Submitted 3 weeks ago by nfreak@lemmy.ml to selfhosted@lemmy.world
https://blog.nfreak.tv/music-stack/
Full disclosure, I’m pretty new to selfhosting myself, and I haven’t written a guide like this before, but hopefully this scatterbrained writeup is enough for someone out there lmao
This is just what works for me and how I set it up. Always open to ideas for improvement as well.
Bit off topic, but I noticed this post has quite more comments than on reddit (currently 59 to 38) and more votes as well. /r/selfhosted is quite crowded usually, kinda impressive there’s more discussion happening here.
Yesterday I got into a “funny image” post showing someone who couldn’t use the correct date format online and quickly found a comment, with tailors, about the most efficient way of searching through a date-time format. I stopped and just thought that was the most "Reddit"moment I’ve had so far here and it felt nice
It’s the type of crowd that self hosting brings. We’re very much more Lemmings than Redditors by trade, so it does make sense the community here is better.
That, and fuck reddit.
Self-hosters are probably the type of people who are interested in getting away from “big tech” corporate solutions for everything, so it makes sense that they would prefer Fediverse versions
One reason could be that the audience on lemmy has a left-ish bias and there’s a political component to the Spotify exodus.
Should put a note on your blog that Lidarr’s Metadata database is being rebuilt, currently the Lidarr APi spits a bunch of 5xx errors when searching for artists/albums/etc.
github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/issues/5498
Help the Lidarr team rebuild the Database by running this application:
github.com/DeviantEng/lidarr-cache-warmer
It’ll search every artist in your library so that the new database has a cache to quickly call upon.
I think I made a note about that, but you’re right I should make it more apparent. I did use the blampe/hearring-aid build here which solves the issue for the short term, but I’ll add a clearer note to futureproof it for when the main builds are fixed.
Yeah and it’s been proper fucked for months. I set up anew server on my Mac mini M4 months ago and every now and then I spin up lidarr again to see if it is fixed and nope, won’t recognise a single album in my entire collection and can’t even manually add an artist.
Headphones is pretty terrible and slow, but it has the benefit of working.
You can petty easily point Lidarr to an alternate cache server. Either use the docker images they provide or of you already have Lidarr with plugins setup, you can do it that way
My hangup with self-hosting is due to the fact that I have a family for whom managing their entire library would be a full-time job. It’s unfortunately worth the $15/month for me to not have to constantly take requests for new music, add that to the server, troubleshoot when things don’t work, etc.
This is how I feel with just my spouse. Spotify absorbs so much ADD energy and immediate new music whiplash that I can’t help but be OK with it.
The alternative is to be up at 4:00am on Oct 13 ripping T-Swizzle MP3s from YT.
I had my partner put in the addresses of my *arr stack into their phone and showed them how to add things they wanted. They never close any tabs so all I need to say is what weird-ass unrelated name handles whatever media they want and I’m done.
You don’t have to host your whole family’s library though. You can start with whatever you want and be on the road to improving your setup.
“Replacing TV and movie streaming services is pretty trivial, and typically one of the first projects for any new self-hoster, but music streaming services are a whole different beast.”
both cases you just gather up media files, and you play them. follow me instead for more life hacks.
I agree, but only up to a point. If you like to discover loads of music because you listen to tracks all day at work for example (which can make you get bored of tracks/albums quickly when you play them a hundred times in one day), its much harder to do so when you have to use a different service for recommendations & listening.
Not so much that I haven’t done that myself, but it is more time consuming.
(Speaking from experience)
It would be cool if there was open source software to link your library to your friends so you would still get new things you didn’t have coming into your list.
It could probably even use one of these fun new protocols too!
I mean for work listening passively I’ve moved to icecast on vlc. There’s a shit ton of internet radio out there and I’ve discovered stuff I never would have otherwise. There’s also the archive. And bandcamp. There’s soooo many ways besides Spotify. Pandora also still exists and I used to like it but I think there’s a lot of ads now
Very wrong
I know the self hosted communities are very pro open source, with which I largely agree, but PlexAmp is such a good player it makes sense to at least try it.
Annoyance: Can’t scan your music library from the PlexAmp app, can’t scan it from the Plex app either. Super frustrating when music as added and you have to struggle with pop-up navigation on the Plex desktop site on mobile.
Game breaker: maybe it’s just really hard to find and undocumented, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to use profiles with PlexAmp, either to have individual play history and playlists, or to age restrict some music content.
Dunno about plexamp, but Plex has an auto-scan built in. Its disabled by default, but works like a charm. It listens for new file events and general finds things before you complete a download or copy
There defiantly can be profiles. You can either create fully new users (with their own logins, etc) or home users. Assign them restrictions as necessary. Of course this is all done in the plex web app, but user switching is done easy in PlexAmp.
Bought a 200€ lifetime abonnement and my daughter have to pay to use Plex on her phone even when using my 200€ paid Plex server. They lost me when they asked the user of a paid subscritpion pay. Fuck it.
Must be a misunderstanding. Paid server; users do not need a subscription.
I wrote something similar about returning to traditional music formats on my own blog audiovalentine.com/…/death-to-spotify-a-survey-of…
You go!! I’ll keep all my cds, tapes, and records as long as we have players for them!
This is a nice resource. For someone like me this would be a big project. I’m curious, it sounds like a lot of moving parts. Assuming it was running ok and I didn’t really touch it for two years, five years; what is the likelihood it would still be working?
Didnt touch Jellyfin for ~2 years (except tweaking hardware acceleration) besides updating it.
Worked fine for me.
At worst you will get security problems from unpatched bugs or loose compatibility from external services, e.g. the musicbrainz API connection in lidarr.
Interested as well. I want to get into this as I just cancelled my Spotify subscription but I’m a bit overwhelmed by the process
Love my Navidrome server, though I use Substreamer on Android since it’s “free” and free.
Fantastsic post!
FWIW I suspect Jellyfin is the better choice for libraries with both music and movies. That said, we live in a world where multiple FOSS options exist to serve these roles. That should be appreciated and noticed by waaaay more people.
all the jellyfin music clients have weird glitches with band names and metadata. this has been with almost every (android) jellyfin client on 3 different Jellyfin servers over the years
i was almost completely sold on Jellyfin being my music server but it wasn’t quite ready for me, or possibly there is something about my library it doesn’t like.
What?
Just have your files properly tagged by picard/lidarr.
Improper tags = Weird behaviour you caused.
I’ve never had an issue, hm.
i‘ve first used jellyfin for movies and series for a while and then decided i also wanted to add music streaming to my nas, so i put it into jellyfin. there were a couple of things that bugged me though, and so i also installed navidrome. jellyfin and navidrome have access to the same directory with all the music i own, and i have both finamp as well as amperfy on my iphone, and i really quite prefer navidrome with amperfy. so i would say that if you already got jellyfin for movies/ series and you don’t need a lot for a music streaming platform, it’s perfectly fine. however, if you need some more music streaming specific stuff, like a nice workflow for creating playlists, you may prefer to add navidrome.
Jellyfin sucks for music. I tried it several times, hoping it got better, but unfortunately it’s not the case. For the moment I’m still using Navidrome (which I used for the last 3-4 years without problems).
To each their own I guess (which is the point after all :) ). I’ve never had an issue with Jellyfin for music in the few years I’ve used it. All setups are different though.
On bandcamp Friday in 2 days I am going to buy a whole bunch of music to have locally and there are some artists which are not on bandcamp that I still want to have, I know I can buy their CDs or records and save them as files myself but I’d rather just buy and download a high quality digital version and not all of them have digital copies available to download fr the artists…so does anyone have any recommendations for website to buy digital music from that just have a lot of different artists regardless of where they are on platforms?
I’ve been working on the same and ran into the same issue. If not Bandcamp, I’ve had success on Qobuz. Their streaming payments to artists, last I checked, is substantially higher than anywhere else I’ve looked. I’m hoping the same is true of their music sales but I’m sure half of that is dependent on the labels, which likely have something to do with their not being on Bandcamp… or maybe that’s just my cynicism. I know little about how things work in the industry I just want to pay artists for their amazing work.
Bandcamp is where I do most of my shopping. Not sure where you are located. In Europe, for alternatives I use Qobuz and have used Bleep.
I tend to use it for more “commercial” albums.
I really need to get into a better habit of waiting for their friday events lmao, but yeah that’s where I get most of mine from as well. Otherwise, sometimes a physical record comes with a download slip or w/e, or I’ll just go find a download for something I already physically own. But for purchasing digital, Bandcamp is king right now, and I’m definitely interested in other options that are out there too.
I already use Navidrome, but I discovered Explo through your post, so thanks! It seems to work well in that it brings in the tracks that it should, but I don’t think I can keep using it because it pollutes my ‘Recently Added’ list in Navidrome with 50 new albums, each with a single track. If I could somehow prevent that, I think I’d keep using it. I tried using an .ndignore file but that didn’t work - it stops the showing up in Recents, but also prevents the tracks from working in the playlist.
This is a dumb question but I’ve really wanted to use Pangolin and I have trouble finding it clearly explained whether or not it works, with authentication, for applications that are not browser based. For example, if I wanted to connect to my self hosted home git server from VSC via ssh would that be possible through Pangolin? Obviously I could use it to log in to the web interface but what about apps/applications that I need to punch into my home network? The authentication is browser-based so in my mind it would not.
This is a bit over my own head as I’ve only been dabbling with it recently, but so far from what I’ve found that seems to be the case.
You can get creative with the Rules, but that’s always accepting a level of risk. Like to get Beszel and Komodo Periphery working on my VPS, I technically expose some services, but I keep Pangolin’s auth enabled and use the rules to restrict it to certain paths and only my own public IP (1. Allow: my IP, 2. Always deny 0.0.0.0/0).
this is incredible! petty much exactly what i did for myself, minus the *arr part (yet)
also i am dabbling with tempo, and it’s been forked with active development!
Soon 🏴☠️
Might be worse than Spotify when it comes to privacy but YT Music with Adblock is great.
I've honestly never understood people who feel the need to "replace" Spotify. I just download the music I like to my device and listen to it via VLC. If I want to discover new music in genres I like, I'll go and listen either to a terrestrial radio station, Soma.FM, or Pandora (which has many of Spotify's issues for me, but serves more as a platform for discovery of obscure music). The rare times I listen to music, I'm usually going somewhere on mass transit, or I'm on foot. And during those times, my phone is either fully turned off (so I'll use an MP3 player), or it's in Airplane Mode. Spotify has never made sense for my use-case.
I’ve honestly never understood people who feel the need to “replace” Spotify. … Spotify has never made sense for my use-case.
I don’t know how to say this, but…you have extremely uncommon use-cases:
…during those times, my phone is either fully turned off (so I’ll use an MP3 player), or it’s in Airplane Mode.
Many people listen to music on stereos and don’t necessarily want a device plugged in, so
I just download the music I like to my device and listen to it via VLC.
either doesn’t work or is substantially less convenient than e.g. casting from a phone.
Not hating on your setup at all, but it’s very niche, in my experience.
Fair enough. My whole life has basically been defined as "very niche" since about 2012. But then again, I basically only use music to shut out the world. And yes, I said use, not enjoy. It's basically a source of predictable noise that acts as a filter to the more random noise around me so I don't have more issues than usual.
Question: did you consider Funkwhale , and if so why did you choose this other stack instead?
Funkwhale is fucking awful. It’s awful to setup, it’s awful on resource usage, it’s awful to manage with multiple users who may share libraries.
I’m not sure how they could fix it without a rewrite.
TBH I chose Funkwhale for my solution because it looked easy and out of the box, I just add a single Docker and subdomain to my existing site.
It wound up being more or less what you describe.
I may well follow OP's guide and nuke my Funkwhale despite the work I put into it and the fact that it does basically work for its intended purpose
Would any of these apps allow for monitoring your listening activity? Similar to Spotify’s annual wrapped playlist?
You can connect navidrome and many other music players to listenbrainz.org. Like Spotify it creates an end of the year report and it also does recommendations like the weekly spotify playlist.
I see nobody mentioning airsonic, the open source fork of subsonic. I tried navidrome but there you can’t browse through folders or start a ‘radio mode’ (i.e. play related stuff in your library).
Another problem I found with navidrome are duplicate files in your library: since it is not folder but tag based, you’ll end up with every track double, and there is no nice quick way to just play an album each track played once.
Is there a reason why people prefer navidrome over airsonic? Since I switched I feel so much more in control what I want to play.
Is symfonium foss? Been looking for a good navifrome frontend for android.
I’ve tried to get away from Spotify for years and the reality is the competition still sucks. I still have Tidal and YT music subscriptions but 90% of my music is on Spotify. I don’t know why is it so hard to match this.
What am I missing? Whats wrong with Spotify?
Your blog is really pretty!
One of the main advantages of Spotify for me is the AI. I could host the music myself just fine. But having an AI come up custom playlists is another thing entirely.
So the first sentence is TV and movie streaming replacement is trivial… Can you elaborate for someone who still uses the pirate bay for movies?
Yup, been porting all my music to navidrome the past few months and it’s pretty sweet. I like that there are native subsonic apps for most platforms (using tempo on android at the moment) and that navidrome also comes with its own web player to use on the fly.
Image
Although my setup is much more simple, just using samba to get files to it and mp3tag to prepare the files if needed.
Anyone have suggestions for an iOS media player I can connect to a setup like this?
I need this i’ve been struggling to replace spotify.
Was just thinking about doing this over the weekend cuz youtube music’s offline functionality seems to have gone down drastically.
Nice! For an Android music player free and compatible with your setup you can try Tempo on FDroid
Fandangalo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Thank you for writing and making content.
In this era, I feel like I’m in the Good Place: it’s impossible to make “good” ethical choices while engaging with modern world. Every day, some platform or artist is found supporting blood money, genocide, unfair labor, treats other artist/collaborators like shit, exploitation… Then we all have to pivot to some obscure alternative with its own issues, lest we be immoral internet users.
I’m so tired of all this shit… /rant
nfreak@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Y e p. It’s a nightmare tbh
Arcka@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
That saying too often gets used as an excuse to not even try moving away from patronizing a harmful business, as though it isn’t worth any inconvenience since we’re screwed no matter what.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 3 weeks ago
The only way to be a truly moral person on this planet is to not participate in society and go completely 100% off grid. Even then the Good Place did a great episode on that, and they’re right, you’re not really living then either. It’s all just about what you’re willing to put up with
Auth@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You have to draw your own lines. For me I dont focus on all the bad choices, I pick something im interested in and then look at the options and try pick the choice I like the most. One thing at a time and before you know it you’ve made major choices in several areas of daily life.