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Funkwhale – Decentralized, self-hosted music server
- tchaffee 6y agoHow do musicians get paid on this platform?
- BRedSox 6y agoI’m guessing when people purchase the music as it’s not a streaming service. With that said, it appears there is the ability to share music socially - which seems like p2p sharing.
- lkxijlewlf 6y ago> With that said, it appears there is the ability to share music socially - which seems like p2p sharing. Which is fine as there is plenty of music that is allowed to be shared free.
- BRedSox 6y agoThat wasn’t their question. We all get that there is music available to be freely distributed.
- sneak 6y agoThis isn’t a platform, it is software you install and run on your own client and server.
- tchaffee 6y ago"Funkwhale is a community-driven project that lets you listen and share music and audio within a decentralized, open network." From the top of their landing page.
- awalton 6y agoThey get paid from whatever service you bought your music from - be it from CDs, MP3 sites like Amazon or Google Play (RIP), etc. Scary thought, being able to purchase music these days rather than a streaming service lease, I know...
- tchaffee 6y agoIf I am only sharing with my family, then fine. But it looks like this software allows you to create a pod and share with whoever you invite. Which my purchase doesn't cover, right?
- pessimizer 6y agoDid your purchase cover your family? Why should your spouse and children be allowed to listen to music licensed to you?
- tchaffee 6y agoMy goal is that musicians get fairly paid for their work as opposed to making sure I am following every subtle licensing technicality in my own home, which is only an exercise in pedantry and accomplishes nothing practical for musicians. I don't talk with the attorneys who create these complex licensing rules at Amazon, iTunes, etc. I talk to musicians. None of whom have ever had a problem with listening to their music with a small group of friends or family. The problem is with a platform that allows me to fire up a server and then invite thousands or millions of people to listen to someone's music for free.
- choward 6y agoDo you remember CDs, cassettes, records, etc.? Is it illegal to let family listen to those?
- _jal 6y agoBe sure you soundproof your home/apartment, and don't turn it up too much in the car. Don't want to accidentally leak any copyrighted joy to your neighbors without payment!
- LockAndLol 6y agoDonations I think. They should be able to add links to their homepage, PayPal, patreon, etc. Or maybe that's an upcoming future, I can't remember exactly.
- tchaffee 6y agoIf this is an existing feature, or when they add it, the platform becomes way more interesting to me. I'd love to pay musicians directly instead of the embarrassingly low payouts from services like Spotify.
- lomereiter 6y agoA feature would be nice to have, but right now you can just go to an artist-friendly shop (such as Bandcamp or Qobuz) and buy an album of the artist you'd like to support.
- Zigurd 6y agoAgate Berriot, the lead developer of Funkwhale, is creating a donation mechanism https://agate.blue/2019/06/09/introducing-retribute-a-decentralized-open-effort-to-support-creators.html https://agate.blue/2019/06/09/introducing-retribute-a-decent...
- 52-6F-62 6y agoI want to be surprised by how controversial this simple question seemed to be, and yet I'm not. I'm disappointed, though.
- reimbar 6y agoDonations, according to the creators of Funkwhale. Some comments here are making assumptions about the motivations/ethical principles of the developers, but how about reading directly what they say? It turns out that they've been thinking quite a lot about this problem: https://agate.blue/blog/2018/05/11/funkwhale-content-monetization-trust/ https://agate.blue/blog/2018/05/11/funkwhale-content-monetiz...
- pontifier 6y agoPeople who run servers will probably fall under the Music Modernization Act. Every DSP (Digital Service Provider) is required to register with the Mechanical Licensing collective, and the administrative fee is $5,000 per year if you fall under the threshold number of streams. If you pass that, then it's $60,000 to unlimited... Of course you'll have to file monthly reports and pay the royalties due under the blanket license as well.
- RantyDave 6y agoDidn't we do this and wasn't it called Napster?
- encom 6y agoYea, imagine what kind of Napster we could build today, with ~20 years advancement in bandwidth and storage. This looks super interesting. EDIT: Never mind. It's another "pipe curl into bash" type of app, since nobody knows how to package software any more.
- progval 6y ago> It's another "pipe curl into bash" type of app, since nobody knows how to package software any more. According to https://docs.funkwhale.audio/installation/ https://docs.funkwhale.audio/installation/ , the curl|bash is only one of the ways to install it. They also provide an ansible role, install instructions on Debian and Arch without the curl|bash, an AUR package, a NixOS package, a Yunohost package, and a Docker image
- encom 6y agoThey don't provide, those are all third party packages.
- rglullis 6y agoIt's open source. Is there such a difference between "third-party" and "application developers who focus more on developing a web application than packaging it?"
- encom 6y agoOkay, let me rephrase: When a project puts `curl | sudo bash` front and center as their primary method of installing that software, that's a planet-sized red flag. Not just because piping to bash is a terrible idea, but because it's an awful and silly way to install software, and it makes me suspicious of the way the rest of the project is being made. First impressions matter. curl>bash is a bad first impression.
- BRedSox 6y agoHonest question, how is this legal? It looks as if there is the ability to share your music online. Can someone explain the difference between this and say Napster, Limewire, Kaza, etc? Rather than storing it locally, it’s just online... or am I missing something here?
- Vinnl 6y agoThere is music you are allowed to share, e.g. music licenced under some Creative Commons licences. It's up to whoever hosts a Funkwhale instance to ensure that it only hosts legal music, I'd assume.
- gitgud 6y agoIf it's decentralised, then I guess it doesn't have to be legal...
- ben-schaaf 6y agoFrom my understanding it's legal for the same reason Apache, nginx, curl, etc. are legal. The software can be used to violate copyright, but that doesn't make the software itself illegal.
- unnouinceput 6y agoTell that to youtubedl. Embrace for stricter control from copyright groups because they don't like the tools either.
- MrGilbert 6y agoWell, as much as you can make software freely available, you can also make music and podcasts freely available. However, there is no such thing as "Github for Music". I like the decentralized approach.
- JacobSuperslav 6y agothe same way as Youtube or Bittorrent are legal
- feanaro 6y ago
- JacobSuperslav 6y agoI know this kind of thing might not be very popular on HN, but I like their anti-meritocracy statement: https://funkwhale.audio/en_US/code-of-conduct https://funkwhale.audio/en_US/code-of-conduct
- BRedSox 6y ago> We have an ethical responsibility to refuse to work on software that will negatively impact the well-being of other people. Such as creating a platform for people to listen to music for free by sharing it with others without paying the artist?
- Asooka 6y agoYou can also say it benefits the artist because it makes it easier to listen to them, which incentivises people to give them money to support them. This is more or less the entire model of Bandcamp.
- glenstein 6y agoRight, and Bandcamp is probably the most pro-artist of the major music platforms, I would say. The project also benefits the artist but creating an infrastructure not controlled by Youtube or Soundcloud.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoYou can indeed say that - and people who demand artists work for "exposure" often do. But there's no evidence it's factually correct. And Bandcamp's model is based on selling tracks and albums with free previews, which is entirely different to free listening.
- BRedSox 6y agoSource?
- Kaze404 6y agoDoes BitTorrent fall under that? Or YouTube? Plex? Google Drive?
- quyleanh 6y agoWhat about quality of this platform? If I self-hosted Hi-Res music, can my friend also play Hi-Res?
- Kaze404 6y agoYes. Iirc there are transcoding options too.
- dvno42 6y agoI've been using this for a little over a year and like it a lot but it lacks the music discovery features of commercial platforms (which becomes important when you have terabytes of music) and takes a lot of effort to organize music and create play lists. The music onboarding process typically starts with organizing metadata with Musicbrainz Picard then import the collection into Funkwhale's DB via a cli admin tool. I have funkwhale hosted at home attached to my own music collection. There is an unofficial mobile client called Otter that makes listening to music on Android very pleasent. Admin overhead aside, this program has become a part of my daily life and I greatly appreciate the developers efforts.
- Findeton 6y agoI cannot upvote Funkwhale enough. I've had the need for something like this for a long long time now. A decade ago I was lucky to have my own desktop computer (before it was a shared one with my brother, before that I had just my parent's from time to time). Nowadays, between the smarphone, the work laptop, my desktop and my laptop I cannot possibly have all my music available all the time. And I don't like using spotify where I don't feel I own the songs and they get dropped from my lists. I used to be a fan of grooveshark, but that went down. Now I can have my pod and share it with my friends? On my own server? Accessible everywhere? I'm in. Where can I donate some money?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- avinassh 6y ago> Where can I donate some money? https://funkwhale.audio/support-us/ https://funkwhale.audio/support-us/ (not affiliated with funkwhale, just found the link from their site)
- dbrgn 6y ago> I've had the need for something like this for a long long time now. Note that there are a few projects like this one, for example Subsonic or Mopidy. (Funkywhale certainly looks nice though!)
- dang 6y agoIf curious see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17933574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17933574 - a short but somewhat good thread from 2018
- jordanarseno 6y agoname is a nod to grooveshark? ;)
- gwillz 6y agoThis is great! I used to run a Subsonic server for myself but it kind of fell apart because the licensing in version 6 kind of broke the community around it. But it looks like this supports the same Subsonic protocol, which is pretty great. It's cool to not only take inspiration from predecessors but to also support and build on the same ecosystem.
- ezst 6y agoAirsonic is what I went for after the licensing woes, recommended if you liked the server-side UI and want to keep the old data. If you think you won't miss accessing your tracks by directory, navidrome (written in go) has a smaller footprint and is quite actively developed (but the web UI is rather awkward)
- mattbk1 6y agoI can recommend Navidrome on yunohost; Airsonic install kept breaking for me.
- 29083011397778 6y ago> but the web UI is rather awkward But does it work? My airsonic install consistently fails to play the next track at my work computer using the browser client.
- keyle 6y agoI just gotta say I love the name. From groove shark, to sound cloud, to funk whale. Cannot wait for slimy eel.
- smcleod 6y agoI must admit I did read the title somewhat incorrectly at first and had a good old laugh, it's a solid title.
- TheUndead96 6y agogroove shark, now theres a name I have not heard for a long time...
- keyle 6y agoGrooveshark was awesome! From the brand, the UI, the service. RIP Grooveshark.
- Lambdanaut 6y agoThey really were the best, and they had obscure music that I would have never expected they'd have. Old SNES game OST like the super mario rpg soundtrack was there. It felt like if I could think it, I could find it. Ad-free and flawless free experience. Truly a gem.
- SuperPaintMan 6y agoI was using it at my job when it went down. Music stopped, things weren't responding, reloaded the page and knew it wasn't coming back. I was using it way back when you could use their Java Applet to upload your music. Had my entire library on it!
- tomjen3 6y agoIndeed. I was a paid user, hoping for the site to get some legitimacy. Unfortunately we need to change the copyright system for music to require a uniform fee only if we ever want to see another groveshark.
- benbristow 6y agoSite seems to have had the HN hug of death.
- oysteroyster 6y agoDoes anyone have any experience with Gonic? Kinda similar and more lightweight imo: https://github.com/sentriz/gonic https://github.com/sentriz/gonic
- captn3m0 6y agoI switched recently from Airsonic to Gonic, mainly due to how resource-heavy Airsonic was. I primarily use 2 clients: Clementine/Linux and play:Sub/iOS. I also tested a audiobook-only-installation against BookSonic/Android. Notes: - Gonic doesn't support many routes. The *sonic protocol supports special routes for Podcasts/Audiobooks/Radio Stations for eg. [0] details missing routes - It heavily uses `folder.jpg` as the album art. Doesn't work well always. I used sacad[1], but it wasn't perfect. - Not all players will work perfectly with Gonic. I use play:Sub and it had some issues with album names being blank because Gonic used `name` field in album info while keeping title blank (I think). This is now fixed mostly, but I still have a few blank albums that I need to investigate - I liked the transcoding options on the server side. You can set it per-client and that client will forever get MP3 for eg. - It doesn't do artist art. Not sure why I haven't faced any breaking-issues other than the blank album names so far (and that was fixed). [0]: https://github.com/sentriz/gonic/issues/7 https://github.com/sentriz/gonic/issues/7 [1]: https://pypi.org/project/sacad/ https://pypi.org/project/sacad/
- dh-g 6y agoDo you mean it doesn't automatically fetch album art? It does serve it to the client in my experience.
- captn3m0 6y agoOther players would use images embedded in cover-arts. Gonic only works with folder.jpg. I had cover.png files which Gonic ignored, so I had to hack around things. See https://github.com/sentriz/gonic/issues/11 https://github.com/sentriz/gonic/issues/11
- 6y ago
- deepstack 6y agowow, totally support decentralized stuff like this. wonder how long will this get taken down like popcorn time?
- black6 6y agoIt uses the ActivityPub protocol, so all someone has to do is spin up another instance in the fediverse (there are already many) if one gets taken down.
- deepstack 6y agoNice! what about the list of instances that is running? Is that on DHT? Or are there some protocol level stuff in the Funkwhale to announce the instance over gossip protocol or something like that?
- deepstack 6y agoAlso maybe a good idea not to rely on github, so we don't get another youtube-dl incident again. Knew MS is going to screw up something when they took over github.
- IndySun 6y ago"Hi, we're Funkwhale. We use cool words like decentralized, self-hosted, music, server, and of course, funk & whale. If we named it more honestly, then our defunding of musicians and creatives that depended on sales wouldn't get any love (not publicly anyway), plus the ethically vacant developers would have to work on it secretly. And to be sure, we ourselves do not create or rely on income from artistic endeavours, we only make software to cut out the middle part." I love coming here, lots of interesting articles, but the most fun is reading the twisted english as people convince themselves digital theft is somehow not to be equated to physical theft.
- Findeton 6y agoWell I helped create the Spanish Pirate Party so I strongly believe Funkwhale is perfectly moral. If my idols want some money, I'll be happy to go to a concert or buy their music from their webpage (but I don't think Jimi Hendrix will complain much these days).
- IndySun 6y agoIdols? Famous guitarists that have bubbled under your nose? What about new guitarists?
- haolez 6y agoIf I were to self host this on a big cloud provider, I'd be worried about the outbound bandwidth costs.
- ubercow13 6y agoSo don't host it on a cloud provider. You can host it from home, or somewhere else. For example I rent a cheap dedicated server with a 1TB hard drive and unmetered 1Gb bandwidth, for £8 a month, which would work great for something like this and there is no chance of unexpected costs.
- rmellow 6y agoI'm looking for something similar (large storage, low bandwidth, hopefully with a VPS). Can you point me to the provider?
- ubercow13 6y agoMine was from OneProvider. I think they're resold Online.net servers.
- lorenzhs 6y agoOVH's kimsufi series (https://www.kimsufi.com/ https://www.kimsufi.com/) has very cheap dedicated servers. I have a KS-2 and am quite happy with it. The servers are very low-end and have old hardware, though. Not a problem for me but you should be aware of it.
- MaKey 6y agoI think Hetzner's Server auction (https://www.hetzner.com/sb https://www.hetzner.com/sb) has better offers if you can wait a bit for a good deal and you're looking for a little bit more performance. A while ago I saw an i7 4770 with 32 GB RAM and 2x 2TB HDD for ~26€. Their servers also come with an unmetered 1 GBit connection instead of just 100 MBit.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dusted 6y agoI've just used a samba share for the past.. 20? years, it's worked great always.. On the desktops, it's mounted with cifs, on the phone I access it via openvpn and play music from it via vlc, on the media-center, it's also just mounted with cifs.
- blackflame7000 6y agoOn the web it’s a target of ransomware via usage of the eternal blue exploit pkg
- Dahoon 6y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20201109033834/https://funkwhale.audio/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201109033834/https://funkwhale...
- LinuxBender 6y agoI had never heard of Funkwhale. How does it compare (usability wise) to Ampache? Also decentralized, as in you can link databases with others [1] [1] - https://github.com/ampache/ampache/ https://github.com/ampache/ampache/
- creeble 6y agoDot audio domains - $300/yr!
- strawberrypuree 6y agoNot sure if you’re saying that’s cheap or expensive, but I am tempted to get <myfirstname>.audio just for this
- makeworld 6y agoThat's expensive for domains.
- zodiakzz 6y agoI like it - keeps the squatter away. I just checked, many top-notch names available.
- ukyrgf 6y agoAnd forum software that you pay per user, with only a 33% discount for being open source.
- tegiddrone 6y agoThis looks nice! I am really interested in this space because I have a long build collection of mp3s and I'm not as interested in yielding to Spotify but I'm not always at the same computer or building for the accessibility. Thus far I've been using mStream https://mstream.io/ https://mstream.io/ with decent success. You can federate collections with your friends. My tries with NFS or SSHFS doesn't work reliably on windows/mobile hosts, especially across the (mobile) internet. I know there is at least a few other projects in this space, some mentioned in the comments (Ampache.)
- SamBam 6y agomStream does look very nice and straightforward. Is there any better UI for seeing all your music than what appears to be just a file dialog?
- tegiddrone 6y agoIt's pretty file dialog-y utilitarian but you can have it group by album/artist and also has a unified search through the library. I haven't explored its AutoDJ feature.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoI see it supports Raspberry Pi installation. Can anyone speak off-hand to what the performance is like on a Pi, or what generation minimum is recommended? I'm assuming my original Pi Model B might be a little long in the tooth, and my Pi Zero might be under-speced. But I could see myself setting this up on a newer Pi and plugging in my 1.5TB external into it to share out all my music with my family. Right now I've got a Samba share on my Windows HTPC for my internal network, but something the rest of the family can use would be sweet.
- CameronNemo 6y agoCould you not use a Pi to mount the samba share for funkwhale and expose funkwhale/ the pi that way?
- teddyc 6y agoWish I would've known about this before I spent hours and hours transferring my GMusic library to Plex on a rpi in my house. Oh well, I'm too lazy to change again. Gonna stick with Plex for now.
- mawise 6y agoI really like this. It seems like the federated model is gaining traction among the decentralized community (Mastadon, peertube..) but I'd love to get to the point where self-hosting is as accessible to internet users as signing up. My vision for music (and other things) sharing is your personal library is on your personal private server, and you can give access to whoever you want individually. Now your streaming source is your library and your friends library--and if a friend likes one of your tracks they can "save" it to their library and give access to their friends. I've been trying to build this for status updates (like a Facebook alternative) as a simple private blog+rss[1] that's easy to self-host (raspberry PI or AWS) but I can see a world where everyone has their own server enabling an amazing multitude of distributed usage--music sharing, personal restaurant recomendations, the ability to post and share things with only your friends without a mega-corp in between is a future I would get really excited about. [1] https://simpleblogs.org https://simpleblogs.org
- pedro1976 6y agoI would push it even further. All these isolated, unstandardized and closed silos are really horrible. I want that in some future we will own all of our networks, not just the data. So, your social graph private and professiinal, your knowledge graph (which could include music) and when you meet someone, that person could grant you access to his graphs. "Stand on the shoulders of giants" would then also be true for your close private family, where you would have access to e.g. your fathers knowledge.
- asab 6y agoThere is an effort under way, one of which is led by Tim Berners-Lee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_project) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr...
- mawise 6y agoEverytime I read about solid I just can't see it working out. It's HARD for someone to host something themselves, and when you talk about decoupling the data from the interface that means any user needs to deal with two system when they used to deal with one. Ease-of-use is one of the most important things for broad adoption--that's everything is "signup and we take care of everything" instead of "run this code on your computer".
- sir_brickalot 6y agoThere is one Spotify feature I started enjoying lately: Seamless playback between all connected players (including Chromecast) and every instance works as a remote for the other players. Just great!! Any FOSS service with this set of features?
- escalt 6y agoWith Jellyfin (more geared towards movies than music) you can use your clients as a remote for another currently playing client
- anonzzz 6y agoI was a longtime Subsonic user and was mostly pleased. For some reason, I stopped using it after moving to a new server. These days, I have been very pleased with https://radioparadise.com https://radioparadise.com. It is an eclectic mix with a couple of different channels. This station offers familiar tunes mixed with new ones. It is a nice gem that I love to tell other music lovers about. Note: I am in no way affiliated with Radio Paradise. Just a listener/fanboy.
- benkaiser 6y agoFor those interested, I also write an open source web-based music player with an Android app that uses youtube and soundcloud as the backing for tracks (iframes on desktop, youtube-to-mp3/soundcloud mp3s on Android): https://github.com/benkaiser/stretto https://github.com/benkaiser/stretto Planning on removing the Google auth dependency it uses right now for syncing and song searching.
- alphachloride 6y agoLooking at the website, I cannot fully understand how it works. Is it somewhere between BitTorrnet (peer2peer content sharing) and Mastodon (decentralized social network)? How does monetization work?
- A6gYPfxNas 6y agosuper cool! thanks for posting!
- stuaxo 6y agoWhat's the security like on this ?
- squarefoot 6y agoA word about Clementine, the desktop player: it's powerful, very complete and works well, however it's literally huge, consumes a lot of resources and has some serious memory leaks that if left on for days will either make it eat all system memory, or die without any errors. This doesn't happen in normal use, it has to be left on for a few days, in fact I'm using it extensively, however it's still really too heavy. I'd be all for a lighter less demanding player.