Submitted 7 months ago by ReedReads@lemmy.zip to selfhosted@lemmy.world
I see that when people ask for music servers, people frequently suggest Navidrome or mpd/mopidy. I haven’t tried either. I’m just using Jellyfin as an all-in-one. I’m wondering why do people choose to use a dedicated music server over an all-in-one like Jellyfin?
Is the extra overhead worth it?
i am enjoying navidrome and mopidy together! mopidy for in house, Tempo or subtracks for on the go.
works with home assistant quite well if the MPD extension is installed on Mopidy.
I use AIO approach with jellyfin but I’m thinking about changing it.
I like how jellyfin handles music, but the search feature is unusable with so many files.
Each time I search for a movie it search through thousands of music files and music people. And jellyfin search feature is bad as it is. I’m waiting for them to fix ot but it doesn’t seem like it.
Holy shit I was googling about this yesterday and was only finding useless reddit threads
Makes zero sense to use a dedicated music server if you also have other media to serve. Plex and Plexamp for me, haven’t seen anything better on the market.
Not for me, I prefer AIO, less maintenance.
Jellyfin works nicely for music, as long as you use a good client. The native jellyfin mobile app is not optimized for music. I use symphonium for android listening and am very pleased with it. More settings than Id ever need, different options for downloading/caching songs on device, support for subtitles and all.
I don’t run Jellyfin yet, does it or symphonium support playlists? I guess generally some kind of recommendation algorithm would be nice, but would need some third party metadata like from last.fm
Symphonium supports playlists. You can make a own manual playlist or a “smart” playlist, which has the x amount of least listened to songs, the 10 highest rated ones and so on. Everything is on the listening device local, so you have to backup for yourself. Symphonium is really really customizable.
Screenshot_20250829_135759 Sorry for german. A setting for an intelligent playlist for all highly rated songs which I havent listented to in 70 days. (AND/OR) can be set for rules. Its amazing.
Music recommendation is not really a thing unfortunately by the nature which most of download->server->jellyfin->client systems run. I sometimes use listenbrainz (by the musicbrainz team) like lastfm
Jellyfin natively supports playlists. Symphonium also supports playlists, both local and from your Jellyfin server.
I tried using Jellyfin for music but I found that it doesn’t really handle featured artists that well. Navidrome organizes music much better so I prefer using that.
i tried jellyfin for my music, but honestly, i just ended up putting all my flac files on an sd card on my phone. XD
it goes with me, no streaming needed. if i need to stream it to a particular device, i use a BT connection to the phone.
I am using syncthing to directionally sync my music from my server to my phone. I like having the local copy on both devices so O don’t worry about losing cell service/internet.
I setup navidrome but never got around to using it much personally. It seems like a good option for a private collection, but im more about sharing mine these days.
I setup jellyfin with feishin and use finamp on mobile for music.
Im running the latest alpha of funkwhale which i recommend checking out the stable version for a better impression but the alpha is functional if a bit ugly at the moment.
I discovered mstream fairly recently and really like its simplicity.
I have MPD setup to stream as a radio on my homepage.
Overall i mainly just use jellyfin out of convenience because i already use it for shows and movies.
I think if you already have jellyfin working navidrome isnt really as useful unless you dont like the way jellyfin handles music (wich objectively jellyfin isnt the best interface for music). Its not really that much extra overhead though tbh so you shouldnt hesitate to give it a try if you want to. Really anything thats just focused on audio streaming isnt going to add much overhead.
Do One Thing Well: Each program should focus on a single task and perform it effectively.
At the moment im not hosting a music server, but used to use Navidrome, it worked fine and used a small footprint.
Having all in one it’s more issues to solve, if something breaks, everything breaks.
Having all on Jellyfin is more convenient.
But adding hundreds or thousands of songs along with movies and episodes will create a huge database, more resources used, slower searches
Airsonic (fork of Subsonic) has worked well for me for a few years. Used Subsonic for many years prior. I mainly use play:Sub on IOS for playback, local/offline caching, etc.
Jellyfin kinda sucks as a music player, it takes so many clicks to navigate and it often sorts music incorrectly, so that's one reason to use something else.
I use Plex for music just because they currently have the best app (Plexamp). My Plex server is mostly just music, and TV shows I record off an antenna using HDHomeRun.
Navidrome for music, jellyfin for video based media. Audiobookshelf for podcasts and audiobooks.
Get the best of each one, much better.
I just wish the audiobookshelf android app had auto play for the next episode. Like the web version does.
I never noticed… But you are right, there is no autoplay for next episode
I’m hosting my music on Jellyfin. I generally use Symfonium on Android to listen. When I was on iOS I was using this app called Manet, but it was a little buggy. No complaints here though, it fulfills my needs.
I don’t think you’re really limited to one or the other. You can pool all your media in the same place and then point different services at it. I don’t listen to my crusty old downloaded music much these days, but, for example, I used to have Plex and Emby running side by side for years to watch movies/TV without issue. These services don’t consume that many resources so you can try multiple options until you find something you like and then remove the rest.
Jellyfin has no star rating for music. Navidrome has it. As simple as that.
Clients often are better suited for music, specially for mobile. For example with Subsonic clients (Navidrome, Gonic, etc), the client aggressively caches the queued songs, which is super helpful when there are hiccups in the network while traveling. A few clients allow me to configure the cache size, allow me to mark some titles are always cached, allow me to browse the cache (case I don’t have network at all). It’s just way better suited for music.
And on the desktop clients are way lighter weight.
I wasn’t aware that the client cached the playlist. That’s pretty great.
Ultrasonic and DSub(2000) both do. It’s so incredibly useful on roadtrips. Works really really well. I have the app live on the as card in my phone and keep the cache at a massive 100Gb, I have all my favorite music stores, in flac, ready to go at all times.
I used jellyfin for music before but i dont like finamp that much, the UI a bit stuttery. Plus, im trying to cut down which services is exposed. I went with navidrome after that but i dread of exposing another service to the internet.
Now, im using nextcloud music with tempo since im already exposing NC, just a single service for all my needs. I dont have many music so it fit my need at the moment.
I think that the little extra work to have separate services is a small price to pay to have the kind of top notch user experience that you can only get with a dedicated tool.
Besides, it’s cool to have a load of different services. Most self-hosters seem to be constantly on the lookout for the next thing to install.
One major reason why I have Ampache as a separate server is that they support smart playlist, which wasn’t well supported on Jellyfin. Navidrome also supports smart playlist, but you couldn’t edit on the web.
how does ampache handle day to day for you? what is your favorite client?
It works pretty well despit having 30k+ music files read over rclone, though I am the only user. It also has a web client, though it looks a bit old. I use Symfonium on Android and Feishin on Desktop since it provides OpenSubsonic API.
I’ve used Plex’s music before. It works well. They have a dedicated Plexamp app for it. Works well with audiobooks too.
It works okay for audiobooks, but if you want it to save your place and track chapters, audiobookshelf is better.
Plexamp has gotten better lately. It can save your progress on audiobooks now. It’s a per library feature, so I have one library of music (that does not save progress) and one for audiobooks (that does save progress). I used to have trouble with some audiobook formats (M4Bs needed to be converted (really just renamed) to mp4s, but that wasn’t necessary for the last few I loaded. Plex still has a little trouble with standards around multiple authors and different productions (and different readers) of a single book, but that’s more of an ID3 tag problem and is resolved if you’re consistent in normalizing the tags on your library. I’ve also used the syncing features a bunch for offline time (like on a plane or on long trips). For a large library, I see syncing offline files as a necessary feature.
And before the Jellyfin fanboys chime in, if Jellyfin could match these audio and syncing features (and be easier to setup for access outside my LAN and sharing with family), I jump ship in a heartbeat.
They recently added support for that, i believe.
Some plex audiobook clients like Prologue for iOS have this built in
When I set up Navidrome I had no idea jellyfin could do music too. Pretty happy with them separate though. Not for any particular reason, they both do their jobs really well.
kybean@pawb.social 7 months ago
I’ve been using Jellyfin for several years and couldn’t be happier. Tbe beta update of the Finamp music player for Jellyfin is a UI overhaul that makes it nearly perfect for playing music on both my phone and my computers, gapless playback, support for downloading songs for offline playback, Spotify-like seperate Now Playing & Next Up queues. Makes it hard to want anything else tbh