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Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

458 points by coppolaemilio 1y ago

geerlingguy 1y ago
Can't get the page to load but agree with the sentiment ;)
- ardub 1y ago
  Too bad, because you are referenced in the post! He was inspired by https://youtu.be/4VkY1vTpCJY https://youtu.be/4VkY1vTpCJY
gnabgib 1y ago
Article title: I left Spotify. What happened next? For Jeff: https://archive.is/waAv5 https://archive.is/waAv5 (who also stars in the article)
- geerlingguy 1y ago
  Oh ha! It's loading now, and just noticed the reference. Nice!
RajT88 1y ago
Love JellyFin! I do not mind the jankiness, since I can work around a lot of it with the API. I do not even mind too much the Love Exposure bug: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/10494 https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/10494
- phanimahesh 1y ago
  This is hilarious. The most probable explanation is that it's matching the tvshow part, but a repro would be interesting.
  - RajT88 1y ago
    I have a hard time conceiving of what it could be. Most users report it is the film whose artwork is used (definitely always was for me). One user mentions they get the art from "Love Exposure: The TV Show". One of these days I am going to spin up a VM and try and work through a report case.
detaro 1y ago
Anyone have opinions on Jellyfin vs music-specific servers like Navidrome?
- Touche 1y ago
  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.
- sodality2 1y ago
  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.
  - thebluelad 1y ago
    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.
    - Semaphor 1y ago
      Symfonium [0] is pretty universally loved (I also use it), but doesn’t care if you point it at Navidrome, or Jellyfin, or anything else supported. [0]: https://symfonium.app/ https://symfonium.app/
      - thebluelad 1y ago
        That's a good point. I had actually forgotten that it's compatible with Jellyfin. Thanks for the reminder.
      - axelthegerman 1y ago
        Haven't tried it yet but looks quality! Any comparable options for iOS? Not everyone in my household is on Android unfortunately Edit: seeing play:sub mentioned maybe I'll have to check that one out
Touche 1y ago
I use Jellyfin in this way. You can also use it with music apps like Symfonium for Android, and you can play on a Sonos via DLNA.
albybisy 1y ago
i use Google/Youtube Music to store all my mp3 library.... until Google change idea..
matthewfcarlson 1y ago
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.
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
  I just googled owntunes and can’t find any information. Can you provide a link?
  - panopticon 1y ago
    I presume they meant owntone https://owntone.github.io/owntone-server/ https://owntone.github.io/owntone-server/
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
toomuchtodo 1y ago
Just wish Jellyfin would support S3 compatible targets for media storage :/ point at bucket(s), scan/index/enrich, serve to clients
- whalesalad 1y ago
  Could you run a user space s3 filesystem that jellyfin thinks is a regular disk filesystem.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    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).”
- mirashii 1y ago
  You can do this via rclone with Jellyfin.
- bob1029 1y ago
  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.
panopticon 1y ago
I embarked on a similar journey last year after YouTube Music took down some albums I listened to religiously. I settled on Plex + Plexamp instead. I'm mostly satisfied, but there are some rough edges like Chromecast and web playback.
- akdor1154 1y ago
  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.
  - dewey 1y ago
    What do you mean with “last pass got hacked through plex”?
    - tough 1y ago
      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-security-roundup/ https://www.wired.com/story/lastpass-engineer-breach-securit...
      - dewey 1y ago
        Please don't post AI replies.
        tough 1y ago
knowknow 1y ago
What’s wrong with Spotify?
- temp0826 1y ago
  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.
  - izacus 1y ago
    What's the alternative for the authors?
    - lucb1e 1y ago
      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
    - PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
      Bandcamp, for one. That's the easiest, biggest, smoothest.
- thebluelad 1y ago
dhosek 1y ago
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.
- joshuaturner 1y ago
  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.
- HexPhantom 1y ago
  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
gigel82 1y ago
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... :(
xanadu132 1y ago
yes yes yes
vvpan 1y ago
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.
- blendertom 1y ago
  Can you share more about your set up? How much storage, are you backing up your data elsewhere? And what did it cost you, apart from time?
  - vvpan 1y ago
    Sure. I might upgrade but at the moment: - Domain name - $3/year - Cloudron free tier with two apps - free - 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.
    - apitman 1y ago
      Check out Runtipi, CasaOS, Cosmos, and yunohost for free alternatives to Cloudron.
      - vvpan 1y ago
        Ah, I felt something like that must exist, thanks for the pointers.
        SansGuidon 1y ago
        I'm using Cloudron for 1.5 years and currently trying Yunohost and Coolify to try alternatives. But I gave up on Yunohost which felt too buggy and required too much workarounds and troubleshooting. I feel Coolify might be best for my needs but it's really for devs. Cloudron spoiled me so much everything else looks half baked.
austin-cheney 1y ago
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.
- freetonik 1y ago
  Check out Doppler for iOS https://brushedtype.co/doppler/ https://brushedtype.co/doppler/
HumblyTossed 1y ago
I self host Navidrome. Works pretty well.
- summermusic 1y ago
  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.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  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. [0] https://github.com/CappielloAntonio/tempo#readme https://github.com/CappielloAntonio/tempo#readme [1] https://music.aqzscn.cn/docs/versions/latest/ https://music.aqzscn.cn/docs/versions/latest/
  - wzdd 1y ago
    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.
  - thebluelad 1y ago
    Symfonium has been great in my experience and does offline and caching. Check it out: https://symfonium.app/ https://symfonium.app/
  - PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
    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.
ishanjain28 1y ago
I wish more artists would sell their music on Bandcamp. I use jellyfin for music but acquiring music is difficult.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
  If you can't find a place to pay for it, then just do what Spotify did when they launched. I recommend Nuclear[0] for that [0] https://nuclearplayer.com/ https://nuclearplayer.com/
  - BLKNSLVR 1y ago
    Love the testimonials!
- Zambyte 1y ago
  Between Bandcamp, 7digital, and Amazon (which I check in that order), I have always been able to find anything I was looking for.
- iamdamian 1y ago
  Why is acquiring music difficult? If it's DRM you're worried about, the iTunes Store is all (or at least primarily) DRM-free.
kretaceous 1y ago
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?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- johntitorjr 1y ago
  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.
  - chipsrafferty 1y ago
    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?
LeoPanthera 1y ago
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.
- agnishom 1y ago
  Does it help to connect a different frontend app like Finamp to your jellyfin server?
  - LeoPanthera 1y ago
    Jellyfin maintains its own server-side database, the client you use is irrelevant.
    - flkenosad 1y ago
      How hard would it be to fork and make the change?
- crtasm 1y ago
  This happened with my library too but they fixed it a few updates ago, all I had to do was let the scheduled full scan run.
- meonkeys 1y ago
  Pretty sure it does use metadata and folder/filename as fallback. Musicbrainz Picard is great for normalizing metadata for music files/albums, maybe give that a shot.
  - LeoPanthera 1y ago
    It does read metadata, but splits albums by directory regardless. And my metadata is already correct.
crossroadsguy 1y ago
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.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
  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
- IlikeKitties 1y ago
  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.
  - jnaina 1y ago
    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.
  - crossroadsguy 1y ago
    Tidal is not available in my country.
PaulHoule 1y ago
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.
- unsnap_biceps 1y ago
  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.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_ad-supported_streaming_television https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_ad-supported_streaming_te... [2] https://scatter.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/thoroughly-pizzled-whats-so-bad-about-the-autofac/ https://scatter.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/thoroughly-pizzled-...
chillfox 1y ago
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.
- mrheosuper 1y ago
  Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A quick math will show that it's not insignificant
  - SECProto 1y ago
    > 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
    - ninjinxo 1y ago
      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.
etra0 1y ago
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!
- apitman 1y ago
  Why do you need Cloudflare if your services are only available over Tailscale?
  - etra0 1y ago
    To access them with vanity (sub)domains!
    - apitman 1y ago
      Ah you're just using it as a domain registrar?
- udev4096 1y ago
  This is partly self-hosting. You are relying on clownflare and tailscale for your services to be accessible. Do better
  - elashri 1y ago
    You can use lets encrypt with dns tests from wide variety of providers. Also you can selfhost the control server of tailscale (headscale).
  - etra0 1y ago
    Why does this feel like nagging on projects I do on my free-time for my own? I'm willing to learn but please try to be less condescending :)
billfor 1y ago
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.
- winrid 1y ago
  The nice thing about these media servers is support for mobile etc
NoPicklez 1y ago
Apart from the HomeLab tinkering aspect, I don't know why you would do this over Spotify or Apple music. I use Spotify the same way I managed my music on Windows media player, creating my own playlists of various genre's and years. What Spotify allows me to do is find the music I want straight away rather than finding a way to procure it. I can do all of that and not have to self host anything.
karpatic 1y ago
Anyone know the legality of using a self hosted mp3 file server? I have a few hobby sites that handle music and always wondered For those curious: https://carlos-a-diez.com/music/ https://carlos-a-diez.com/music/
someonehere 1y ago
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.
- applied_heat 1y ago
  Interesting they felt the need for a re-write when it was already so good. I wonder what the impetus was
- srmatto 1y ago
  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.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    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.
- al_borland 1y ago
  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?
dankwizard 1y ago
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.
- 9935c101ab17a66 1y ago
  This isn't an article about replacing all-knowing streaming service content recommendations, it's about finding a solution for playing local music files you own in a convenient way.
- Semaphor 1y ago
  > 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- closewith 1y ago
  A slower speed on the hedonic treadmill is a feature of self-hosting, not a bug.
wmichelin 1y ago
Loved the callback to MCRs woefully underrated first album
indigodaddy 1y ago
This is a pretty easy way to spin up Jellyfin, et al if anyone doesn't really know where to start. It's more meant for a remote server/vps: https://github.com/EdyTheCow/docker-media-center https://github.com/EdyTheCow/docker-media-center
rappatic 1y ago
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.
- jjulius 1y ago
  >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.
  - rappatic 1y ago
    Fair. I was exaggerating a little. 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.
- udev4096 1y ago
crtasm 1y ago
Jellyfin + Feishin (desktop) and Finamp (phone) is pretty great for music!
funnychain 1y ago
[dead]
tastysandwich 1y ago
For music, Navidrome is superior. 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. I highly highly recommend it Edit - Opus not Opal!
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Do you mean Opus?
  - tastysandwich 1y ago
    Yes my bad
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  And Navidrome you can run on a 1gb Raspberry Pi.
- chillfox 1y ago
  That's great to hear, Navidrome is on the top of my list to checkout when I get to music (currently doing movies).
- vander_elst 1y ago
  +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.
  - rc_kas 1y ago
    I'm sold, thank you will install it.
- twilo 1y ago
  Is it better than plexamp?
gessha 1y ago
What would be the requirements for a jellyfin server?
diabllicseagull 1y ago
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.
harry8 1y ago
Self hosting Data point. 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).
twilo 1y ago
Plexamp
udev4096 1y ago
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
- kilroy123 1y ago
  Interesting. This is what has stopped me from self hosting music. I love the discovery you get from Spotify and other music streaming services.
- dandersch 1y ago
  Can you elaborate? I'm not aware of musicbrainz having any recommendations/discovery features.
  - udev4096 1y ago
    Sorry, I meant listenbrainz
    - dandersch 1y ago
      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.
ruuda 1y ago
I wrote my own networked music player, https://github.com/ruuda/musium 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.
sandreas 1y ago
I personally use Jellyfin ONLY for Video stuff. AudioBookShelf[1] is for audiobooks and podcasts. For music I use navidrome [2] 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 Substreamer [3] but you could also go with DSub[4] or others. 1: https://www.audiobookshelf.org/ https://www.audiobookshelf.org/ 2: https://www.navidrome.org/ https://www.navidrome.org/ 3: https://substreamerapp.com/ https://substreamerapp.com/ 4: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/github.daneren2005.dsub/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/github.daneren2005.dsub/ 5: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/smartplaylists/ https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/smartplaylists/
- anthonypz 1y ago
  Neat! Can you stream navidrome to a smart TV? I have speakers connected to them and I usually stream to it using airplay on iOS.
  - sandreas 1y ago
    Substreamer is available for iOS and Android, DSub is Android only afaik. If your smartTV supports Subsonic API, it probably works, but if not, it's possible to point Jellyfin and Navidrome to the same audio directory.
  - armsaw 1y ago
    If you use an AppleTV, there’s also a pretty decent navidrome client called LMP.
- hypercube33 1y ago
  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.
magic_hamster 1y ago
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.
HexPhantom 1y ago
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
- iamacyborg 1y ago
  Roon is where it’s at if you want a decent music player. Not free but well worth the price, imo.
- INTPenis 1y ago
  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.
- ezst 1y ago
  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.
petepete 1y ago
I tried Jellyfin for music but couldn't make it work with Sonos so just ended up using Sonos' local music library via SMB, with Symfonium on my phone. It works well but it's something I'll revisit at some point as I do like the idea of one central library with shared playlists etc. In fact, I haven't been able to even make a playlist on Sonos, it's baffling.
prmoustache 1y ago
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. No server needed.
Sheeny96 1y ago
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
- nsteel 1y ago
  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. https://listenbrainz.org/my/recommendations https://listenbrainz.org/my/recommendations https://www.last.fm/player/station/user/{username}/recommended https://www.last.fm/player/station/user/{username}/recommend...
junglistguy 1y ago
[dead]
sotix 1y ago
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.
lanfeust6 1y ago
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.
LauraMedia 1y ago
I have a local Navidrome server, which I don't really use as a "Spotify alternative" (I don't mirror my casual listened songs) but as a big database of videogame and series/movie soundtracks. It helped me when I tested out Apple Music for a few months and I noticed it's absolutely not working as well for me.
mystified5016 1y ago
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.
_spduchamp 1y ago
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.
- _-_-__-_-_- 1y ago
  beets, it's ridiculously good, https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/# https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/#
- quesera 1y ago
  I've used beets to import and tag a huge personal music library: https://beets.io/ https://beets.io/
mr_coleman 1y ago
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.
turtledragonfly 1y ago
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 (: [1] https://lyrion.org/ https://lyrion.org/
jonathantf2 1y ago
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.
latentcall 1y ago
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.
Defletter 1y ago
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.
psyfer 1y ago
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

458 points by coppolaemilio 1y ago

geerlingguy 1y ago

Can't get the page to load but agree with the sentiment ;)

ardub 1y ago
Too bad, because you are referenced in the post! He was inspired by https://youtu.be/4VkY1vTpCJY https://youtu.be/4VkY1vTpCJY

gnabgib 1y ago

Article title: I left Spotify. What happened next? For Jeff: https://archive.is/waAv5 https://archive.is/waAv5 (who also stars in the article)

geerlingguy 1y ago
Oh ha! It's loading now, and just noticed the reference. Nice!

RajT88 1y ago

Love JellyFin! I do not mind the jankiness, since I can work around a lot of it with the API. I do not even mind too much the Love Exposure bug: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/10494 https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/10494

phanimahesh 1y ago
This is hilarious. The most probable explanation is that it's matching the tvshow part, but a repro would be interesting.
- RajT88 1y ago
  I have a hard time conceiving of what it could be. Most users report it is the film whose artwork is used (definitely always was for me). One user mentions they get the art from "Love Exposure: The TV Show". One of these days I am going to spin up a VM and try and work through a report case.

detaro 1y ago

Anyone have opinions on Jellyfin vs music-specific servers like Navidrome?

Touche 1y ago
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.
sodality2 1y ago
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.
- thebluelad 1y ago
  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.
  - Semaphor 1y ago
    Symfonium [0] is pretty universally loved (I also use it), but doesn’t care if you point it at Navidrome, or Jellyfin, or anything else supported. [0]: https://symfonium.app/ https://symfonium.app/
    - thebluelad 1y ago
      That's a good point. I had actually forgotten that it's compatible with Jellyfin. Thanks for the reminder.
    - axelthegerman 1y ago
      Haven't tried it yet but looks quality! Any comparable options for iOS? Not everyone in my household is on Android unfortunately Edit: seeing play:sub mentioned maybe I'll have to check that one out

Touche 1y ago

I use Jellyfin in this way. You can also use it with music apps like Symfonium for Android, and you can play on a Sonos via DLNA.

albybisy 1y ago

i use Google/Youtube Music to store all my mp3 library.... until Google change idea..

matthewfcarlson 1y ago

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.

hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
I just googled owntunes and can’t find any information. Can you provide a link?
- panopticon 1y ago
  I presume they meant owntone https://owntone.github.io/owntone-server/ https://owntone.github.io/owntone-server/
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

toomuchtodo 1y ago

Just wish Jellyfin would support S3 compatible targets for media storage :/ point at bucket(s), scan/index/enrich, serve to clients

whalesalad 1y ago
Could you run a user space s3 filesystem that jellyfin thinks is a regular disk filesystem.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  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).”
mirashii 1y ago
You can do this via rclone with Jellyfin.
bob1029 1y ago
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.

panopticon 1y ago

I embarked on a similar journey last year after YouTube Music took down some albums I listened to religiously. I settled on Plex + Plexamp instead. I'm mostly satisfied, but there are some rough edges like Chromecast and web playback.

akdor1154 1y ago
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.
- dewey 1y ago
  What do you mean with “last pass got hacked through plex”?
  - tough 1y ago
    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-security-roundup/ https://www.wired.com/story/lastpass-engineer-breach-securit...
    - dewey 1y ago
      Please don't post AI replies.
      - tough 1y ago

knowknow 1y ago

What’s wrong with Spotify?

temp0826 1y ago
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.
- izacus 1y ago
  What's the alternative for the authors?
  - lucb1e 1y ago
    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
  - PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
    Bandcamp, for one. That's the easiest, biggest, smoothest.
thebluelad 1y ago

dhosek 1y ago

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.

joshuaturner 1y ago
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.
HexPhantom 1y ago
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

gigel82 1y ago

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... :(

xanadu132 1y ago

yes yes yes

vvpan 1y ago

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.

blendertom 1y ago
Can you share more about your set up? How much storage, are you backing up your data elsewhere? And what did it cost you, apart from time?
- vvpan 1y ago
  Sure. I might upgrade but at the moment: - Domain name - $3/year - Cloudron free tier with two apps - free - 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.
  - apitman 1y ago
    Check out Runtipi, CasaOS, Cosmos, and yunohost for free alternatives to Cloudron.
    - vvpan 1y ago
      Ah, I felt something like that must exist, thanks for the pointers.
      - SansGuidon 1y ago
        I'm using Cloudron for 1.5 years and currently trying Yunohost and Coolify to try alternatives. But I gave up on Yunohost which felt too buggy and required too much workarounds and troubleshooting. I feel Coolify might be best for my needs but it's really for devs. Cloudron spoiled me so much everything else looks half baked.

austin-cheney 1y ago

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.

freetonik 1y ago
Check out Doppler for iOS https://brushedtype.co/doppler/ https://brushedtype.co/doppler/

HumblyTossed 1y ago

I self host Navidrome. Works pretty well.

summermusic 1y ago
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.
makeitdouble 1y ago
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. [0] https://github.com/CappielloAntonio/tempo#readme https://github.com/CappielloAntonio/tempo#readme [1] https://music.aqzscn.cn/docs/versions/latest/ https://music.aqzscn.cn/docs/versions/latest/
- wzdd 1y ago
  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.
- thebluelad 1y ago
  Symfonium has been great in my experience and does offline and caching. Check it out: https://symfonium.app/ https://symfonium.app/
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
  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.

ishanjain28 1y ago

I wish more artists would sell their music on Bandcamp. I use jellyfin for music but acquiring music is difficult.

OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
If you can't find a place to pay for it, then just do what Spotify did when they launched. I recommend Nuclear[0] for that [0] https://nuclearplayer.com/ https://nuclearplayer.com/
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  Love the testimonials!
Zambyte 1y ago
Between Bandcamp, 7digital, and Amazon (which I check in that order), I have always been able to find anything I was looking for.
iamdamian 1y ago
Why is acquiring music difficult? If it's DRM you're worried about, the iTunes Store is all (or at least primarily) DRM-free.

kretaceous 1y ago

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?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
johntitorjr 1y ago
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.
- chipsrafferty 1y ago
  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?

LeoPanthera 1y ago

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.

agnishom 1y ago
Does it help to connect a different frontend app like Finamp to your jellyfin server?
- LeoPanthera 1y ago
  Jellyfin maintains its own server-side database, the client you use is irrelevant.
  - flkenosad 1y ago
    How hard would it be to fork and make the change?
crtasm 1y ago
This happened with my library too but they fixed it a few updates ago, all I had to do was let the scheduled full scan run.
meonkeys 1y ago
Pretty sure it does use metadata and folder/filename as fallback. Musicbrainz Picard is great for normalizing metadata for music files/albums, maybe give that a shot.
- LeoPanthera 1y ago
  It does read metadata, but splits albums by directory regardless. And my metadata is already correct.

crossroadsguy 1y ago

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.

OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
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
IlikeKitties 1y ago
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.
- jnaina 1y ago
  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.
- crossroadsguy 1y ago
  Tidal is not available in my country.

PaulHoule 1y ago

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.

unsnap_biceps 1y ago
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.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_ad-supported_streaming_television https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_ad-supported_streaming_te... [2] https://scatter.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/thoroughly-pizzled-whats-so-bad-about-the-autofac/ https://scatter.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/thoroughly-pizzled-...

chillfox 1y ago

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.

mrheosuper 1y ago
Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A quick math will show that it's not insignificant
- SECProto 1y ago
  > 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
  - ninjinxo 1y ago
    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.

etra0 1y ago

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!

apitman 1y ago
Why do you need Cloudflare if your services are only available over Tailscale?
- etra0 1y ago
  To access them with vanity (sub)domains!
  - apitman 1y ago
    Ah you're just using it as a domain registrar?
udev4096 1y ago
This is partly self-hosting. You are relying on clownflare and tailscale for your services to be accessible. Do better
- elashri 1y ago
  You can use lets encrypt with dns tests from wide variety of providers. Also you can selfhost the control server of tailscale (headscale).
- etra0 1y ago
  Why does this feel like nagging on projects I do on my free-time for my own? I'm willing to learn but please try to be less condescending :)

billfor 1y ago

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.

winrid 1y ago
The nice thing about these media servers is support for mobile etc

NoPicklez 1y ago

Apart from the HomeLab tinkering aspect, I don't know why you would do this over Spotify or Apple music. I use Spotify the same way I managed my music on Windows media player, creating my own playlists of various genre's and years. What Spotify allows me to do is find the music I want straight away rather than finding a way to procure it. I can do all of that and not have to self host anything.

karpatic 1y ago

Anyone know the legality of using a self hosted mp3 file server? I have a few hobby sites that handle music and always wondered For those curious: https://carlos-a-diez.com/music/ https://carlos-a-diez.com/music/

someonehere 1y ago

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.

applied_heat 1y ago
Interesting they felt the need for a re-write when it was already so good. I wonder what the impetus was
srmatto 1y ago
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.
- skydhash 1y ago
  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.
al_borland 1y ago
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?

dankwizard 1y ago

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.

9935c101ab17a66 1y ago
This isn't an article about replacing all-knowing streaming service content recommendations, it's about finding a solution for playing local music files you own in a convenient way.
Semaphor 1y ago
> 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.
deleted 1y ago
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closewith 1y ago
A slower speed on the hedonic treadmill is a feature of self-hosting, not a bug.

wmichelin 1y ago

Loved the callback to MCRs woefully underrated first album

indigodaddy 1y ago

This is a pretty easy way to spin up Jellyfin, et al if anyone doesn't really know where to start. It's more meant for a remote server/vps: https://github.com/EdyTheCow/docker-media-center https://github.com/EdyTheCow/docker-media-center

rappatic 1y ago

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.

jjulius 1y ago
>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.
- rappatic 1y ago
  Fair. I was exaggerating a little. 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.
udev4096 1y ago

crtasm 1y ago

Jellyfin + Feishin (desktop) and Finamp (phone) is pretty great for music!

funnychain 1y ago

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tastysandwich 1y ago

For music, Navidrome is superior. 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. I highly highly recommend it Edit - Opus not Opal!

mixmastamyk 1y ago
Do you mean Opus?
- tastysandwich 1y ago
  Yes my bad
TiredOfLife 1y ago
And Navidrome you can run on a 1gb Raspberry Pi.
chillfox 1y ago
That's great to hear, Navidrome is on the top of my list to checkout when I get to music (currently doing movies).
vander_elst 1y ago
+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.
- rc_kas 1y ago
  I'm sold, thank you will install it.
twilo 1y ago
Is it better than plexamp?

gessha 1y ago

What would be the requirements for a jellyfin server?

diabllicseagull 1y ago

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.

harry8 1y ago

Self hosting Data point. 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).

twilo 1y ago

Plexamp

udev4096 1y ago

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

kilroy123 1y ago
Interesting. This is what has stopped me from self hosting music. I love the discovery you get from Spotify and other music streaming services.
dandersch 1y ago
Can you elaborate? I'm not aware of musicbrainz having any recommendations/discovery features.
- udev4096 1y ago
  Sorry, I meant listenbrainz
  - dandersch 1y ago
    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.

ruuda 1y ago

I wrote my own networked music player, https://github.com/ruuda/musium 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.

sandreas 1y ago

I personally use Jellyfin ONLY for Video stuff. AudioBookShelf[1] is for audiobooks and podcasts. For music I use navidrome [2] 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 Substreamer [3] but you could also go with DSub[4] or others. 1: https://www.audiobookshelf.org/ https://www.audiobookshelf.org/ 2: https://www.navidrome.org/ https://www.navidrome.org/ 3: https://substreamerapp.com/ https://substreamerapp.com/ 4: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/github.daneren2005.dsub/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/github.daneren2005.dsub/ 5: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/smartplaylists/ https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/smartplaylists/

anthonypz 1y ago
Neat! Can you stream navidrome to a smart TV? I have speakers connected to them and I usually stream to it using airplay on iOS.
- sandreas 1y ago
  Substreamer is available for iOS and Android, DSub is Android only afaik. If your smartTV supports Subsonic API, it probably works, but if not, it's possible to point Jellyfin and Navidrome to the same audio directory.
- armsaw 1y ago
  If you use an AppleTV, there’s also a pretty decent navidrome client called LMP.
hypercube33 1y ago
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.

magic_hamster 1y ago

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.

HexPhantom 1y ago

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

iamacyborg 1y ago
Roon is where it’s at if you want a decent music player. Not free but well worth the price, imo.
INTPenis 1y ago
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.
ezst 1y ago
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.

petepete 1y ago

I tried Jellyfin for music but couldn't make it work with Sonos so just ended up using Sonos' local music library via SMB, with Symfonium on my phone. It works well but it's something I'll revisit at some point as I do like the idea of one central library with shared playlists etc. In fact, I haven't been able to even make a playlist on Sonos, it's baffling.

prmoustache 1y ago

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. No server needed.

Sheeny96 1y ago

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

nsteel 1y ago
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. https://listenbrainz.org/my/recommendations https://listenbrainz.org/my/recommendations https://www.last.fm/player/station/user/{username}/recommended https://www.last.fm/player/station/user/{username}/recommend...

junglistguy 1y ago

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sotix 1y ago

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.

lanfeust6 1y ago

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.

LauraMedia 1y ago

I have a local Navidrome server, which I don't really use as a "Spotify alternative" (I don't mirror my casual listened songs) but as a big database of videogame and series/movie soundtracks. It helped me when I tested out Apple Music for a few months and I noticed it's absolutely not working as well for me.

mystified5016 1y ago

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.

_spduchamp 1y ago

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.

_-_-__-_-_- 1y ago
beets, it's ridiculously good, https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/# https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/#
quesera 1y ago
I've used beets to import and tag a huge personal music library: https://beets.io/ https://beets.io/

mr_coleman 1y ago

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.

turtledragonfly 1y ago

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 (: [1] https://lyrion.org/ https://lyrion.org/

jonathantf2 1y ago

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.

latentcall 1y ago

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.

Defletter 1y ago

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.

psyfer 1y ago

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