, the clearchannel / IHeartMedia stations.
However, there is an independent radio station and it's so great. They play Democracy Now! during the daytime and they have a rotating list of shows for the evening. I've heard some really great music during the evening shows.
Disclaimer I make https://www.radio-addict.com but only retrieve the played song data on demand (never tried to probe all 80k+ radio streams at the same time on my small server, could be fun), but searching on it could be a new feature (it's stored in Elixir genservers :D)
> suddenly it's all the same music you've already been listening to, very little new music.
However, if you expose the gods of the algorithm to a new artist, suddenly all the auto-generated feeds will try to include that band regardless of fit. Weird how these "social graph" systems tend to form and perpetuate bubbles.
On top of that, there are some weird shenanigans with meta-data. Listening to "foreign" bands may very easily taint the weekly mix with songs in a language you don't even understand and probably don't care about. An anecdata of course, I just looked at my "daily mix x", which appears to be in my local language, but with styles all over the place. Another mix contains mostly correctly turn of the century romantic pop.
I suspect the algorithm biases heavily on metadata so that it could be easily fed "albums/artists that publisher x paid to promote".
> However, if you expose the gods of the algorithm to a new artist, suddenly all the auto-generated feeds will try to include that band regardless of fit.
cf YouTube when you watch one video on X that's outside of your normal viewing and RIP your homepage for the next few days until you've clicked "do not recommend" on enough videos to stop the flood of X and X-adjacent content.
Spotify has not viewed itself as a music company for longer than that. It's a platform for audio. And, while there are still music first people at the company, they are not in the power positions that they used to be.
The transition didn't start when they laid off Glenn MacDonald, but that sort of cemented it. They had already gutted curation before that and by this time you were far more likely to find people talking about AI in the halls than music. If you've never heard of Glenn, check out his book: "You Have Not Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music." Or his old online projects at https://everynoise.com/.
Anecdata incoming, but to offer an alternative view, I would really love to not use Spotify anymore since they change things constantly in ways I don’t like, but their music recommendations are fantastic for me.
Their generated playlists are great, and they do a good job recommending playlists I’d like from other users as well. And while I hate the format, their music shorts actually give me consistently good music. I just hate that it’s in the TikTok swipe style.
I wonder if it's a bit of a vicious cycle. For example, if you only ever listen to new music that Spotify gives you then at a certain point, the algorithm only knows how to output the things that it has already outputted. If you don't give it any new external signal then it doesn't have a good way to find new songs.
> As of today, daylist is available to both Free and Premium users across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland at spotify.com/daylist.
Do you mean daily mix playlists? From the first 20 songs 17 are something which I added to my library, or listen them regularly. The rest of the 3 songs? 2 of them are from artists whom I listen to regularly. 1 clearly new song.
I have very similar rate with “daytime mix”.
So which one do you mean? “Discover weekly” and ”release radar” have new songs, yeah. But “radios” are like the previously mentioned playlists.
It has a very similar rate for me, a little bit better. Btw, there are new songs in every playlist. The problem isn’t that there is none, the problem is priorities, especially with radios.
My experience with YouTube is that I start with an obscure song/artist and it will gradually bring me to the mainstream. Maybe that is just me... I feel like ideal algorithms died with last.fm era.
My guess/conspiracy theory is that Spotify has cut deals with record companies that pay less on subsequent listens to a track so the repetitive radio algorithms are more profitable.
I don't want that. At all. It's algorithmic and there's nothing stopping artists and labels paying for placement in there. I don't want that.
I am a musician, and a DJ, and I've been digging deep through artist and label catalogues on my own for decades. The process of discovery via my preexisting routes is far more fruitful, enjoyable and rewarding than lazily letting an algorithm do the work.
But I like doing that. This works for me, not for others.
I miss last.fm and audioscrobbler so much. Yeah it's still there, but it's not like the old days, which was far better for feeling like I was in touch with other users, finding tons of new music, and not hearing yet another Home Depot ad.
I half wonder if Spotify US is one of those harbingers of doom for the old web in the same way I think of Twitter and iPhone/SPAs/The Stream UI.
Fun fact since I already ranted about last.fm being the bees knees when it integrated with Spotify - my wife looked up on lastfm music compatibility after we first met and her and a Russian lady are the only 3 above like 75% similar taste in music. Small world but also wild that it's not so small.
Big streamers cater to most people's interests of music and are probably satisfactory for them but for us weirdos in music last.fm and it's music genome thing were amazing.
spotifynewmusic.com used to be an aggregator of human-curated playlists [from The 405, All Music, AV Club, Beardfood, Clash Music, Consequence Of Sound, Drowned In Sound, The Guardian, Music OMH, NME, No Ripcord, Paste, Pitchfork, Pop Matters, Resident Advisor, Slant, The Line Of Best Fit, The Music Fix, The Skinny, Tiny Mix Tapes, and Under The Radar]. It had been my discovery tool of choice, until it abruptly shut down [because, I suspect, the maintainer was a Spotify employee]
I had a peripheral awareness of listenbrainz for scribbling, and think that's neat. However, last.fm's radio and song/artist/genre/tag search and suggestion capabilities were on an otherworldly level. Do the *brainz services have anything that really compares?
I do appreciate that the algorithm here, since you're paying for the music, is not to increase your cortisol levels, but to increase your listening time and perception of the product
I've never seen this work. Either it plays the stuff I've listened in the past in a loop or shove some random things I really dislike (maybe hidden promotional stuff?).
Personally it's the reason I've cancelled subscriptions each time I've tried, I always ended up listening to radio instead as the value brought by Spotify etc... was really poor.
I use YouTube Music and it definitely does work but yeah it weighs songs you've already said you like way too heavily and generally seems way worse at discovering similar music than Last.fm or Pandora from over a decade ago. (If anything I remember Pandora being too good at finding similar songs - the playlist would end up almost monotonic because it found such similar music.)
Fortunately they do have a "Discover playlist" that completely excludes music you've heard before. Unfortunately that's all you get. No way to e.g. say "play me reggae I haven't heard before", and it's only updated once a week.
So yeah... kinda shit. But still better than the alternative which as far as I remember from the 90s is to only listen to extremely well-known bands and find good news music like once a year.
Leaving music streaming services has been a great excuse for me to rediscover music blogs like Gorilla vs. Bear and Stereogum, or even local culture magazines.
Another great way for discovering music I've found is just perusing Bandcamp, which is where I buy most of my music anyway. Love finding local artists, so I just put in some genre filters and the location filter. Found multiple great bands this way.
As for keeping abreast of new releases, Bandcamp is pretty good for that too. You can just follow artists and you get emails when new releases or merch or tours come around.
I'll admit it, I have a fairly narrow range of music I like so the following works for me on this basis: I don't like Spotify and other music streaming services as they never are consistent with their licensing or good with their recommendations. And the adverts are obnoxious. What I like is radios like Radio Paradise: https://radioparadise.com/player or regular radios available through online streams (such as the French radio FIP: https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip). There is enough to discover on either and they are still mostly in the range of what I would/could listen should they not have existed.
It was like this in the past, now it's crappy. The algorithmic optimization started eating its own tail. And it's a problem on all platforms, from Spotify to YouTube.
Let's take YT. In very simple terms, instead of taking a bold move and suggesting a few outliers (similar to differentiating the population as it's done in evolutionary algorithms), it takes an easy shot and, if I'm identified as male, suggests some videos with females with big breasts and other generic junk many people just click on autopilot. It works well for them because most people click and click and spend their days uselessly hooked and feel bad, but in my particular case I lose what I had earlier, i.e. suggestions of interesting bands (they still do happen but the selection is of much lower quality).
This hasn't been my experience at all. Not sure why Youtube would suggest big breasted female artists when I never, ever, ever watch the video when I'm playing music.
The styles information that Plexamp has works really well and in my experience, as long as your library is large enough, works better than modern Spotify.
It was Spotify's degradation of their radio service and terrible "AI DJ" that finally got me off Spotify. Punishing them for platforming Joe Rogan was just icing.
I find Plexamps Radio features, and DJ's to work great against my library. It also helps if you, as an individual, have a diverse and large music library to supply for the sonic analysis.
I'll argue music algorithmic recommendation on these platforms is a bad thing anyway.
First, the algorithm is opaque, so it can push stuff to you because the platform decide it has to get the spotlights. Maybe the label/producer/musician paid for it or whatever you want to imagine that is even worse. It is a well-known phenomenon that if some music is pushed to your ears, you'll end up appreciate it most often than not. This is how hits have been and are still made.
But even if the algorithm was not gamed at all, I still think it is a bad thing. It is not going to push you out of your comfort zone. Listening to new stuff is usually not pleasant at first. You will only "discover" things that are very similar to what you know and already enjoy.
If these recommendation algorithms were about food, they would "reason" like this: "Hey, you've really enjoyed this whole pack of M&M's, I'm sure you'll like this Kit-Kat bar now! Oh and you've had a glass of wine, what about trying out meth, it's pretty good too.". Do we really want our computers to reinforce such behavior?
Go to concerts, buy merch, buy albums on bandcamp (it has not enshittified too much yet apparently), donate money to artists; discover music through your friends and other humans recommending it. Recommend what you like to your friends. Cancel your Spotify subscription, none of that money is going to artists anyway. And use soulseek.
Equivalence is too strong a word, but content produced by spotify where musicians (or AI prompters) are mere contractors comes to mind.
Getting back to "I don't even want virtuous algorithmic recommendation"… I like jazz rock/fusion, especially when it has a touch of bluesy/blues rock influence. There is probably a lifetime of listening time of that genre, and it takes no effort for me to appreciate anything that resemble this. Long guitar solos by a jazz-educated guitarist who happens to like Jimi Hendrix, sign me up.
But I do think there is value in getting out of my comfort zone, and listen to something drastically new, from time to time. It requires effort though. My first reflex when I hear synthetic drums or autotune, for instance, is to press "next". But it is through other humans being recommendation, that I sometimes make that effort, and actually learn to appreciate something else.
Call me an elitist prick, but I hate to think of music as a commodity for us consumers to consume. It is art. Art is not always pleasant. It sometimes becomes pleasant after overcoming an initial disgust.
My favorite songs gravitate heavily towards 2 very different genres. This seems to confuse the hell out of Spotify. The "discover weekly" is comically bad no matter how hard I try to prime my library.
> I have no idea on when artists I like release new albums and would not encounter them on a self hosted solution, etc.
Depending on what you like, bandcamp makes it easy. You can follow any artist (which is also offered whenever you buy), and from then on get release notifications. But of course, what’s available differs by genre. For metal, most bands are on BC, except most Japanese artists and major label stuff.
I buy, download, and put the flacs on my Jellyfin server.
There are, of course, also piracy solutions for that, pretty sure the *arr stuff has automatic downloading per artist.
By moving away from streaming services, you can once again own what you bought and paid for. Algorithmic playlists are nothing, nothing at all compared to the loss of ability to use your own player, edit your files, back them up, or not be nickel-and-dimed to get around artificial restrictions. Not to mention that with streaming services, music can be taken away from you after the purchase.
One can have both: use the streaming services to discover new music, buy physical media of the bands you like most.
Not everyone has this option, but it is an alternative.
My experience with Youtube Music is that the recommendations are quite poor. So I wouldn't miss that. But it's hard to replicate the breadth of coverage of YT music (even though sometimes songs just vanish from my playlists). But I have started buying a couple of albums every now and then and slowly I am building my owned music library.
IMO using a streaming service’s recommendations is a way to filter out bands that labels aren’t promoting. The services have to be getting paid for pushing - right?
If everyone is this lazy about music discovery, then music suffers. I am not using “lazy” as a pejorative. There are people who just couldn’t be bothered and that’s fine. Music just isn’t that important to you. But if the people who deeply love music are corrupted by the ease and dopamine, it will deeply wound music as a whole.
My problem isn’t discovering new music, it is “discovering” my massive library. I love AM, but the fact that 3 of the five large icons taking up precious screen real estate are devoted to discovering music that Apple is paid to promote is infuriating.
> IMO using a streaming service’s recommendations is a way to filter out bands that labels aren’t promoting. The services have to be getting paid for pushing - right?
I keep hearing this, I also read Mood Machine that says the same thing over and over again.
Yet, every week for years, thanks to Spotify I'm discovering artists that don't have the means to pay to be promoted in any way.
I'm not saying that I'm special or that I hacked the algo or that it's false that Spotify promotes artists that are paying to be promoted.
I'm just saying that, depending on how you consume (I'm using this verb on purpose) music on streaming platforms, you'll be more or less targeted by money-making thongs.
If you listen to the main playlists, they are basically 100% promotion based.
But if you listen to a non-promoted artist's radio, you'll have far less promoted content.
I love Spotify's algorithm. My wife loves my Spotify algorithm & hates her own so I know it's not universally great but it's still incredibly impressive & I value it a lot.
That said: there's trade-offs. I don't browse music forums but I have in the past (when I had more time) & it's incredibly rewarding. I also get a lot more value from new music discovered through friends than through Spotify - there's something about intentionality that adds to the listening experience. I love when Spotify plays me a great song from an artist I've never heard, but I'm much more likely to seek out that artist on a personal recommendation.
Not everyone has the time, energy or expertise to host Jellyfin, but for those of us that do, there's probably room for both of the above listening experiences in our lives.
> I don't browse any music forums and so apart from my favourite bands, I have no idea on when artists I like release new albums and would not encounter them on a self hosted solution,
I think for some people the goal shifts from discovery to ownership - knowing your library, building it intentionally, and not being nudged by what the algorithm thinks you should be into
its hard to beat the convenience of being able to right click/radio to get new recommendations but there has to be other options that arent that much more effort either?
i think you can add plugins to jellyfin. maybe there is a last.fm plugin? i know of some other last.fm alternatives like maloja or libre.fm but i cant comment on how good they are
Are playlists in Jellyfin readable? Could you not create a script(s) that takes your existing playlist and generates new ones for you? LLM's are great at suggestions, I mean it drives Spotify's DJ X.
Same here, plus I can finally find related songs in languages I cannot read!
At least a fifth of my favorite songs look like cryptic gibberish to me, that would be nearly impossible to find as a download... I'm firmly vendor locked for that reason alone.
I do make regular exports, just in case my Spotify account ever disappears for whatever reason. That data is too valuable to risk losing it.
That was cool 10, 12 years ago. Now that everything has been exploited and enshittified, I want to go back to the pre-infinite-streaming experience. The only issue is cost vs being a pirate...
I mean right at the top he says hes just trying to listen to his own music. I dont get how this is a downside if you wanna discover new shit you can always just go to youtube.
Frankly 99.9 of my music listening is stuff I already know and enjoy. But I still like to listen to new stuff often. So this kinda thing is perfect for me 99% of the time.
The smart playlist feature[5] is awesome. Having 3 services instead of one seems overkill, but specialized apps instead of one generic one feels different. One interesting aspect of navidrome is, that it has implemented the Subsonic API, which MANY Apps make use of. My personal favorite is
The thing I miss and can't find a replacement for is lastfm inside of Spotify. It gave two things and did it exceptionally well:
1. Helped me take something I like or am super into at the time (band or song) and give me a playlist
2. actually suggested with a high hit rate something I didn't know about and it was available to play right now.
other streaming or stations just loop into what I already have which sucks. Side note that I'm into pretty niche non mainstream music such as Melodic Death Metal and Industrial so self hosting seems interesting but I also spend a good chunk of my time looking for more music. (Most of the bands I am really into only have sub-20k plays a month on Spotify).
I really miss Napster letting you browse people's music when you found someone who was also into things you liked - pure gold mine only second to a LAN party where you could dig through the file server.
> I really miss Napster letting you browse people's music when you found someone who was also into things you liked - pure gold mine only second to a LAN party where you could dig through the file server.
If you are a bandcamp user, find people with similar purchases to you and follow them. It is a good way to browse for new albums based on people with similar tastes.
Thanks for mentioning audiobookshelf. I'd totally given up on using jellyfin for audiobooks. It just absolutely butchers any book split into multiple files, which is basically all of them.
You're welcome. The Android app is pretty good, but for iOS it remains unreleased, so you have to deploy yourself. Prologue seems to be the best iOS App.
There are other unofficial Clients (e.g. in flutter), but I tend to use audiobookshelf as streaming player paired with vlc to play downloaded offline files (the app is not so great here)
There is a paid audiobook shelf client on iOS… I think it is like a one time $5 or something. Totally worth it to me, it has worked great and I don’t have to do the bullshit test app stuff (which stopped working for audiobookshelf anyway because too many people were using the test app)
It is just crazy how easy it is to set this stuff up nowadays. I run both Navidrome and Jellyfin in docker containers. Then I use NordVPN Meshnet to securely connect to them outside of the home.
The experience is absolutely flawless. In Navidrome you can host an entire FLAC library and then transcode to Opus on the fly.
It's been over a year now and I have pretty much no issues whatsoever.
+1 for Navidrome, I self host both jellyfin and Navidrome. Navidrome wins hands down for music. With Jellyfin it's harder to categorize and then search, Navidrome provides a great experience out of the box.
Navidrome's killer feature is its simplicity, and not just the dead simplicity of setting it up: Jellyfin has everything and the kitchen sink, which is nice - especially for video, whereas Navidrome offers a well-honed, long matured, music search/browse/play standard API, namely Subsonic which opens a world of clients for a multitude of platforms and all tastes... On that front Jellyfin feels narrow in comparison.
Smart Playlists mainly. They let you add logical filters to create playlists. Think IF song_name NOT contains "live". That's not syntactically correct but that's the idea. Also lots of apps can connect to navidrome so you can import everything easily. Like Feishen is a desktop music player, and
I've never tried NordVPN Meshnet, but just want to add an alternative I've fallen in love with: Tailscale. It's amazingly simple to set up and use. Today all my devices are connected to each other, and my jellyfin service is reachable through my chromecast, phone, computer and Ipad. As well as my filehost VPS.
I've been self-hosting for quite awhile now, and these days it's such a breeze.
I use and like plexamp but I also think it's a low bar to set; Winamp 2 streaming from a file share is a better UX experience and less work than the funky ux Plex and plexamp has.
I'm curious how you came to find your self on Hacker News without either a passing knowledge of some of the things mentioned above or an innate curiousity to learn about the rest.
A docker container is a way to easily install software on a server without having to install dependencies yourself.
A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a way of securely connecting to your home network without exposing it to the world.
FLAC and Opus are audio formats. FLAC uses lossless compression and offers the best uncompressed quality while not being as huge as a broadcast wave (.wav) file. Opus is similar to an mp3, that means it is a lossy compression, but it sounds extremely good at small bit rates/with bad connections. The transcoding-on-the-fly-bit means the user opens up the private Navidrome website running in their home from the road and the Audio they play is compressed and sent over on the fly as they play it.
Self hosting sounds scary, but it is an essential skill nowadays and extremely useful. Things I self-host (besides websites) include a partskeeper instance which is essentially a stock keeping system for electronics parts, jellyfin as a netflix replacement for films and series, my mailserver (mailcow), paperless-ngx (hooked up to a scanner, allows automatic text-recognition and tagging of invoices, letters, etc.) and homeassistant (smart home).
That probably makes it appear like I have to spend all my free time on this, but it takes surprisingly little of my time to maintain this, with a lot of it running on a single Raspberry Pi.
> That probably makes it appear like I have to spend all my free time on this, but it takes surprisingly little of my time to maintain this, with a lot of it running on a single Raspberry Pi.
Sure, it is really easy to maintain… if you are already skilled with system administration and how all of these things work.
> It is just crazy how easy it is to set this stuff up nowadays. I run both Navidrome and Jellyfin in docker containers….
Wow, I’ll get grandma to do it! Ha ha, just kidding, but I’ll try it myself. Ha ha, just kidding.
Honestly, I just want to scream “self-hosting isn’t going to happen, stop trying to make it happen.” I absolutely welcome the hobbyists doing this fun stuff in their free time, but the idea that they will ever win over ordinary users is total fantasy. And it’s accompanied by reality-denying stuff like how “you don’t need” feature X or Y. Sure, I long to go back to organising my own mp3 files like it’s 2002. And because you’re angry about corporate power, Spotify or whoever definitely provide no features of value to anyone! This is all pure mood affiliation.
Sorry. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad your setup works for you. But I think you are not using the word “easy” in the same way as most people.
Those aren't competitors of Spotify/Netflix; they're alternatives for people who are willing to tolerate small inconveniences to have full control over their library.
Of course it's not as easy as signing up for Spotify/Netflix, but setting them up is easier than ever (even easier for tech people).
Yup, the key word for me is control. And over time, considering the continual loss of control, more people will adopt self hosting, and things will get better and easier. For now, i only recommend it to hobbyists or people with free time and money. It does take quite a while to get it all running smoothly.
Disagree. With a little bit of technical knowledge which I’m assuming most people browsing hacker news have, these services are easy to spin up and use.
If you can read a README you can set up Navidrome and point it to your local library in 5 minutes.
Locally. It's a bit harder if you want remote access... I ended up using a reverse proxy and let's encrypt certs... It wasn't to bad but it wasn't easy. I have never looked into Tailscale or similar solutions though, maybe those are just click and go.
Tailscale, ZeroTier, Tinc, Hamachi, and the like are all very, stupidly easy mesh VPN solutions that anyone can use. If you feel like owning a domain, Cloudflare Tunnel makes it similarly easy to expose your service to the wider Internet on a home connection and not have to worry about proxies and certs. The barrier to self hosting has never been lower, and it keeps falling. Heck, Cockpit's Podman management means you almost never need to look at a terminal, and aren't locked in to a bespoke platform that's rainbows and glitter until it stops getting maintained or gets enshittified. Get a little SBC with as much RAM as you can find and you'll be amazed at the capability:effort ratio.
Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills.
I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions. The subscriptions really had gotten out of hand, it had gotten to about $200 (AUD) a month.
Quick napkin math is that I have cancelled about ~$150 a month worth of subscriptions so far. The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling at this point, but it's already paid for itself, so I will likely upgrade it to something much better later this year.
Currently I am in the process of replacing all the movie streaming services with Emby.
Spotify and Adobe lightroom is still on the todo list.
I will likely end up with Youtube, Fastmail and Borgbase being my remaining subscriptions once I am done.
This reflects a lot of what I've been through as well. My subscriptions exploded when AU got a lot of different streaming platforms, and I think when paramount+ came out and took Star Trek off of another one I drew the line. I realised I still owned all the physical media, so time to make backups. Previous to that I moved off Gmail, that was by far the hardest, and still somewhat ongoing after 8+ years.
The hardest to kick for me now is YouTube Premium.. And in AU it's like $33/month AUD, but I just can't stand ads.
My NAS is blocked from the internet, while web facing stuff is on a separate server (old dell workstation). And now have added a PI hole to another older dell box. My partner's laptop will be moving to Linux and will also be a Windows free household. I used Windows since 3.1, I liked it up until around Windows 7. I'm glad I've moved to Linux, but disappointed to see what has happened to Windows in general.
I want to self host more services for family, but the experience isn't there yet without quite a lot of work.
The tags #homelab and #selfhost are pretty decent to follow on Mastodon btw!
>The hardest to kick for me now is YouTube Premium.. And in AU it's like $33/month AUD, but I just can't stand ads.
Any reason you're not just running network level AdGuard and Firefox with Ublock Origin to block all ads on your home network? Even just FF+UBO would block YouTube ads.
The selfhosted subreddit is also a really good resource to use for interesting things to run.
DNS blockers aren't good enough to block all ads. Especially YouTube. Plus, many browsers will ignore DNS without configuration and same for phone apps. While this can be fine for me it's not for everyone else in my family nor guests. And that's before we talk about Apple...
I already use Firefox on /my computer/. We were talking about a pihole or some /network/ solution. How do I block ads on my friends computer when they get into my network without touching their computer? How do I block ads on my TV? You'd have to do something like deep packet inspection. Devices I fully control I can trivially solve this but there are plenty of devices I don't, including ones I own.
And for Android, you know you can use revanced, right? You can recompile the app and others to get more control
I don't. Sure, I can root my TV and certainly there's exploits for that. But honestly that example isn't the problem and is much more easily solved by treating my TV as a monitor.
We were talking DNS blockers. The context matters. I already use ublock but I can't do ublock on my pihole. I can't do it on an iPhone (I can use orion browser but YouTube quality is low). I can't do it on my TV. I can't do it on my friends computer that visits my house. And so on. I appreciate you trying to help but you're misunderstanding the problem and honestly I don't know how someone could be on HN and not know about ublock.
YouTube is a bit of a problem. I feel like it costs about double of what it should be, but I also think that content creators should be paid, and I absolutely hate ads.
The Yattee client for Invidious works great on iOS, or the Vinegar/Baking Soda browser extensions that replace the YouTube player with a basic (ad-free) HTML5 player work also.
I've been on this mission but unfortunately also trying to defend my PhD in a month. But I do have a lot more Linux experience. Here's stuff that I think will really help.
yt-dlp: a video downloaded. Originally designed for YouTube but supports a lot of sites. I suggest heavily aliasing this with options like sleep intervals, aria2, and make sure you download the user agent switcher. For YouTube you probably need to import cookies from a browser. But you'll be able to watch the videos without the ads.
Btrfs: it's a file system, like ext4 or ntfs. Has a lot of useful things like being able to create subvolumes, raid, cache drives (or volumes), quotas, snapshots, etc. Think anything that you'd do with zfs but it's been easier to use and it has a copy on write system that helps dedupe. You can also compress the file system! I use duperemover. If it finds dupes it replaces one file with a link (which btrfs natively supports). It'll hash the files so run it early and then set up a job (use a systemd timer)
Tailscale: take your network anywhere. God, tailscale is so fucking useful. You can even put it on a raspberry pi or your phones. It's nice to have it on an old phone which you can throw termux on and have a little server. I've used these to jump to another machine that has had issues where it could connect locally but not outside. You can also set up exit nodes so you can do things like push all your traffic through a vpn, make all your traffic use pihole, or just make it appear like you're somewhere else. You could use this to even make it effectively impossible for streaming services to know you're sharing an account. The data is going through whoever's house pays. If you get fancy you can set up rules to port specific traffic through specific locations but this is still a bit above my head. I just know it's possible. Unfortunately with iPhones you have less control. They can even break out of all this and you don't have full control. I need to get someone to explain more networking to me.
Systemd: it's annoying at first but damn there's so much to it that is helpful. Use systemctl edit to edit your service files. The ones that come with services like jellyfin aren't nearly as locked down as they should be (I intend to push to them in a few months). You should also use systemd mount for your drives. You need a companion automount file but your drives will go offline when not being used. This will really help with reducing energy costs. Be sure to note that there's even configs for you gpus. It also lets you control a systems resources. There's also nspawn and vmspawn. I wish these were a bit more popular because they can do everything docker can and more. Nspawn is a suped up chroot so you can really containerize things and even run different Linux flavors (I've even been play around with running an arm container on my x86 machine). Using machinectl you can enable these as services and even create triggers to spin up or down. There's also importctl so if you create an image (or someone else does) you can just pull that! Which kinda makes it easier than docker in many cases other than the fact that not many people have made images (or publicly available). Docker's big win is popularity but systemd has felt nicer in every other way (documentation sucks). There's so much more to systemd and that's why it's loved and hated. There's a reason it stuck, it just is too damn useful (don't forget to check out homectl too)
Ffmpeg: you probably know this one but it's also worth spending some time to learn it more and write some scripts. If you care more about storage I encode most stuff to av1 with nvenc. It's not archival but honestly I'm often getting 50% storage reductions and I can't tell the difference. Your source file probably wasn't archival grade anyways. Good enough for me. Hevc is also giving me good success.
There's a bunch of other little tools that help. For example, I have my main computer sitting behind my TV. If I'm working on it I'm in it via ssh. Otherwise games and movies are on the TV. I use ydotool as a keyboard and just made a shortcut on my iPhone and a trivial script on my Android so I can push commands that way and use a wireless mouse. There's kconnect but it's been more a hassle than help ime. I did the same for backing up photos on from my phones (they wake the drives first). Android can rsync but for iPhone I can't find a good free solution other than writing the hackiest shortcut you've seen (ssh in, check if file exists, if not then write. You can't rsync, the fucking thing will timeout and despite there being terminal emulators for iPhone you can't access your photos from them. I've found zero ways to link them and I'm upset). Check out things like fail2ban to jail users that do too many logins. You can also use nspawn to containerize these services, spin up and down, and between btrfs, homectl, and pam it is really easy to containerize users. You can mount their volumes on demand and get their accounts syncing across your intranet. It's kinda crazy what you can do.
My goal is to get some images so many of these things can start becoming plug and play. I'm getting close but obviously bigger priorities right now. I'd love help if anyone is interested. I'm not an expert in these domains so I'm sure I'm doing some things wrong but I'm learning a ton
This is great. If you ever wrote about your entire setup I'd love to read it. Got a few new ideas from your post. To anyone reading, the most helpful tool for setting up my homelab is the community helper-scripts (formerly tteck, RIP). Those have saved me soooo much time, and showed me best practices in setup, and the list of scripts give you a good idea of tools that are commonly used.
I have drafts for it but maybe I shouldn't have made this comment under my anonymous account lol.
I'm a firm believer that tools should be made to be usable by both technical and nontechnical people. Usually we do one or the other but it's a false dichotomy. "For the noobs" pushes for sane defaults, reduced complexity, and fixing bugs. It's also an entry point to become a power user, especially as being a power user in one domain doesn't mean you're automatically in another. "For the power users" gives flexibility, helps fix bugs (faster and higher coverage), as well as is critical for feature development (unless you naively believe you can know everything your diverse users need and have an infinite budget), and evangelize your product. The magic of success requires having both but I think we pretend it is one or the other. It needs to work well and be pretty.
What about backups? My greatest fear is self-hosting valuable stuff (like family photos) only for my NAS to fail one day and lose potentially everything.
I keep important data on a zpool that's mirrored across 2 drives, I snapshot it nightly, zfs send/receive the snapshot a drive on a different machine, and run a borgmatic/borg backup to borgbase 3 times a week. I also run a scrub on it quarterly.
There are good options. Borg, rsync.net with zfs send/recv. Storage boxes from Hetzner
Hard to make a particular recommendation as backing up to the cloud is a popular option but depends on your upload speed and rate of data change. And depends how much you're willing to spend for what tradeoff
Storage box from hetzner is great. Hetzner is a good company, I'm glad that I'm doing business with them. The service is good, cheap, reliable, and... Un-american which means it would probably stay good and won't enshitify.
Use Hetzner! I'm not affiliated just a happy customer.
i use hetzner too, and I like their current services. But I think we all do good in never assuming or relying on ANY company being our friends. Be vigilant
>Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills.
>I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions.
I have been doing the same for quite some time now but it's only recently I realized all these subscriptions services are just making rich richer. We should encourage self hosting as much as possible. I mean why should we pay huge corporations more money just for storage?
For "content subscriptions" (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix) keep in mind that a part of the revenue goes towards the content creators.
For anything else, I can also highly recommend using local or self-hosted software. Plenty of open source software has even exceeded proprietary alternatives in the last couple years.
You know if we could this open source self hosted stuff with a layer of Patreon on top people would pay something to all the people. If one could make it non-intrusive it could become a decent alternative to paying all these artists. I think Kanopy.com comes pretty close, its funded by tax payer dollars and is available via your local library.
Sure, but they also got a cut from all of those dvds I bought before streaming services was a thing or the new dvds/blu-rays I am picking up now.
I mostly watch movies I have already seen before, but with the fragmentation and constant moving around that's happening with steaming services I would frequently end up using 3+ different ones every month. The constant cancel/renew cycle was a real hassle and very error prone, I would often forget one or two.
I only watch about 20 new movies a year, so even without hunting for bargains I will easily save a lot of money. But I will be looking for bargains, because why not.
Is it though? If it were nothing artists might be in a better negotiating position to demand something. But now instead of demanding payment, they are asking for a raise instead.
Weird thought, but doesn't some of the stuff the blockchain people do potentially apply here? I'm not talking building a new coin or any of that crap. But rather more about just handling the transactions of plays and a distributed anonymized ledger. Artists can formulate a contract, users pay in and their pay gets distributed proportionally. I'm sure you could add zkps to help protect privacy. Could you get away with "proof of listen"? Could you stream via other users torrent style to move away from a central hub? Hosting and high upload speeds give you discounts. Maybe there's something in this (bad) idea?
I'm really just spitballing here. Seems really difficult to pull off, but what would such a system look like if we didn't design it for profit extraction and instead designed it to cut out all the middlemen? To really just make it as easy as possible for artists to connect to listeners. If we designed it without a desire to get rich
Yes so this is the future you're speaking of. A complete separation between client and server, and none of the current bs enshitified monopolies. Just need to wait a few years tm.
I really don’t understand the argument that these subscriptions are just making the rich richer.
In the first place why would that be a problem? If a company offers a good value and service for your money, isn’t it fair to compensate them for it? Does someone need to be compensated less just because they have been successful in the past providing good value for money? That would create weird or negative incentives.
Then, what’s the negative consequence of rich people getting richer? It’s not like the economy is a zero-sum game. The proportion of poor and extremely poor people has gone downhill in the last 200 years, while population has increased 8x (we’re probably around 10% of extreme poverty compared to +90%).
And then, there’s the lack of evidence of really rich people getting richer. How much of your money going to Spotify is really going to rich people compared to employees, artists, little shareholders? Maybe the impact of the earnings of Spotify is disproportionately helping normal citizens make a living compared to the very few big shareholders that are already rich.
What’s the alternative? Spending the same amount of money exclusively on Albums that probably bring a higher cut to big music companies and do not expose you to little or unknown artists? While at the same time you spend hours every month in the maintenance of your own music service while you could have used that time to help in some community projects or just earning more money to donate to causes impacting the extremely poor?
I’m really not sure at all that a subscription service like Spotify has any negative consequence for humankind.
I upgraded my NAS to a recent Asustor a year ago and it changed my life. JellyFin for video works perfectly everywhere in my home, on any device, and it can also be accessed remotely, securely, with Tailscale, so if I'm in a hotel somewhere with my iPad it still works.
And my library is curated by me; it has classic movies and other movies I like, and zero fluff or random shows that I would never watch in a million years.
But self hosting doesn't stop here. Using Docker (via Portainer) I can publish any app in minutes, on either Apache or Nginx, securely with a Cloudflare tunnel (free) without ever exposing my home IP to the world.
This of course isn't as resilient as a proper server with a proper provider, but it's so much simpler and so much cheaper that for hobby projects it's largely good enough.
> Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A quick math will show that it's not insignificant
If you run it 24/7 on a dedicated desktop with decent idle (i.e. no high power video card, low power CPU), it likely uses ~ 50W average. That gives an estimate of 0.05kW24hr30 = 36kWh, which would be in the range of $12/month at current australian electricity prices. If you have bad idle power usage (or somehow mostly active not idle), maybe you'd be looking at twice that. But for OP who was spending $xxx/month on subscriptions, it's a pretty negligible cost. If you really want to save this too, raspPi can do a lot of home server needs nowadays
An N100 minipc or second-hand Dell Optiplex doesn't cost too much more than a rasp-Pi ($100-200), has a lot more power, and will only pull about 10W idle.
My optiplex shows as 8.191 kwh last month -> 11w average.
Is 10W idle the lowest one can reasonably get a small home server? As a comparison, that's about as much as my fridge draws on average. Also, a mechanism to maximize the time spent at idle would be useful. Basically all the optimisations done for phones.
yep yep n100s are great. I just use my gaming desktop as server, uses more money in power but it'd be on for hours a day anyway and i already own it, so i'm not concerned.
Looking at a WD spec sheet, it's more like 6-7W during read/write, and 3-4W during idle (1W sleep). Assume your use spread however you want, but that would be a max average of 5W usage per drive, so another 5-20W depending on your storage needs.
Dunno, my N100 with 1 SSD and 1 nVME (which hosts over 15 services including jellyfin) is probably not really relevant compared to my desktop PC. ~10W vs 180-350W depending on what I’m doing.
I have got 26 docker containers running on it.
Looking at current utilization, it's 6% of cpu, 10GB ram out of 16gb.
The issue is disk access. The thing has total shit bandwidth to storage, this was a surprise to me and a bit of a learning experience. It has an nvme ssd and a 3.5 hdd, but in the end usb drives attached to the usb 2 ports are much faster than either. It's a Lenovo, so I guess they cut costs somewhere and the usb 2 ports should have been a giveaway, but I was tricked by the nvme.
I'm doing the same, I have family plans with my friends for pretty much anything so I don't think I ever reached such high monthly costs though.
I started my home server for self hosting Immich, not only for the cost but because I like to have my images close to me.
I also recently replaced Lightroom with ON1, it's definitely not the same quality but, as hobbyist, it didn't make much sense to pay that much for me anymore. It was by far the most expensive subscription I had.
With all the SWE in the mix, why not just roll your own media player...? It's not THAT hard. Same for movie player btw (and one solution can do both ofc).
HTML spec for media is pretty amazing these days, no real excuses outside of time.
That's been sitting on my ideas list for over a decade, because I've wanted Pandora that runs locally from my collection. But I'm not sure I'll realistically ever get to it.
I have my collection in Dropbox, then sync that onto my home server with rclone once a day, which exposes it to Plex. Then I use the Plexamp app (music-only Plex app) to listen across all my devices
What do you do for backups? I'm just setting up an Emby instance with a 4 TB hard drive attached, but I'm worried it'll fail and take everything with it.
In general I use Borg/Borgmatic with borgbase for backup, but movies are a little big, so for now I am just using zfs send/receive to keep a copy on a usb drive updated. Once I am done getting the encoding pipeline scripted (av1/opus/vtt) and the size goes down I will likely start sending it to borgbase as well, or maybe store a copy at my mums place.
I would prefer to use a cloud backup solution that supports zfs send/receive, but they are a bit pricy.
zfs.rent seems like a nice solution, but not sure using a US location is a great idea.
Some things are popular in the moment and very hard to come by 10-20 years later if they aren’t pretty popular. TV shows especially.
I’ve been considering buying some of those giant DVD lots that come up on Craigslist from time to time, or checking out flea markets for good deals.
With the way things are heading, one of my fears is I will get old and lose access to some of the shows are movies I loved in my youth. Licensing with streaming services are so fickle, and some others are removed or edited if they around found to be politically incorrect a decade or two after being made. I want to make sure I still have access to the original versions.
I do often wish I was one of those people who didn’t care, and could be happy with an iPad as my main computer, but it’s not in the cards for me.
This, if you have some favorites or just movies that remind you of your youth, don't wait, go get them on dvd now. It gets harder and more expensive the longer you wait.
I have been hunting down the movies that I was watching when growing up and it's been a real mission, especially the really old ones that were made before I was born.
It's the other way around if anything. If you ripped it yourself, you still have the original media and can rip it again. If you sailed the seven seas, it may or may not be around if you go to look for it in the future.
Another one I realized - content is often edited in later versions. Two examples in my collection are the theatrical vs current versions of the Star Wars trilogy, and Top Gear, which had the original licensed music replaced by worse generic music in newer releases.
This is a major issue for me for both video and music streaming platforms.
Do you know what version of the Abyss you are going to get? Is it that theatrical version that cut out a major plot point or the director's cut that includes it? What about Blade Runner? Do you want the original theatrical version or the super duper pointless extended Director's Cut? You don't get a choice with streaming, and you often don't even know what version it'll be.
I find this is even worse with music. Take the Beatles. Their songs have been remastered many times. Some of the remasters are good, and some of them ruin the music for me. But what version are you going to get? And, you may be listening to a good version today, but due to label negotiations, have it swapped out with a different version tomorrow.
I take a lot of pride in curating my personal media collection. I know these issues aren't important to everyone (and some people who might care are just unaware), but they are incredibly important to me.
My initial though was to not bother with backup, I still have the DVDs/Blu-rays if the HDD dies, but with the amount of time it takes to load in I changed my mind on that.
Where do you get media from? Piracy is an option, but if you want to do it semi-legally I guess you’d need to rip blu-rays, but that seems like it'd be more expensive than streaming services, and you’d have to wait for everything to be released on blu-ray (if it even does)
I have a large dvd collection from before streaming was really a thing, but yeah I just get blu-rays of the movies I really like. Most of the movies I watch is ones I have already watched. I was really only watching 1-2 movies a month that were new to me with streaming, and few of them were actually new releases.
Unraid makes a lot of the home lab stuff pretty easy. There's a very active community, good docs, frequent updates. It costs a little, but it's one time and worth it, and can grow as you have time and money to add stuff to it.
You have to be extremely dumb to even think of using unraid. It introduces a hard dependency on whatever you do and is nothing more than a glorious wrapper for managing docker services
Yes, mostly storage. But why? Storage == ZFS. ZFS cli is well documented and works extremely well. Don't use unraid or truenas or any other fancy UI. I know the appeal from the beginners but it's not worth it
You might be amazed to find there's a lot of good reasons the storage world moved away from the RAID4 model Unraid relies on. They're proprietary too, which isn't great if you care about recoverability or never being in a position where they can withdraw your license.
Having parity on a one or more separate disks is one of the hallmarks of RAID4, and as such the comparison conceptually makes sense even if it's not literally RAID4. The actual state of their data protection is actually worse due to data not being striped across the data drives, reducing I/O, causing balancing issues, limiting large file sizes, and increasing risk of data loss if the wrong drive is killed at the wrong time. Modern software RAID not only solves all these problems, but also automatically heals bit rot and often includes compression support for both space savings and increased throughput. Unraid stalwartly refuses to grant these protections and enhancements to its users in the name of "simplicity", which I as a storage engineer must balk at.
Put your data at unnecessary risk if you want. I will shed no tears for you.
The sum of your arguments are basically "unraid doesn't do a particular thing I like using Cli tools" then make a bunch of self contradictory claims of what those things are. Then you double down in your made up arguments. This is just bad faith trolling behavior unwelcome here on HN.
I am not surprised he doesn't know. Most of the unraid users are completely clueless and are UI junkies with no understanding of what the underlying services they use
Emby just felt more polished and focused while Jellyfin felt like it was on the path towards feature bloat. Also, I had more confidence in Emby supporting future devices I might get than Jellyfin.
When it comes to supporting multiple media types (video/audiobooks/music/etc..) I prefer using a seperate solution for each that is focused on that use case instead of an all-in-one solution.
I am using audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts, so I really don't need that from my video solution.
I have configured Emby to keep the metadata in nfo files next to the videos, so I should be able to easily switch to something else if things change in the future.
It's a pretty simple setup. I run Alpine Linux with ZFS, all apps are in docker containers managed with docker-compose, Caddy for reverse proxy, borgmatic/borg for backup, and some scripts managing zfs snapshots.
I don't know.
I was dumb enough to move my entire photo library into Lightroom cloud back when they released that.
It's a nightmare.
It's pretty easy to export the photos, you get them down organized by date and photos with edits are there both as the original and a "-edited" version. What is missing is the library organization.
I really want to get my library organization as well, it's very valuable to me, it's what has got the details of what photos was from what event. And I don't really know how to get that down. I am thinking I will have to scrape it from the webapp or something like that.
It's been left to last as it's both one of the cheaper subscriptions and a total nightmare to get out of.
As for what app to use when it's all down, Capture One or Darktable seems reasonable with a network attached drive.
My problem stays the same — finding all my music that is on Spotify from elsewhere. It costs a lot to buy those music files and that too if they are available (which isn’t always the case) and even after I buy I am not sure what were the T&C from that particular place I bought - whether I really own it, I don’t, a bit but not fully - etc. Finding from Linux ISO sites is a nightmare and an extra bad nightmare if we are talking about some 2K - 0.6K songs (because I have 600 from before I started streaming). I wish there was an easy way for this - plug and play kinda.
> I wish there was an easy way for this - plug and play kinda
I can click a button in Lidarr to auth with Spotify and automatically search usenet for every album of every artist I follow on spotify, download them all, and make them available in Jellyfin. It'll even monitor the spotify account and import new additions. Getting the whole stack set up is pretty much the exact opposite of plug and play, but once you have it all installed it's amazing how much becomes smooth sailing. 2K songs is nothing for this kind of stack.
I ran my own seedbox for close to 12 years on a VPS. My choice was either never upgrading the OS (which was always an Ubuntu server) or setting up everything all over again. There were few more things like a VPN, a note app at one point, 2fa setup and so on. Finally I stopped and this Nov the VPN will expire and I am planning to let it go really.
I see where you are coming from but all that experience really tired me out. People say once you do it, it’s forever but is it? I appreciate it that some people can do it — no I really do — but maybe it’s not for everybody.
Then there are managed solutions — oh, I am sure there would be, there were and are for seedboxes as well but the good managed seedboxes sometimes would cost as much or half of my annual VPS cost in a month, yes 1:12 or so. Now I believe there’s nothing wrong with pricing a managed solution high but not all can afford it or are willing to afford it.
I really appreciate it though. Would you mind sharing a tutorial if you’ve saved one somewhere and what disk, CPU, and memory I am looking at for this? That would be very kind.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it sounds like your problems with your VPS and VPN come from having someone else hosting those services for you and restricting how you can use them instead of just doing them yourself. Things are indeed much more permanent (at least as much as you want them to be) when you actually do them yourself instead of rent them from someone.
> Would you mind sharing a tutorial if you’ve saved one somewhere
I would if I had one, but I mostly just googled the official installation instructions for any random component I wanted. No overall tutorials. Service-wise, I'm using Jellyseerr to discover content and take requests from friends/family, Radarr for sourcing movies, Sonarr for sourcing TV shows, Lidarr for sourcing music, Prowlarr for centralizing the configuration of the other *arrs, Sabnzbd as a usenet download client, rtorrent as a bittorrent client, and Jellyfin for consuming my library. You probably don't need all of those depending on what you're after, but you can just look up the instructions for only the components you want. And if you want to get content from usenet or private torrent trackers, you'll need the relevant accounts.
> what disk, CPU, and memory I am looking at for this?
Whatever you want honestly. You can run most of this on a toaster so long as you don't have unrealistic performance expectations for it. Obviously if you're planning to download 10TB worth of content, you're going to need at least that much disk space, and if you're planning to download it faster than HDDs can spin, you might need some SSDs. But most of these things are just downloaders and file managers and don't really need much more than network bandwidth to source the content and disk IO to put the content somewhere. Maybe 8GB of memory for some of the more bloated services (my whole server idles at ~5GB used, and it runs a lot of other junk) and to do really large indexer merges when searching for content, and however much hardware you need to meet your transcoding requirements if you're playing through Jellyfin or similar. You can stream source material without transcoding and consume basically no CPU from it, or you can enable transcoding with a decent enough CPU or pretty much any supported GPU. All up to you and your needs.
I'd recommend starting with pretty minimal hardware and adding more as you need it. My storage has quadrupled since I started doing this and at some point I tossed in an old GPU for transcoding.
The one thing that bothers me about Lidarr is that it is album based, not song based. Before streaming services, I managed my local music library with albums as well, but my habits have changed. I basically only listen to my "Liked Songs" playlist on Spotify, and really only have a select few albums that I listen to on the whole.
I tried syncing Lidarr with my Spotify account, but 95% of the downloads then where songs that I didn't care for.
I don’t think there are more than 4-5 albums in my Spotify library where I like more than one songs of it. Or even artists (though there might be more music from single artists). I also just listen by playlists and often just my “Liked” or “all songs”.
> Kinda like saying Winamp is alternative to Spotify
No, it's really not like saying that. I was responding to a post lamenting the difficulty of acquiring the files for the music they've already discovered on Spotify, and I brought up a music file acquisition system that pulls from what they've discovered on Spotify. That's different than comparing a local player to a discovery system.
If you feel bad, buy a single song of each artist afterwards and you have given them vastly more money than listening to them on Spotify will ever generate.
You can give them even more by skipping the silly part of buying a song you'll never listen to on the platform which takes majority of that money, and just transfer them $1 by paypal or whatever they like to use.
I know you are hyperbolic, but finding the band on Facebook and sending a quick message takes a minute max? Especially for your "favorite band". I always deter people from buying CDs of local bands, the band will see a tiny fraction of that price in their pockets. Just walk up to the bandleader after concert and give them $5.
It’s sad but true. What I like to do is use the credits I earn from choosing slower Amazon deliveries to purchase single songs on Amazon music. Sometimes I don’t even download the song.
I try to do that. Sadly this is sometimes very hard. I often fine myself in situation when I can't buy album I like. It is nowhere to be found. Sometimes I can't even pirate it because this so niche.
They said "finding from Linux ISO sites is a nightmare" and I took that to be a euphemism for piracy sites. They just find navigating and using those sites to be annoying, which is totally fair if you don't have software doing it for you.
Actually most of them are dead and no their families are not getting anything either I am pretty sure. Heck almost 80% of my songs I won’t be able to buy from anywhere at all.
Fun fact: I bought an MP3 from a record label site in my country and the file was from songs.pk. Yup!
And like you said, even when you do buy tracks, the T&C are murky. Some platforms basically treat it like a long-term lease rather than true ownership. Honestly, what we need is a modern, ethical "one-click" export + purchase system that lets you grab your current library in lossless format and actually own it.
This is a vendor lock-in more than anything. As someone who listens to mostly dubstep and EDM and built my playlist off of Spotify, I can't move to Spotify because they don't have half my playlists
My use case is that I sometimes like to use my subscription music on an offline MP3 player. So I keep my YTM subscription and am using https://github.com/ryanprop/ytm-dumper to download its files and put them on my MP3 player.
This might work for your use case too, though if you're just using it to grab content, the artists won't get royalties..., then again that seems to be the same for Linux ISO sites.
You can rip them from tidal quite easily. Youtube also has lots of music to rip but in shitty quality. That being said, music piracy has declined quite a bit since spotify. I'd suggest getting into a private music tracker if you really want to.
wrote a python tool to do daily scrapes from a russian music tracker site and sync all the titles onto a mariadb database. led me to discover all sorts of music which I would otherwise not able to stumble up on across all my 4 paid music subscriptions (Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal and Amazon Music). Some that I could not find on these music services, now live on my private Roon server. Mostly ancient multichannel formats, DSD/SACD and vinyl rips. And some precious private live recordings from concerts long gone, as in decades ago.
You could of course use your technical ability to work around that limitation or figure out other ways to pirate the music you like. I just wanted to add another helpful option for self hosters. But thank you for mentioning that Tidal is unavailable in your hitherto unmentioned country, your contribution to this discussion is valuable and appreciated.
> It costs a lot to buy those music files and that too if they are available (which isn’t always the case)
Virtually all music, particularly modern music, is made available for free on YouTube. You can download it and it's yours.
For example, here's the official release of Taylor Swift's album "Evermore" for YouTube ("Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxrMpCMdYwk&list=OLAK5uy_m-v... . You should be able to pass the playlist to yt-dlp and automatically extract all the audio tracks.
I don't really want wholesale quantities of music, so I do this manually, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's tooling around for it.
My strategy for syncing my music library with my phone is that I have four smart playlists:
- songs rated 5 stars which I haven’t listened to for at least 8 months¹
- songs rated 4 stars which I haven’t listened to for at least 16 months
- songs rated 3 stars which I haven’t listened to for at least 32 months
- the 20GB of least-played music
(there are some other strictures as well, like eliminating Christmas music and some music files I have in my library more for archival purposes than anything else, but this is a decent approximation).
This gives me a reasonably fresh selection of music and at least at the moment, with my daily sync habit, when I listen to a song it goes out of rotation for a while which could be anywhere from a week to years.
⸻
1. This was originally 6/12/24 months, but I ended up boosting that time frame as storage grew tight on my phone.
This reminds me of my smart playlist on Apple Music.
It's called "long time no see" and it includes any songs I've listened to more than 10 times but haven't listened to in the last year. I've been using the same music library for nearly two decades now, so it works really well for me. It's like a constantly rotating nostalgia playlist.
Love that you've got archival stuff and Christmas music filtered out - feels like everyone with a big library has a few odd folders that shouldn’t be in regular rotation
I self-host a couple of things including an Emby server to watch movies. Self-hosting a music library seems interesting. But I discover and listen to music far more than I watch movies.
This article tells me how good Jellyfin is, but the music collection process is not here. Do you download them manually? Do you buy records?
I grew up downloading music into my PC and then transferring them to my SD card which I used in my phone. Once I had a Spotify, it was just... easier. I can discover music faster with the "song radio" feature in Spotify. I can find and listen to an album as soon as I come across it.
I'd absolutely love to have a better media player and "frontend" than Spotify but I haven't solved the collection part of it. What can be done there?
I've never used Spotify so can't compare to that, but Bandcamp is like a much better version of the local record store. You can follow artists and record labels you like, which will give you email notifications whenever they release something. You can browse new and old music by all kinds of esoteric tags and subgenres. Every week or so you get an email of some new releases in your favorite genres. You can download in multiple formats, personally I download FLAC for backup and 320 for listening. It's easy to search for tracks or artists you discovered elsewhere, it's easy to listen to and scrub through tracks... Just great. If you're a gamer, it's like the Steam of music.
My only complaint is that when I buy a bunch of songs my credit card gets charged a bunch of times (one for each artist/label) which has triggered fraud warning in the past, but I guess they do that to avoid the hassle of routing money to each artist in their own currency... It seems mildly customer unfriendly to me but in a world where people charge a can of coke to their credit card maybe not all that weird any more.
I am a heavy user of bandcamp, but I find their notifications...lacking. I ended up taking their emails, categorizing them, and putting them in RSS [1]. This has cleaned up my notifications and makes it much easier to follow artists and to easily separate new releases vs news/merch/...
Also, I find bandcamp's wishlist manager to be severely lacking. I use the wishlist as a queue of things I need to check out or have already checked out (and may not have liked). But, it isn't really meant for having 1000s of albums in there.
So, I wrote a wishlist manager [2][3], which lets you organize, comment, rate, and listen to your wishlist.
I spend a quite a bit on bandcamp, especially since many of the bands I listen to are only available on bandcamp (no streaming services!). While I am glad it hasn't been enshittified by the acquisitions, I do think there could be a few small UX improvements.
I think the unstated assumption is that the reader has an existing music library. Where that library came from is an excercise left to the reader. I use bittorrent, which I admit is a little morally smelly, but I justify it by buying vinyl albums of any artists I listen a lot to. It'd take a lot of Spotify listens to match the money to the artist of buying a single album from the band website. Lots of vinyl comes with digital downloads too. When I'm at home, physical media is fucking rad. I mean, I can unplug the turntable, spin it by hand, and hear the music directly from the needle. No software, no gadgets. It's so primal, like the artist is whispering to me. I hadn't realized how much I lost switching to Pandora until I switched back to physical media.
Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything? e.g. Merge the artists 'Guns N Roses' and 'Guns and Roses' into the most correct one.
I can't justify the time to do it manually and feel like if I just wait long enough a turn-key AI solution will pop up.
I can't justify the time to go torrent music every time I want to try something new. I don't have a "small list" of artists, I listen to tons of artists and if I immortalized it with a torrented library, how would I ever find new music?
There're recommendations in these comments that can solve the automating and downloading part of it but they still don't solve the discovery part of it.
The only way I see is - use Spotify to discover; sync your library using said software to collect and play later.
I do not know what you are listening to, but for my kind od music I have few webpages that I can visit for new and old releases. I can filter for example by genre and see few yt videos with to see if this is something I would like. Then you can download it or buy it. This is a lot od work but I would never discover few bands 'the spotify way'. Like i.e. Austrian Death Machine.
Somehow we did it before spotify :). Browse forums. See what people are talking about. Follow local venues and see who is coming to town. Read about different artists. Different producers. Different record companies. Fall down the rabbit hole. You don’t need an algorithm to tell you what to listen to. Take the reigns. It’s a hobby right? Lean in.
> Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything? e.g. Merge the artists 'Guns N Roses' and 'Guns and Roses' into the most correct one.
I've recently started using Beets[1] to organize my music collection. It's a command line application that IMHO is not entirely intuitive to use at first. But once you get the hang of it, it works incredibly well.
I don't usually recommend software that isn't open source, but MusicBee is really great for organizing tunes. You can build really deep auto playlists based on any tag you like, you can do bulk updates across lots of fields, you can have it reorganize files into folders around any of the tags, including with fallbacks for missing tags, there's configurations to download metadata from online, all kinds of stuff. Plus it's a super customizable music player too.
If you haven’t been keeping up with Plex, self-hosters like myself and others are up in arms over the client rewrite. It feels like the Sonos update for us. Broken features. Useful functionality removed. UI that’s more streaming focused than self-hosting like it used to be.
If you haven’t gone down the Plex path yet, don’t right now as the community and developers sort out their roadmap. Plex seems to be open to feedback, but a lot of us feel betrayed. They had open user testing for the new apps but they didn’t implement or fix any of the reported issues.
I moved away from Plex when they started shoving free B/C movies with lewd posters on my home page and made is very hard and confusing to remove (if removing it completely was even an option, I still don't know).
The whole reason I host plex is that I want an offline experience that I curate myself. The requirement for internet to authenticate and shoveling crapware in my face pushed me towards trying Jellyfin. The Jellyfin UI on TV and mobile is not as flashy and polished as Plex, but it is extremely functional and respects users choices.
Been a happy Jellyfin customer for years now though I only use it to organize and browse my library now. Actual playback is either MPV on PC or Kodi over NFS on TV. After trying many many players, these were the two I found best for respective platforms, nothing else even comes close.
I think this is the path. I like jellyfin but I find it has trouble with some files on some devices. Kodi handles pretty much everything. Not as nice for browsing though.
Totally. I had some issues where Jellyfin would transcode to remove HDR when trying to play on a HDR capable TV. Disabling transcoding completely means black screen for a lot of videos which kodi plays just find over NFS (so no chance of transcoding) on the same device.
I’ve been using Plex since it was a Mac only XBMC fork. While it’s drastically different than where it started, I haven’t noticed any recent changes. I do 99% of my viewing via the AppleTV app and it hasn’t changed. I removed all the shortcuts for their streaming stuff long ago.
I’m running the server in Docker and pretty lazy about updating it. Is that the side that changed? It looks like I’m running 1.27 and 1.41 is out now. Should I be sticking with what I have?
I really like Infuse Player on my AppleTV. It "just" reads from a network share that has a bunch of folders with movies and tv shows and just handles the rest. Occasionally I will have a codec issue but I just transcode for free using handbrake.
I used SMB before with Infuse, but switched to selfhosting Jellyfin as scanning takes too much time over the network (the files are on HDDs attached via USB). I still play with Infuse, but it uses Jellyfin's database.
I never really understood what is the point od running something locally and then registering on .com domain. Like if I will loose internet connection I cant listem my own music? Seemed radicoulous. But I guess it does nit require much knowledge and people keep using it.
I give all my services a proper subdomain so SSL works. But I keep all my services internal and run a pi.hole with DNS for my local services. (I use wireguard to vpn into my network to access everything).
If internet goes out, DNS to my local services still works fine since it is being served directly from my pi.hole.
What about their plexamp app for streaming music? It looks pretty nice and seems like a good deal if you purchase the lifetime plan for 50% off during Black Friday.
Might not be true for all setups, but I find that Plex is a resource hog. Navidrome and Jellyfin are a lot leaner. Plex was using quite a bit of CPU just browsing the library.
Plexamp sounds awful to me, trebly and thin. Googling around I found it was a common complaint.
It DOES handle multichannel audio well, though I don't think it can do Atmos natively.
I went through a similar phase where I thought, how hard can it be to just manage my own music like it's 2008 again? Turns out, kind of annoyingly hard. The part about music players being stuck in time really hit. Winamp nostalgia aside, most local players feel like they haven't evolved in a decade
That's why the author moved beyond that stage and to apps that connect to existing music libraries hosted on jellyfin. Apparently there are a lot more options out there than I knew about.
My question would then be, what do you think needs "evolving"? This space hasn't seen transformative changes in decades, with ample time to converge towards effective paradigms and implementations. Stability would be pretty much what I would expect, or even desire there.
I have Navidrome with the "play:Sub" app on iOS (because it works with carplay) for a few obscure albums and it works ok, but I still pay for Spotify because it's convenient and it has most of the music I want.
When we start getting the same splintering that we have with video (too many subscriptions to count), I'll dust off my old eyepatch and start sailing the seven seas... :(
Just tossing in my own recommendation: I use Lyrion Music Server (previously Logitech Media Server (previously Slim Devices/Squeezebox))[1]
It's open-source, self-hosted, has various good plugins (eg: I have some Pandora stations I listen to, as well as my own music collection).
You can synchronize music across multiple devices in your home (I just have 2).
Even though the physical devices (Squeezebox Touch, etc) are no longer sold, it's pretty easy to build one yourself with a raspberry pi.
It's one of those cases where a company created something great, and strongly-open-sourced it enough that the project can't die even though the new owners are not giving it the love it deserves.
So, I hope to keep using it for the rest of my days (:
For me it was never an alternative because I don't use Spotify at all.
For streaming I use Soma FM almost exclusively, everything else I curate myself.
I never had a problem discovering more music through good old forums and more recently, LLMs. Trying out their recommendations is a fun exercise on its own as some songs they recommend will be totally obscure, but mostly they are on point.
I’ve tried using jellyfin for music, but I’m so much happier than jellyfin or Spotify when I’m using my old iPod. There’s something special about curating a collection. New music is deliberate and exciting. And I already had a decently sized library! I just picked up a pair of AirPods Max now that they released a USB-C - 3.5mm cable, and it’s wonderful. The beauty of the headphone jack is that the newer tech of the headphones just works. I suppose using an iPod for music aligns with why I enjoy using a kobo for reading ebooks. It’s nice to have a focused device disconnected from the internet. Best of all, the iTunes Store is DRM-free, so it remains easy to acquire music.
I finally decided to self-host last week and boy I did not know how much that domain has progressed. I have setup a domain, a VPS with Cloudron and cloud backup in less than two hours. I was absolutely blown away. I no longer use notion and store all my files and photos on the VPS, it has been wonderful. The bonus is how good I feel about my for not relying on the big players.
- Wasabi for backups (Cloudron supports every cloud storage possible and Wasabi is not the cheapest, I just wanted to try it) - $7/m
- Hostinger VPS with 50GB of storage - $5/m
I will probably add more apps to Cloudron at which point I will have to pay $15/m. But I think it is worth it - you can install every possible app with one click and have single sign-on. I offered to split the service with some friends too which would make the economics even better.
Storage costs are the weak link in this sort of setup. Productivity apps can be fine, but as soon as you start trying to host a music or video it can be expensive.
I have not looked at different offerings for block storage but object storage has been very cheap. Say the Wasabi account gives me a terrabyte for $7/m with egress included. I am not sure whether it is possible to setup the self-hosting solutions to use that rather than VPS block storage though.
I bought a 4TB external hard drive from a thrift shop and found it is loaded with a huge unorganized treasure trove of MP3s that stops maybe around 2008. The tags and file names are a bit of a mess (looks like bad character encoding for anything with accents), and there is no genres or categorization. I'd love to use a subset of this archive on Jellyfin or Navidrome.
Any suggestions for a tool that can clean up file names and tags, and apply some sort of genre categories? I've tried Picard, but the process seems too manual for such a large archive.
I recently bought a mini pc too and gave the self-host shenanigans a roll. It was definitely worth it.
Using traefik + tailscale + dns challenge with CloudFlare, I was able to self-host and make my services available only through the vpn without loosing HTTPS on all the subdomains. It's lovely!
I wrote my own networked music player, https://github.com/ruuda/musium. It's not nearly as fully featured as Jellyfin, but it does do what I want in exactly the way I want it. A feature I implemented a while ago is to make it show me albums I listened to a lot in the past, but not recently, and it's been great to rediscover some of those albums.
Do you use a local client that accepts caching/offline playback of the content ?
I'm looking through the android clients and none seem to fully embrace keeping the most played tracks on device ("offline mode"). Tempo[0] has in on the wip list, while StreamMusic straight removed in it the latest update[1], so as of now it looks like a pretty tough feature to get.
Listening to music in remote places is nice, and that was the main reason for paying for Spotify for me.
Every couple of years, I buy a used Sansa Clip+ from ebay to replace the previous one that suffered physical damage. I transfer over the 128GB/256GB sd card. Voila - entire music collection in the size of a box of matches, no need for data connections, or a working phone, or fumbling with a screen when I'm working out.
This won't help you if you're looking for Android apps, but for anyone else interested using iOS, play:Sub works with Navidrome and has pretty good local cache support: you can explicitly download stuff locally and there's a configurable maximum size.
Seconded! And the Subsonic-compatible API means that I have Android/iOS clients (playing music through the browser on mobile devices isn’t great). The web interface works well on any desktop.
I've been working on a custom media server that does streaming, block-based storage on top of S3, with the local disk being used as a cache.
I implemented an override of Stream in C# that can be passed directly to an HttpContext file response. This gives me range-based response support on top of cached S3 media blocks for free. The front-end uses ffmpeg to do a quick transcode on uploads to guarantee fast start of mp4 content in my html video elements.
The cool thing with having a reasonable sized cache is that you can switch to glacier infrequent access tier (i.e., the one intended for quarterly reporting) and save a lot of money on storage. The other fun bit is that it is shared across all clients on the LAN, so if someone watches a show before you, you'll just read it from local during your run through.
For me, I don't need a lot of fancy bullshit in a media solution. An un-styled web player that just works on my MacBook is pretty much the only client support I care about. My media library currently shows up as a monolithic <table> without any pagination. Time to first frame on an uncached video click is well under a second on a 1gbps fiber connection using 32 megabyte block size to US-EAST-1 from Texas.
Egress isn't that bad. It would be like paying for 1~2 streaming subscriptions if you watched several gigabytes of fresh content per day every day (i.e., zero cache hits).
(Disclaimer: this relates to the commercial project I run, but it is directly answering the parent)
It's not self hosted, more a middle-ground between rented Spotify and self hosted data sovereignty, but this is what we do at https://asti.ga . You store your music in some Internet-accessible storage, such as any S3 compatible endpoint, and Astiga connects and streams your library (and provides offline etc etc). AMA.
Is that wise though? I mean I understand the desire to use cheap off-site storage, but S3 clouds can be expensive when requesting files a lot, streaming data, lots of read/write operations.
You can, it’s just suboptimal in my experience and incurs troubleshooting time. I’ve been meaning to put a bounty on S3 compatible support via a fork (maintainers are not interested and believe posix file system is preferable), just haven’t had the time. Hopefully soon!
Desired pipeline is “Ingest->MusicBrainz->Object Storage (music bucket, write once read many)->Serve to various clients from middleware server (Jellyfin).”
I’ve been doing this since 2005 with just my NAS and mediamonkey or foobar2000. Additionally, Sonos can index the NAS directly over SMB, although they have not really put much effort into fixing bugs in their implementation it still works well enough. Any upnp/dlna streamer that runs on your NAS (plex, twonky, etc…) should be able to handle other situations.
I like Jellyfin and have it set up for movie, tvseries, youtube channel hosting for family members.
As a music server it has a few shortcomings (that can be fixed with contributed code - ATM this one is waaay down my TODO list so anyone that wants to step up - go for it, please) ..
It currently has non existent support of FullAlbum.flac with 'standard' TrackIndex.Cue track timing lists.
I ripped a lot of my early albums and CD's as single lossless FLAC (and APE and another format) files with track timings courtesy of either hand entry or the exactCD (?) database - there are many such rips out there is full album rips where popular for a good run of time.
Jellyfin sees these as single files, not as an album of tracks, and plays them as such with no track selection, next track, or resume.
Addressing this is on the github issues list.
Foobar2K and other music players have no issues with these files.
Personally I switched Navidrome since I found the clients to be better and the scanner to be lighter, but there's a few things I miss: casting was nice, as well as centralizing my media on one everything-app.
I use Navidrome with Feishin as a client on PC and Symfonium on my phone. Symfonium allows me to cast in the same way as Spotify.
Symfonium is paid but appears to be one of the rare apps that is still thoughtfully created by somebody who actually uses it. The developer deserves the support.
I haven't spent much time trying Jellyfin but I really like having my music information in a central location (Navidrome) and being able to stream to a variety of different clients based on my device. It works well for me so far.
I've used both, and wound up using Jellyfin mostly because it also does movies/TV and I mostly listen to music from external apps, so a music specific server wouldn't be adding much benefit.
I have been using PlexServer and PlexAmp apps lately and I'm quite happy. Nothing like listening to your CD collection on the go with the streaming quality you get to decide. The best bit for me is that the server side can run on a low powered SBC, and a large sdcard.
The problem with this is is the same problem I had when I tried to switch to Apple Music, the network effect. I can't see my friend's playlists, work on collaborative ones, have automatic "blends" with friends etc if I have all my music on a JF server.
Plexamp is awesome and i miss it a bit as a Jellyfin user... But i don't trust the plex codebase. My suspicions were firmed up when Lastpass got hacked literally through Plex.
The LastPass breach was indeed linked to a vulnerability in Plex Media Server. Attackers exploited an unpatched version of Plex on a LastPass DevOps engineer’s personal computer, enabling them to install keylogger malware. This allowed them to capture the engineer’s master password after multi-factor authentication, granting access to sensitive corporate vaults.
Notably, the Plex vulnerability had been patched in May 2020—approximately 75 versions prior to the breach. The compromise occurred because the engineer hadn’t updated their Plex software. While the flaw was in Plex, the breach underscores the critical importance of timely software updates and robust security practices.
https://www.wired.com/story/lastpass-engineer-breach-securit...
In short: other posters want to hear from you, not from an AI. AI written posts aren't actually valuable (we can all dump stuff into the AI just fine). If you don't have much to say, it's fine to just share a link to the source you found.
Just link the article if you have nothing more to say. If you absolutely insist on posting AI-generated stuff be extremely clear that it is AI-generated instead of hiding that it has been ghostwritten by a LLM.
When it comes to self hosting, Jellyfin is really not a Spotify replacement. There are better, more purpose driven application. A good example is Navidrome. It is a less featureful Spotify clone but it has more functionality than Jellyfin.
I respect the author's self hosted journey and encourage everyone to go down that path.
Anyone concerned about recommendations might wanna look at musicbrainz. You can write a script for fetching the recommendations based on your current library every week
Thanks, I'm checking it out right now and it looks really promising. It supports scrobbling (which apparently just means syncing your listening data) from various music players like navidrome & jellyfin.
Author mention the struggle of making playlist, I just use the filesystem feature and put them in individual folders. Every single audio player can put all songs in a folder in the play queue. Hardlibks can be used to save space for songs I have on individual albums. I still like listening to complete albums.
The music from my computer is synchronized to my smartphone with syncthing.
Owntone has my library to play in my house through shairpoint-sync driven amps & speakers in different rooms. (Synced perfectly and seamlessly - your ears can really tell too).
That same Owntone installation over wireguard using http stream in my phone/laptop browser when I'm not home.
Owntone & airplay2 is absolutely first rate.
Owntone http streaming is plenty good enough for me.
(Owntone also works great with your spotify subscription if you do that).
I’ve been using Roon for a few years. Proprietary but it works amazing for me. The big feature is the auto-tag feature so I don’t have to be anal about music tagging.
At least in the case of a music player, self-hosting simply isn't good enough for me. I'm not willing to accept a single second of added latency or buffering or downtime because I don't have multimillion dollar server farms. The fact is that the vast majority of us don't have the resources to self-host a Jellyfin instance that can provide near-instantaneous access anywhere in the world to every song ever made at 320kbps. And that's the bar for music. I can deal with a little added latency vs. Netflix on a Plex server or something. But I'm not willing to compromise with music.
This isn't even to mention the numerous features that Spotify has which are difficult or impossible to replicate on self-hosting. The "radio" feature, song recommendations, the DJ, AI playlists, stations, automatic playlist enhancement, social features, Canvas... the list goes on. And of course I never have to worry about managing a library of mp3 files. When an artist I like drops a new album, it'll be on Spotify at 12:00am exactly and work perfectly. This isn't possible with self-hosting.
When you look at it this way, the chance to pay 6 bucks a month to get all these extra features and ignore the headache of self-hosting is a no-brainer.
> The fact is that the vast majority of us don't have the resources to self-host a Jellyfin instance that can provide near-instantaneous access anywhere in the world to every song ever made at 320kbps.
The fact also is that the vast majority of us don't have a requirement to be able to access our media from anywhere in the world. Most people aren't traveling the world on a regular basis, they stay in one area except for maybe an occasional vacation.
> And of course I never have to worry about managing a library of mp3 files. When an artist I like drops a new album, it'll be on Spotify at 12:00am exactly and work perfectly. This isn't possible with self-hosting.
If that's important to you, then indeed self-hosting will never be able to match it. But for me at least, my music listening has been 95% static since about 20 years ago. On occasion I hear something new that I add to the collection, but for the most part I listen to the same music I did some time ago. Paying $6/mo to Spotify just to listen to the same things I already have in my collection would be a gross waste of money. So for me it's the exact opposite: self hosting is a no-brainer because I simply would not get any value for my $6/mo.
That's definitely your prerogative, but I think that is also kind of esoteric. When I'm on vacation I'm too busy enjoying my vacation to have time to listen to my music!
>I'm not willing to accept a single second of added latency or buffering or downtime...
>... near-instantaneous access anywhere in the world to every song ever...
Nobody needs this. You think you do, but nobody needs everything everywhere all at once. If being wholly unwilling to wait "a single second" isn't sarcasm, then... yeesh.
My point is this: I spend over 100,000 minutes per year listening to music. Any unnecessary friction in the experience is therefore extremely frustrating and has a disproportionate effect on my life. In all my experience self-hosting, it adds a certain level of friction that just isn't worth it considering how much time I spend listening.
I am not hostile to self-hosting in other cases. I am very satisfied with my self-hosted Plex server, for example. But I don't spend 30% of my waking hours watching TV.
I'm a bit confused, why would you have problems with latency for music? This is not real time sound mixing where you need millisecond latencies, the client can just download the whole thing and play it. Even high quality audio files are tiny (unless you're listening to 4 hour classical operas).
It's no-brainer for people who do not care about freedom or file preservation. Spotify can pull the plug on whatever your favorite song is and there is NOTHING you can do about it. Then again, spotify has hundreds of millions of clueless subscribers, such as yourself, who will willfully consume the most crappy audio codec and praise them for it
> Spotify can pull the plug on whatever your favorite song is and there is NOTHING you can do about it
There's plenty I can do about it. If Spotify decides to "pull the plug" on a song or artist I like, it's my prerogative to switch providers or decide to self-host. I'm not locked into a lifetime serfdom with them, and it's not like the files will magically vanish from the internet once Spotify decides not to host them.
> who will willfully consume the most crappy audio codec
I listen to 99% of my music through Bluetooth on AirPods, so 320kbps is perfectly fine for my use case. If I was someone who cared deeply about audio quality, I would switch to a competing service with HiFi.
> hundreds of millions of clueless subscribers, such as yourself
I really want to use Jellyfin for music, but unfortunately it separates albums based on directories and not by reading the metadata, so if you have an album separated into "Disc 1", "Disc 2", etc, each disc shows up as a separate album.
I really don't want to restructure my library just for Jellyfin, so I basically can't use it.
Yes, "Spotify Alternative" does seem to miss that Spotify / Apple Music+ / etc are legal and somewhat ethical ways to get access to a huge amount of music that would be expensive to purchase and a huge pain to torrent.
E.g. lately I have been listening to more classical, and the musicianship between different performances of the same piece varies widely. It is very nice to be able to quickly explore a few different albums before I find the one I like (also to study the differences). In the Olden Days I would hogged the headphones at the music store... or, more likely, not make my own decision and purchase based on reviews and name recognition.
On the other hand, I of course never actually purchase albums anymore. ("somewhat ethical")
If you listen on high-end equipment the audio quality is noticeably worse than many other solutions and depending on your music taste, Spotify often removes content or doesn't have it in the first place.
I got a smartwatch with a cell connection, some good earbuds and started going to the gym, then I learned that their watch app is complete garbage. It refuses to play the music I want, either playing something else or nothing at all. It will play it out loud on my phones speaker in the locker instead of through my earbuds. It refuses to download the playlists I want. It refuses to stream the music.
None of that is a problem with the Apple Music app, so it's 100% a Spotify problem.
Also, Music sometimes disappears from my playlists.
Afaik it's not terribly good to the artists. One of my favorite bands left the platform; I'm not there yet but if it happens en masse (or at least enough to effect me noticeably) then I'm out too.
Streaming services could price themselves out of the market in an attempt to generate the income needed to pay artists fairly. (Google/Apple could temporarily draw money from coffers and outcompete Spotify temporarily)
Or artists could sell the music directly at a fair price (no streaming service but vinyl or downloads). Or more people could go to concerts
Either way, consumers need to pay more before all good artists can make ends meet. The (comparatively) pocket change that many of them get from streaming won't be enough even if Spotify turns into a non-profit and improves payout from 70% of their income to 99.9% of their income
Most consumers seem to disagree, judging by the reactions to Spotify's recent price increase in the netherlands (even though the increase was lower than inflation or median income growth). With the money simply not being on the table unless you get lucky and get massively popular, there is no realistic alternative, but some options feel more fair than others. I could totally see myself doing music as a hobby and seeing what I can sell on Bandcamp rather than supporting Google and having them/Youtube stream my music to people
Nothing. It's pretty cheap, and saves all the hassle these people are going through to self host. I'd guess for most people here paying for music streaming service isn't really a problem. Buying all the music would likely be more costly, though seems a bunch just want to pirate music and make out that they are "saving money". Music discovery would be more problematic.
For $15 a month I get access to (as far as my tastes are concerned) all the music ever recorded, instantly accessible from anywhere in the world on any device I own.
I recall a commercial from the 90s that sort of poked fun at this exact idea, as being laughably farfetched and "sci-fi".
i was cool with it for a long time, id buy annual memberships every year(non renewing). price hikes came, that annual is a lot more daunting as a one time purchase (especially at that particular moment in time for me). i was spending a lot of time in the car attempting to use the app. it quite literally felt like a short trip was 1 song sandwiched between equal parts ads. so a trip to the grocery was kinda like 2 mins ads, song(dont you dare try to skip that song or youll get an ad, or be out of next songs as its shuffle only), maybe another song, then 2 more minutes of ads.
ive now been in a place where that membership isnt that daunting. but im good, im not gonna have my music library held prisoner from me unless i cough up a monthly fee. its quite literally unusable if you arent paying. it also seems like they intentionally make their browser based version kinda trash... to make using it to block ads a less viable option(its been a while, not sure how true this currently is).
the jellyfin option is actually what ive settled on as well, ive been a bit lazy about setting up more functionality than just for my LAN, but i will get around to it. for now i just kinda plop junk on my phone and play it through vlc, which is certainly a lazy solution but its still feels freeing.
Was happy for a time, then I realized I only listen to the same playlists (generated playlists don't work for me as I need some time to appreciate new music). Now I use YouTube/SoundCloud to check out artists' releases, and then get the whole album if it's interesting.
I have a decently sized library with my favorite albums and that's been sufficient for some time now. Every once in a while, I track new releases and explore new genres, then add the few that picked my interest to my library.
Intentionally is great for enjoying art (and YouTube is more than enough for mood music)
Yes it is. If it's not available for you then blame the fucktard lawyers who made the call that it should not be available wherever you are for some dumbfuck reason. Spotify is not responsible for this, they just comply with the aforementioned fucktard lawyers.
Their point is at a higher level than a single artist's inclusion. What you're advocating is for artists to give up their rights (whether primarily or indirectly negotiated). "Just do what the lawyers say."
I didn't think Spotify had fanboy/fangirl followings, but based on your and others' comments, I stand corrected. What do I know!
I fully support artists to decide what they want to do with their music, but artists who sign contracts with labels and music companies do give up their rights, like it or not, that's how it works. And yes, Spotify enforces contracts and geographical licensing deals that dumbfuck lawyers invent because reasons. What would you want them to do, break IP laws?
There's absolutely no way in hell I'm going back to hoarding stupid ass CDs or MP3/FLAC files when I can legally have immediate access to tens of millions of titles. I have absolutely zero interest in the "owning" part but I understand some people would prefer it.
ive often thought about a happy middle ground product that would make me consider coming back to spotify... a version of the subscription model, somewhat similar to ebook stuff, where if you are subscribed you can choose X amount of songs that month to "own" forever.
so if you decide you cant pay their monthly fee, you still have full access to your library of songs that you chose to own over the years, and are not subjected to the feeling of being a prisoner to their subscription model if you decide you cant afford it for x amount of time.
this feeling of being a prisoner is the absolute main driver of why i prefer non spotify solutions. i love the actual product otherwise. if i had not experienced the non subscribed version of what my account feels like, i think i would still happily be paying for spotify today.
I use bandcamp intermittently and have often wished that they offered a "subscription" feature like this, whereby they take a certain amount of money from me a month to put into my "bandcamp wallet" or whatever, that I can then use to buy music. I mean to spend a certain amount on music in bandcamp per month but life gets in the way and it falls off the radar. A model like this would definitely keep me more engaged
I've never understood the conspiratorial use of that slogan because it's unironically correct. Ownership is economically a cost and a risk and you're generally better off if you can utilize something without owning it or distribute ownership.
I'm much better off using free software than having copies of proprietary software on my shelf and the train is much cheaper than the car insurance.
It's not conspiratorial. It's an accurate and widely broadcasted business model by several companies. Why do you feel something that is present and real should be denigrated as conspiratorial?
Spotify prices are quite reasonable, especially when you consider what has happened to video streaming services like Netflix. Plus Spotify has a large portion of all music ever, and mostly has close to 100% of new music that is being released.
Hosting my own, even though it appeals a lot to me on principle, just would be either too costly to maintain legally (buying new music) or too cumbersome illegally (torrenting any music I want to listen to).
I guess if someone is really into music, they will spend a lot of time on finding new music, and will be inclined to spend more money on the hobby too. But for casual listeners like me, it's far too convenient to simple select a song on Spotify and click "play radio" and get an unending playlist of new songs.
If there were a recommendation algorithm plugin for Jellyfin (even if it just calls out to the API of some existing external web service), that might pull me over. Until that's the case, the recommendations will keep me on Spotify
Assuming there's last.fm/listenbrainz reporting plugins for Jellyfun, then both those services will provide recommendations based on what you have listened to. Maybe not as good as Spotify's but it's something.
There's a lesser known player app called Voicelane where you could drop youtube URLs into a playlist where you are allowed to play on loop. I would browse music and songs on YT and listen to them on one of my Voicelane playlists. It's pretty neat
I struggled with Jellyfin for years, never got it to work right, particularly the XBOX clients. Switched to Plex for the win. I like the recommender that comes with Plex Pass and listen to music off my home server on my phone in the car and when walking in the woods.
I used Plex for years but ditched it when they got caught sending all your watch activity to their company for whatever. My privacy is worth the pain. I'm running Jellyfin, but it's not a smooth system at all.
I bought an XBOX One as opposed to a PS4 because I'd heard the Plex client was perfect on XBOX -- personally I like game consoles as media players because they play discs and I'd rather have an overpowered rather than underpowered machine.
I ditched Plex when they came out with a FAST [1] service which was thoroughly pizzled [2] for me. I switched to Jellyfin which I struggled with in so many ways, the terrible XBOX client which was a degraded version of the web client was the worse but Jellyfin's poor metadata handling was part of it.
Last summer I spent a lot of time in a room in our rental house where I tried (and failed) to gentle a feral cat and wound up watching a lot of Tubi and came to the conclusion that FAST wasn't so bad and gave Plex another chance when I rebuilt my home server and I can say I'm highly satisfied.
I wanted a WinAmp style playlist that would work on the iPhone but couldn’t find anything I like from the App Store so I wrote my own in JavaScript that executes with a media player in the browser with advanced filtering.
I have my music loaded into plex and use plexamp but because it’s a nas, I also map it into an owntunes docker container so I get local playback via the HomePods in the house.
Jellyfin is pretty good these days. I have it hooked up to radarr, etc, and my non-tech husband can pirate and watch anything he wants easier and better than Netflix et al.
Honestly that's about 90% of what my homelab does.
I don't tend to re-watch or pirate video, so Jellyfin/plex is out. I thought to have a navidrome setup just for music, but it's redundant since I just listen from my machine, and for other places (except the car) I won't subject others to my music.
Stopped using Jellyfin after it played ear-splitting screeches directly into my eardrums. It was a song from an exported iTunes library, I knew iTunes would skip over the song and didn't know why, nor was I particularly bothered. I have to assume now that the file was corrupted, and Jellyfin uncritically played it anyway. I knew I had a few other songs like that in the library and stopped using it for fear for my ears, my headphones, and my speakers.
A large part of my listening on YouTube Music is going to a particular song or band I like and clicking "Radio", which generates a playlist of similar sounding songs. You can then fine tune it with a filter i.e "Popular songs, deep cuts" or specific elements of the song "More emo", "Slow paced" etc. This exposes me to a lot of new music and keeps it fresh and if I'm lucky I'll discover a new artist or song to add to my rotations.
You lose that.
A lot of these services overtime build mixes which takes your listening habits and tries to categorize them into specific mixes made up of your existing library & new music.
I don't browse any music forums and so apart from my favourite bands, I have no idea on when artists I like release new albums and would not encounter them on a self hosted solution, etc.
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