14 ms·

I ditched Spotify and set up my own music stack

279 points by starkparker 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
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Okawari 1y ago
I've been thinking about doing the same thing as the OP for a while, but haven't really gotten around to it. I've started scrobbling to last.fm in order to see if their recommendation algorithm can be a replacement for Spotify. The jury is still out on that. As my financial situation has gone from a place where I felt I could not really care and still save a healthy amount per month, to a place where I feel it is more necessary for me to try to keep up with my finances I've gone from really liking Spotify to a realization that I've probably spent enough money on spotify over the last 15-ish years to buy a cheap car or quite a sizeable music collection, had I just spent that money on music directly. I have gotten my money's worth from Spotify for sure, I listen to it a lot and have probably gotten to hear magnitudes more music than if I merely bought an album or something every month instead, but at this point I can't get over the fact that if/when I unsubscribe to Spotify, I will have nothing and will have to spend a lot to get access to the music I actually care about again. In a sense, I wish there was an audible style subscription for music. Give me the ability to sample music as a replacement for spotify radio, or/and some playlists like discover weekly and a few personalized ones, and a credit to pick something to buy permanently.
stogot 1y ago
Is there a way to do this for Mobile?
deleted 1y ago
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Jotalea 1y ago
Good for you. But for me, personally, I went with the lazy route. I just downloaded the songs I like and saved them to a USB stick, plugged it into my speakers and called it a day. Honestly, I don't really know much about audio quality other than higher kbps = higher quality (I might be wrong on that though). My library consists of ~120 .m4a files, 128kbps, most (if not all) downloaded from YouTube.
denimnerd42 1y ago
I really want to do this but like any hobby it takes too much time. My biggest frustration as a youtube music user is that the app doesn't appreciate that it might not always have a good internet connection and takes forever to fallback to your downloads when loading the library. If I used an open source app or my own app I could fix this stupid bug but I don't have any control. :(
- jerf 1y ago
  If you just want independence, just start collecting MP3s or CDs or whatever. I've been collecting physical music since the mid 90s and my whole MP3 collection is still under 128GBs, so I just copy it anywhere I want it now. Unless you really put some effort into it, storage will probably grow faster than your collection will. Also, you don't need to think of it as an all-or-nothing proposition, or something you need to drop in one month. Just start. Peck away every so often and in 5 years you'll have enough independence to tell any streaming service what it can do with itself.
  - denimnerd42 1y ago
    The large flac/mp3 collect I have from my ripped CDs is the reason I even consider it. I just find the toil to be not worth it over minor foibles I have with streaming music. It would sure be nice though to have the time.. I operate software at work for a living. I don't want to come home and operate it too :( Was all about it in HS and college though.
    - jerf 1y ago
      If you've already got it, I'm not exactly sure what you think the toil is? You just copy it places. Maybe just the MP3s for things like phones. Then use an MP3 player. If you mean the inaccuracies of the metadata, again, you just peck at it as it bothers you. You don't have to fix it all at once. Any decent MP3 player can do searches for specific songs. Nor do you have to do a hard cut from streaming services. I do have it all hooked up on Syncthing so my changes stay in sync but that's not exactly a hard thing. It's only marginally harder than a straight copy, and sometimes honestly even a bit easier given how dodgy phones can be about large normal copies.
echelon_musk 1y ago
> Always ensure you're obtaining music through legal channels > My setup uses sabnzbd integrated with Lidarr for handling downloads of content I've purchased. Sure. I believe you.
renterforever 1y ago
It's interesting, but the author's motivations are a little muddled: > several issues became impossible to ignore: artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream and later: > My setup uses sabnzbd
cortesoft 1y ago
So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? What is fair compensation for writing a song? In the old days, artists would join a label and put out an album. The artist would earn about 10% of sales or so (varies of course, but on average). So a $15 CD would earn an artist $1.50. The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005. So it would take about 300 streams of a song to earn the same amount as selling a CD used to make. I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen? There are many albums I own that I have listened to way more than 30 times, which is what it would take for a 10 song album to get 300 song 'streams' Is that a fair compensation? Why or why not? I think artists should be able to earn money from creating music, but I don't know how we decide how much they actually deserve if we aren't just going based on the price the market sets.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- troyvit 1y ago
  That's why I like bandcamp. Artists choose the price for their music and I'm free to pay that price, or more, if I think that's fair compensation.
- steveBK123 1y ago
  > I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen? Fundamentally, inflation-adjusted there are 1/2 as many dollars coming in the front end to the US music industry in the 2020s as there were in the 90s peak, per most sources... even though population is 30% higher. So per-capita music spend in inflation adjusted dollars is down like 60-65%. And there's probably far more artists to spread that around to now with the long tail of bedroom producers / part timers / etc all the way up to Swift. So surely artists are making less than they used to, regardless of how the pie is sliced up because there is a smaller pie. Given the trend in everything else in our economy, I am dubious that the newer streaming arrangements are incrementally more artist-friendly than the old physical media music industry.
- claw-el 1y ago
seemaze 1y ago
My own self hosted audio journey ended with Lyrion Music Server[0], formerly Logitech Music Server. It is now open source and run by the community. There are plugins for Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify, local radio, song lyrics, and more. It also does great multi-room audio syncing via DLNA, Airplay, and Squeezelite. I recently setup transcoded streaming so I can listen to my library remotely on Apple Carplay at a reduced bitrate. It's certainly not perfect, but more perfect than any other open or commercial platform I've trialed. Can't recommend it enough! [0]https://lyrion.org https://lyrion.org
al_borland 1y ago
I've gone back and forth on this. I recently signed up for a streaming services again (Apple Music), but I'm being very intentional about how I use it. I'm currently going through the 500 greatest albums ever made, according to Rolling Stone. I don't necessary agree with their rankings, but it's giving me exposure to things I normally wouldn't listen to, gets me out of the algorithms, and feels much better than having it play a bunch of random stuff no one has ever heard of, just to fill the void. I'm treating the online catalog more like a store, only listening to albums I've added to my library, and deleting ones I don' think I'll listen to again. This has helped avoid falling into the algorithms when overwhelmed from near infinite choice. It is likely some of the albums I run across in venture will be purchased and added to my local library so I have them and am not only renting. I do want to support things like the iTunes Music Store, because I don't want to end up in a future where the only options for music are streaming and piracy. Since it's DRM free, I don't have an issue buying from there, but I like that I can sample full albums for extended periods of time (as long as I keep paying) via streaming. From my attempts with YouTube Music and Spotify, the library wasn't really setup well to do what I'm doing, and if I were to get these albums through other means, like the poster who I can only assume is pirating everything now, I wouldn't ever want to delete anything, and my library would be full of junk I'd never listen to. The most seems to also really glaze over the cost of the setup and storage. I have a NAS at home, and not even counting the initial investment in the hardware, the cloud backup alone costs me $30/month. Assuming a person wants backups, having your own library may not be the money saver it sounds like, depending on the setup.
- mingus88 1y ago
  $30/mo seems pretty steep for backups. How much storage are you talking about, and what tier? All of the music I purchased from bleep and bandcamp is still available to download again, and the CDs I rip from the used book stores are in a box to be ripped again if I ever need it.
  - al_borland 1y ago
    5TB through Synology's C2 service.
muratsu 1y ago
Going through the trouble of maintaining a home server is not worth it for me. I wish dropbox offered some extra service for music/video.
- leovander 1y ago
  If you organize your folders correctly, you could probably have that dropbox folder synced with one of those services. The maintenance isn't too bad once its up and running, probably more hurdles (proxies, etc) if you are accessing outside the home. If you are the only user, you can use tailscale to access your hosted apps when out of the home.
clueless 1y ago
really the biggest service spotify has for me is its music recommendation engine... and so the big question with all this setup is: is listenbrainz's recommendation engine better than spotify?
- ramblin_prose 1y ago
  on spotify recommendation is just a euphemism for 'we are being paid to promote this' so yes
  - clueless 1y ago
    that's not been my experience with the "discover weekly" feature
  - ramblin_prose 1y ago
    oh, you've been listening to antichrist siege machine lately? check out sabrina carpenter!
justatdotin 1y ago
I'm interested in the general direction, but for different reasons. IDGAF about AI artists and industry financials - but Helsing killer robots... I also recognised different features I would miss. After an initial bump, the discoverability benefits declined to negligible. What I did greatly value was the unified interface. For that reason, the winner for me is to use plex as the media server, giving plexamp for all clients.
- gregwebs 1y ago
  Navidrome looks nice but it looks like it is Desktop only. I am using Plexamp as well. I tried some alternatives but couldn't get them to work reliably. People miss Plexamp as an option because they try the regular Plex app and not the simplified Plexamp.
  - sroerick 1y ago
    Navidrome is compatible with browser apps through a protocol the name of which eludes me at the moment The web interface also runs pretty flawlessly on mobile browser. I was actually shocked at how responsive it was.
    - theshrike79 1y ago
      Subsonic API: https://www.subsonic.org/pages/api.jsp https://www.subsonic.org/pages/api.jsp
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    Navidrome is a server, not a desktop app. It's more analogous to Plex than Plexamp. If you want a mobile app that can do Subsonic (the protocol Navidrome uses), Symfonium on Android is amazing.
  - bambax 1y ago
    Navidrome is a server. You can use it directly by connecting to it in a browser, but its point is to serve the music to a client, of which many exist for both iOS and Android.
guhcampos 1y ago
The genius of streaming was being more convenient than piracy. With streaming prices hiking up, recommendations getting worse and their libraries becoming plagued by one-song-releases and AI Slop, piracy is becoming a thing again. The same is happening for video, apparently, as people get tired of having to pay for half a dozen streaming services more than they used to pay for 300 cable channels. Apple actually used to have a platform that was decent at providing legitimate music at reasonable pricing and convenient means to play it with iTunes. I wonder if Apple Music can become that again.
sfRattan 1y ago
Just added my old music collection to my private Jellyfin server on my home network. The UI for music is not as polished as some focused alternatives like Navidrome or FunkWhale, but it's good enough... And I like having both fewer apps installed on my devices and fewer discrete services running on my homelab. It was fun to go back through the collection of music I've been accumulating since high school and moving from hard drive to hard drive: mostly ripped off CDs from the library or purchased in used bookstores, later purchased from iTunes, Amazon, and BandCamp once DRM-free downloads became the norm. Updating album art and re-curating the collection has been a walk down memory lane --- I'd (back then) embedded most of it at 200x200 to fit on a tiny Sony MP3 player, and then an iPod, without wasting space. The music library holds up better than either my old DVDs or the rips I made of them... Even lossy MP3s don't sound as rough as 480p looks on a large display today. If you're looking to update the metadata in your own music collection, I can happily recommend: * https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ for searching for album art. * https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ for editing music metadata in files. If you're wanting to replace Spotify or other music subscription services on the go (i.e. from a phone) with something like Jellyfin, Funkwhale, or Navidrome running at home, I've tried and had some success with both tailscale and netbird (though these both require some networking knowledge).
- noduerme 1y ago
  I recently switched to Jellyfin when Plex started charging for remotely accessing my home server. For anyone considering it, I found Tailscale + Jellyfin work a charm. There aren't great docs for doing so, and I beat my head against it for a little bit, but all you need to do really is to add both your local IP range and the Tailscale IP range to the allowed ranges for Jellyfin. With that, any device on your tailnet can access it. I went further and set up a cloud VM with a public web address behind an auth, installed Tailscale on the VM, and set it up to reverse proxy port 443 to the Jellyfin tailscaleIP:port on my tailnet. So now I can get to it through any web browser or Jellyfin app on devices that aren't on my tailnet. I'm extremely happy with the results, and the nice thing is that unlike Plex this setup is never subject to forced changes in the future.
  - 1y ago
wilsonnb3 1y ago
The table comparing the authors solution to Spotify is missing the biggest benefit of streaming services, which is the cost. It would cost way more than $11 a month to buy all of the music I listen to.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  If you're always listening to new music, that makes sense. But are you really? Or are you listening to the stuff you already know and like, with an occasional sprinkling of new music? My impression is that most people are more in the latter group than the former, and at that point you need to consider whether you come out ahead if you buy music rather than renting it. I know that I personally would waste a ton of money paying for Spotify, because I'm 99.99% listening to the music I already know and like.
  - nomel 1y ago
    For some napkin math: I just transferred my library from Spotify to Apple Music (with the new built in tool!): 13k liked songs. I started using paid Spotify from invite, before public release in the US, so 15 years. Lets go very conservative (for me) and say every 3 songs is from the same album, at $12/album (LOL!): $52k, or $288/month. Spotify cost: $2.1k, or $12/month If I had to pay for albums, I would definitely be listening to less varied music.
    - bigstrat2003 1y ago
      I mean, I did say if you're listening to new music all the time then Spotify makes sense. It sounds like you are, so it makes sense for you. But not everyone does that. For myself, I already have the music I like. I would say that once every 3-4 years I come across a new artist I like and I purchase a few of their albums. If we're really aggressive, let's say I buy two new albums per year at $12 each... so my marginal cost is $24/year versus $144/year with Spotify. It all comes down to one's listening habits.
      - nomel 1y ago
dijit 1y ago
I wish I had a way of just bulk buying everything thats “in my library” on Apple Music. I know its not Spotify, so maybe not related, but I have a much better experience with PlexAmp and would love to be able to buy my way out. Even if its €1,500 or something. It should be noted that I actively fought against Apple Music as a subscription service, but buying music became (very rapidly) a third tier experience once they started pushing in that direction.
james_marks 1y ago
See also https://subvert.fm/ https://subvert.fm/
sunrunner 1y ago
I'm always glad to see people move away from Spotify's model and towards options that better support artists directly, and I definitely don't mean this to take anything away from the article despite how it sounds, but just seeing the system diagram reminds me that it's amazing the lengths that systems-minded people will go to to create their own Rube Goldberg-esque systems to 'optimise' the experience. I counted thirteen separate components. If it works for the author then more power to them, but I personally want to spend less time futzing with technology when it comes to this kind of thing and more time actually just actively listening to new music. I buy from Bandcamp or Apple, sync locally, and I'm done. Bandcamp's iOS app is better than Apple's Music at this point (though not a hard bar to reach). And I find new music organically from listener-supported streaming public radio. I haven't mentioned analysis or recommendations, but honestly I so rarely seem to find anything through the typical algorithms and recommendation-type mechanisms that I genuinely like, and stumbling across something new just from having public radio on in the background still feels magical, organic, and overall such a good way to broaden your musical horizons. Still, a good starting point for people wanting their own similar setup.
- sfRattan 1y ago
  > stumbling across something new just from having public radio on in the background still feels magical, organic, and overall such a good way to broaden your musical horizons. I've largely given up on algorithmic recommendations and gone back to human curation. There are humans out there writing about music, movies, and everything in culture. I've found the ones whose tastes I largely trust, and I follow them via RSS to read about the things I might like. Are some of those critics probably using algorithms themselves? Sure. Let them dive into that swamp and pull out the gems. I'll stay on the shore, watch, and wait.
  - sunrunner 1y ago
    > human curation More and more I feel like recommendation algorithms for discovery of anything seem to just not actually work for finding things which are new and exciting, but perhaps that's by definition. If information is surprise then the most interesting things are those which aren't like the things I already know. And the easiest way to find those things I find is to just tune in to something where you don't know what you'll hear, and simply wait. That's it. It might take a while, but I bet you'll find something that feels new, exciting and perhaps expands your tastes a bit. And what could be better?
toddbonzalez1 1y ago
It's annoying how the author mentions "artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream" along with buying from Bandcamp but doesn't describe how they integrate music from Bandcamp into their collection, instead linking to programs that seem designed exclusively for downloading from torrents and usenet. I also have a Navidrome setup that is my main music streaming method which I've used for a few years now. I buy from bandcamp quite often and downloading and importing music from bandcamp (and managing metadata generally) is the most tedious part. I use beets[1] and if I buy, say, a mix of 10 tracks and albums, I then get 10 URLs and I have to download and run `beet imp` on each mp3/zip file. I do this over SSH with a bunch of copy-pasting since I haven't convinced myself it's worth the time[2] to change my method. It looks like there's some way to scrape bandcamp and automate this process based on the existence of this tool, bandcamp-dl[3]. If anyone has their own method to suggest I'd appreciate it. [1]: https://beets.io/ https://beets.io/ [2]: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ [3]: https://github.com/Evolution0/bandcamp-dl https://github.com/Evolution0/bandcamp-dl
dankwizard 1y ago
Ha, this is the guy that got absolutely butchered in his Reddit post [1] about the same link. OP has extensive history in the piracy subreddits and believes piracy is not theft. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1n87xho/why_i_ditched_spotify_and_self_hosted_my_own/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1n87xho/why_i_d...
- don_quiquong 1y ago
  I mean the use of lidarr is a dead giveaway. Don't need to snoop his history to put 2 and 2 together
- s3p 1y ago
  I read the comments. Despite clearly explaining that he was supporting artists, people just said "no you're lying" and baselessly accused him of piracy. Anyway OP seems like a great person. And if he did like pirating, cool! You are free to live your life how you see fit :)
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  > believes piracy is not theft That's true by definition isn't it? Piracy (Internet piracy, since that's the context) is copyright infringement, not theft.
  - dankwizard 1y ago
    Maybe by definition, but if you're a game developer and you find out everybody is pirating your game and not purchasing it from Steam/physical store, it's akin to them walking into the store, sliding the product under their jacket and walking out. You're not going to say "They are infringing on my copyright".
    - sfRattan 1y ago
      > akin to them walking into the store, sliding the product under their jacket and walking out That is a misrepresentation of what is happening across computers and networks. Here is a better analogue: If someone walks up to my car, taps it with a magic wand, mutters some incantations, waits a few minutes as a perfect duplicate slowly materializes, and then drives away in the duplicate... Of what have I been deprived? Maybe privacy, depending on what I had in the car at the time it was duplicated... But that's tangential to the point here. There's a worthy argument that the above scenario is still a wrong (some kind of tort, maybe). But there is simply no argument that the above scenario is equivalent to theft. Theft deprives someone of a scarce material resource. Copyright infringement subverts someone's exclusive, government-granted monopoly. Unlike being secure in one's possessions, copyright has never been understood as a natural right. People grok this distinction intuitively, even if they neither fully understand the technology nor possess the words to articulate it well.
therealfiona 1y ago
Been rebuilding my music library from my sailing the high seas days when I did not have money. CDs sound really good. Some much better than streaming Spotify. Glad I own the media. A buddy was listening to an Audiobook on Spotify, paused it and came back to it no longer being on Spotify. Between stuff like that and no toggle to disable AI generated music, I don't think I'll be going back. _grabs minidisc player and goes for a walk_
- prayerie 1y ago
  hah, i always take my MZ-N1 with me whenever i go outside as i genuinely find it simpler to use than trying to manage a local music collection on an iPhone, does make me feel a bit pretentious though :-)
- cobbzilla 1y ago
  Or discovering that the song you loved has been edited by the artist, and your favorite line is now garbled because it’s not PC anymore? So glad I had the original CD, so I can listen to it how I remember it!
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    What if how I remember it is with a skip that happened because the radio DJ bumped the player while I was recording it to tape? :D
SirMaster 1y ago
I don't understand. At the start of the article the author says this is why Spotify is good. "For years, I relied on Spotify like millions of others. The convenience was undeniable stream anything, anywhere, discover new music through algorithms, and share playlists with friends." How does one discover new music through algorithms or share playlists with friends on this proposes self-hosted stack? He claims it tiges him everything Spotify offered plus more. "Here's how I built my own self-hosted music streaming setup that gives me everything Spotify offered and more." But I don't see how it does those things, and those are the main reasons I use Spotify. 80% of the time I listen to automatic playlists based on my music tastes and hear new and old (but new to me) music constantly. If I don't like it I skip the track to the next as much as I want. How on earth am I supposed to do that if I have to buy and curate every new album into my collection?
- gausswho 1y ago
  Haven't used it myself but the author's tool for recommendations is Lidify.
  - SirMaster 1y ago
    But that doesn't come close to the flow and convenience of Spotify. So I have to manually invoke Lidify, then see the recommendations, then buy the songs, load them into my library, then mix them into my playlists. And what if I don't like them? Now I bought songs that I have no interest to listen to again. How many songs can I even buy per year for $99 a year that Spotify costs. $1 per song? I certainly cycle through way more than 100 new songs a year with the Spotify algorithms to hear new music. I just don't see how he can make a claim that his setup is even remotely comparable to Spotify.
McAlpine5892 1y ago
Recently I gave up on Apple Music. The clients had gotten so bad from a UX perspective that I found it frustrating to use. Especially on desktop. There is also no easy way to cache your _entire_ library to disk. Other services+clients are heaps of Electron that I'd rather avoid. It took some effort and pain but I have a pretty solid self-hosted system now that requires no futzing around: 0. epoupon's Lightweight Music Server (LMS) [0] is an awesome, barebones Subsonic client written in C. It's really good and deserves to be more well-known. 1. wrtag [1] is a less-fully-featured beets written in Go that handles tagging. 2. amperfy [2] is an excellent Subsonic client that runs on iOS. It's configured to automatically cache anything and everything on LMS. 3. Syncthing [3] syncs music files. Needs no introduction. Rock solid. 4. Swinsian [4] a macOS music player that is very reminiscent of old iTunes, but much better. The information density is so incredibly refreshing after using Apple Music. 5. Everything talks to each other seamlessly over Tailscale [5]. All together, an entire open-source stack maintained by volunteers that easily outdoes Apple's own UX in the music department. [0] https://github.com/epoupon/lms https://github.com/epoupon/lms [1] https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag [2] https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy [3] https://syncthing.net https://syncthing.net [4] https://swinsian.com https://swinsian.com [5] https://tailscale.com https://tailscale.com
- jihadjihad 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - xyst 1y ago
    It’s always been pretty terrible. When I was in college, Apple gave it to students for free (or at a steep discount, maybe $2.99/mo?). The 2015 client was god awful but I honestly couldn’t complain since it was just a few bucks. But once I graduated and the university locked me out of the .edu account. I didn’t feel it was worth keeping anymore and dropped them for Spotify or Pandora.
    - brewdad 1y ago
      I really should go back to Pandora. It fits my listening style of picking a genre or era and just letting things play. Spotify artist radio works ok but I really enjoyed Pandora’s algo more. My wife loves to build Spotify playlists though and I can’t justify paying for both.
traverseda 1y ago
Worth noting that lidarr is broken right now. It relies on a metadata server provided by the lidarr org (like that's not going to blow up in our faces) and that metadata server is currently down. It's been like that for I think 6 months? https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/issues/5498 https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/issues/5498 >If you're starting a NEW lidarr library, you should wait. It's not ready for that.
toastercat 1y ago
I just use Plex hosted on a Raspberry Pi, and Plex Amp. I download mp3s from Bandcamp/wherever, and use beets [0] to auto-tag. EDIT: FWIW, I don't recommend most people host their own music. Spotify/YouTube music is easy to use and has most music people want to listen to. I only self-host because I'm the type of person who has built a collection of mp3s since 2005, and the few times I tried switching to Spotify, I would commonly not be able to find specific things I wanted to listen to. [0] https://beets.io/ https://beets.io/
- nickthegreek 1y ago
  Some services like youtube music also allow you to upload your own tracks and mix them in the playlist so you can have the versions of songs you want or ones that they don’t have.
  - toastercat 1y ago
    Ah interesting, I remember this being a feature of Google Play Music 10 years ago as well. Nice to see they kept it around.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  I self-host digital media (and have physical copies of the very best stuff) because I want to be able to access the things I like even if there's some legal bullshit about the content. And when it's on my NAS and backed up, I can be pretty sure that I can still access it in 10 or 20 years.
rpgbr 1y ago
Wow, that’s a lot. Just install any offline music player on your phone and transfer songs to it…?
- theshrike79 1y ago
  My current music collection is 399GB (mostly lossless Flacs). I'm not buying a phone with 512GB-1TB of storage just for my music, 5G is available everywhere and my home internet connection is plenty fast. I can just stream it from home - maybe sync some locally if I'm going off grid. And moving files manually one by one to my phone? Oof. It's not the early 2000s, we have better solutions.
  - ragazzina 1y ago
    >I'm not buying a phone with 512GB-1TB of storage just for my music, If a 512GB phone costs you $300 dollar more tahn the one you would have bought, it amounts to $2 per month for a 5-year phone. Spotify is three times that.
    - theshrike79 1y ago
      $300 will also get me a used mini PC[0] with 2TB of storage[1] I can set up at home in an evening with Navidrome+Audiobookshelf and not have to buy a phone with massive storage at all! :D And as a bonus everyone in my family can listen to the same collection without having to upgrade to a 1TB phone. And I can use the same source in my car, on my laptop, desktop etc. All without having to waste 400GB of space for music storage on every device. [0] https://www.ebay.de/itm/156667490633 https://www.ebay.de/itm/156667490633 [1] https://www.ebay.de/itm/296887285188 https://www.ebay.de/itm/296887285188
  - a-french-anon 1y ago
    Then convert it to Opus. I have a similar ~440 GB in FLAC and would never opt for such a complex solution when one of the major benefits of FLAC is that you can do proper encoding yourself.
  - rpgbr 1y ago
jnaina 1y ago
I have over 400 CDs and SACDs in my collection, from the 80s to the oughts. Have ripped them to my Roon server connect to a Qnap NAS with now over 30 TB storage, as Flac or DSF files. For those CDs that have over the years degraded and can't be ripped, I wrote a scrapping agent for an (in)famous Russian Music Archive site and have > 1M magnet links stored on a MariaDB instance running on the Qnap. I only download albums/tracks as backups, for those I have paid for, via Put.IO My Marantz Amp is Roon Ready and the Roon App (both the desktop and the iPhone version) is pretty good and sound quality is amazing as the App streams the files bit perfect without any downmixing, via ethernet. Roon unfortunately doesn't handle DVD-A and DTS formats properly. I use Plex server and Infuse running on the Apple TV for those, and they work well. (Yes, I know I can convert .dts files to multi-channel FLACs using ffmpeg, but too many files, and I have not gotten around building an automated conversion workflow)
- rsync 1y ago
  Genuinely curious… Did you, in fact, rip your SACDs at their true, higher, resolution? If so, how ?
  - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
    You can get hacked Blu-ray players to rip SACD.
  - jnaina 1y ago
    Yes, in the early days. Now I download SACD "backups". You need to use the below software and get yourself an Oppo 105 BD player. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/0yvj4ytl1tgk4r0eqt385/AA4yicmH1HmnKV3JCugOE5s?rlkey=8iyyb1qsy5bjqul9tj9rbxj58&e=1&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/0yvj4ytl1tgk4r0eqt385/AA4yicm... Full instructions here: https://www.hifive.sg/index.php?threads/ripping-sacd-on-a-oppo-105.2/ https://www.hifive.sg/index.php?threads/ripping-sacd-on-a-op...
sys_64738 1y ago
I setup Plex recently and can access it on the go from an Android phone over cellular. I can also use "Alexa, ask plex to play <whatever>" to stream to the Echo Dot. It's quite amazing to not have to bugger about anymore.
fastball 1y ago
> and the fact that despite paying monthly, I never actually owned anything. FYI, when you purchase digital music through iTunes/Amazon/etc, you still don't actually own anything. You are purchasing a license for personal use, which can be revoked for various reasons.
- privacyking 1y ago
  Woosh. That's the whole point.
  - fastball 1y ago
    That was definitely not the point. The author was contrasting a streaming service with purchasing digital music files, implying the latter is "ownership".
- cobbzilla 1y ago
  I thought you could buy songs as downloadable mp3 files on Amazon? Did they stop allowing that?
  - fastball 1y ago
    You can download an MP3, but you still don't "own" it in the conventional sense. You are licensing it, and a downloaded MP3 is how you utilize that license. If that license was revoked for some reason (admittedly not a likely scenario), continuing to have the MP3 on your system would be a violation. In practice I doubt this would ever be an issue, but just wanted to point out that you effectively never "own" a digital reproduction of something unless you are the actual copyright holder (or the copyright is permissive), and digital copies can be clawed back in a way that a CD or physical book you purchased cannot.
    - brewdad 1y ago
      So long as the copy is DRM-free, which I’m pretty certain Amazon and Apple are these days, there is no means to enforce such a revocation. Of course, you could find yourself unable to download a new copy should you ever need to.
xyst 1y ago
Only components I would swap out here is Cloudflare Tunnels and use of docker. I have my own tailnet with a self hosted head coordinator (headscale). No need to expose music server to public internet or tie your setup to a service that can easily go down or suddenly find yourself paying for it. Access service from within tailnet While docker is great for development purposes. I have found for self hosting it adds a bit of overhead (particularly memory and cpu) and complexity to installations (port forwarding between container and host, firewalling, ip discovery, cpu/gpu passthrough). Sure containerization is great if you have the funds/hardware/time and need to scale across thousands of instances/servers. But becomes overkill for these types of use cases. I would replace with deploying on top of nixOS and manage remotely with nixos-anywhere with declarative configuration. Going to bookmark this since I have been putting off setting up my own media server. OP tailors to music but also want to make my collection of Blu-ray, and photos accessible.
- bambax 1y ago
  Docker with Portainer is really simple and much more straightforward to use than having to remember what services run on what ports, etc. I have been self hosting a bunch of apps and web services on an Asustor for a couple of years now, with Cloudflare CDN in front of it, and everything runs smoothly and never breaks.
  - philipallstar 1y ago
    I just went to the Portainer websites and I can't figure out what it does, exactly. All I know is they've chosen nice fonts. Do you mind explaining what it does for you?
    - bambax 1y ago
      It adds a GUI to Docker so that you can manage your containers from a web page instead of the cli (create, configure, start/stop, etc.) You don't need it if you know Docker well but it's a nice to have.
      - 1y ago
ljoshua 1y ago
I’ve never been on the Spotify train, but with an all-Apple household, including HomePod Minis in multiple rooms, I’ve been stuck in iTunes/Apple Music land. We own our music, which is nice. And I dutifully pay the $24.99 per year for iTunes Match so that I can tell Siri what to play on HomePods, but I will be 0% surprised when they deprecate that service. Anyone have a good non-Apple way of getting Siri to play songs from a personal music collection on HomePods? My kids use it most.
mr-pink 1y ago
its all been down hill since rdio shut down
- the_gastropod 1y ago
  Bahhhh don’t remind me. It’s unreal none of the contemporary players in the music game learned a thing from Rdio’s seemingly universal admiration.
throwaway743 1y ago
Vanced ftw. Blocks all youtube ads and plays with the screen off.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
qixv 1y ago
This sounds really interesting. Can you handle connected devices i.e. play on Sonos, Bluesound devices, Denon HEOS?
lynx97 1y ago
I refuse to use streaming services since they exist. Pay per month to listen to everything? No thanks. These days, I buy everything I like on BandCamp. I have a "mirror script" for BandCamp sites I find interesting, to be able to listen into the stuff, and decide if it is worth buying. I use a MPD based setup on a rpi at home. Built a small web interface to control the thing (MPD clients are plenty but rarely sufficiently accessible). Even wrote my own AI based presenter[1], which will make a description of the cover art part of its moderation. Nice for me, since I am blind. A simple feature (took me a few hours to write) that a proprietary vendor will actually never offer. In this particular case, if I don't scratch my itch, nobody else ever will. When I am mobile, I use the "Shuffle All" button in the BandCamp app to play through the things I've hand-selected over the past 10 years. [1] https://github.com/mlang/llm-mpd https://github.com/mlang/llm-mpd
bambax 1y ago
I did the same as the OP except I use Amperfy on iOS and Tempo on Android. Navidrome is super simple to setup and finds new music immediately. Never breaks. It's not exposed to the Internet directly but via a Cloudflare tunnel (like the OP) and an obscure url that I'm the only one to use. I also wrote a little Python script to transform Spotify playlists into Youtube lists of urls. Shazam can add songs to a Spotify playlist so it's a way to discover new music.
- b3lvedere 1y ago
  I hate to be that guy. Obscurity is not security.
  - delusional 1y ago
    There's technically no distinction between a random url, and a random prime that is part of a keypair. There's a difference of "degree" of randomness, but not of approach. In both cases you get owned if somebody guesses your random bytestring.
  - mvdwoord 1y ago
    Don't worry, we hate you being that guy too ;) Obscurity sometimes gets you enough, if only just cleaner log files. Something something threat model.
    - b3lvedere 1y ago
      I know. I know it's way easier. And i know everybody hates that guy :)
  - bambax 1y ago
    You're right, but I'm not really after "security". It's not like I'm hosting state secrets. I may move to tailscale though, which would be the same thing without exposing anything publicly. Besides I already use tailscale for other things.
- sniffers 1y ago
charcircuit 1y ago
>My self-hosted setup is about controlling my listening experience and owning what I pay for, not avoiding fair compensation to artists. It's ironic to say in an article about illegaly streaming music. It's possible to both buy a CD and legally stream music and the artist will get money from both actions. By illegally streaming the music the artist is missing out on money they would otherwise earn.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  What bit of this is "illegally streaming"? 1. Author buys music legally from Bandcamp 2. Author adds said music to their local self-hosted solution 3. Author listens to said legally bought music on their phone, streamed from the home server Where is the illegal part?
  - Mashimo 1y ago
    > Where is the illegal part? Right here in the stack: >Lidarr -> sabnzbd Someone else mentioned he is also very active in piracy sub-reddits. Think of piracy what you want, but I doubt all music OP has was paid for ;-)
pjmlp 1y ago
I never used Spotify, still buying CDs and MP3. And if I had place for it, I would be getting vynils as well. Additionally I buy many of those directly from bands, on smaller venue concerts, where they sell their stuff and even get to talk with us directly. It is already enough music to consume in my lifetime, more people should focus on controlling the feeling of FOMO against the industry, be it music, movies or games.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  Hey, I am also a boomer.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Yep. :)
konart 1y ago
I had my music stack way before Spotify because this was the only way (and completely illegal at that time) One thing I _really_ want to point out is: >One-time server setup + storage This is a fairy tale. No, you will have to support this stack, things will break as they always do and hardware is not free either. And this works more or less well for techy people. (only a small portion of them). Spotify because a thing because most people do not want to do all that. Or store hundreds of CDs.
- charles_f 1y ago
  > you will have to support this stack, things will break as they always do and hardware is not free either. Hardware is hardly the first thing that will break when you consider the number of pieces in that architecture, including a bunch that aren't self hosted.
poisonborz 1y ago
It seems to me music streaming is the most widely developed self hosting stack. There are literally dozens if not 100+ platforms, servers and clients - so it's very easy to find what you need, even if it's much different than what OP got.
aspenmayer 1y ago
I ditched Spotify for Montreal’s own CKUT and its best known (to me) program, WEFUNK Radio. No problems for over 20 years now. Oh yeah, none of these have ads! Listener supported radio and streaming is where it’s at. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CKUT-FM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CKUT-FM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEFUNK_Radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEFUNK_Radio https://www.wefunkradio.com/ https://www.wefunkradio.com/ DJ Static and Professor Groove are too legit to quit. They’re the second DJs to ever podcast, apparently, as they’ve been on air since 1996 and streaming online since 1999. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SomaFM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SomaFM https://somafm.com/ https://somafm.com/ If you don’t know about SomaFM, now you know. A true SF original. https://www.bagelradio.com/ https://www.bagelradio.com/ Also a special shout-out to BAGeL Radio, formerly rebroadcast by SomaFM. A one-man project that is amazing and unique, also from San Francisco. If you like indie stuff, it’s as good as Indie Pop Rocks of SomaFM, with a bit wider range in genres played.
emsign 1y ago
It misses the only feature why I'm using Spotify: the vast music catalogue instantly available. Coming from foobar2000 I think of all the other features of Spotify as being mostly annoying or unneccessary.
rootsudo 1y ago
This does sound like a fun service to roll out actually
philipallstar 1y ago
This is nice, but the real thing that's needed is an easy way to buy music and dump it into that stack (and preferably keep a copy so I can redownload it). A shop front that lets me log into other shop fronts, or something?
- ramon156 1y ago
  you mean like bandcamp?
  - philipallstar 1y ago
    Oh - yes. I've never been to that website before. I guess if I could buy something on Bandcamp and it loaded straight into my local setup that would be exactly what I'd want, yes.
LauraMedia 1y ago
I myself started collecting music on Bandcamp and recently set up a server with navidrome to have my full collection of music (mostly game soundtracks as of now). It's a bit of a struggle to get access to "common music", because virtually no one offers mp3 downloads anymore, but a lot of the music I used to listen to is already over on my own server, for the low low price of 4€ a month.
quitit 1y ago
The bonus here is that the artists you like will get a much better share versus spotify's very low pay out rates, especially if you're into more obscure acts which fall under spotify's "no payouts under the 1000 plays/year threshold", which conveniently works out to be around 2/3rd of the entire platform. https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/track-monetization-eligibility/ https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/track-monetiz...
HelloUsername 1y ago
I never really understand all these very complex setups. I have a Music folder on my (Synology) NAS that I can browse and play with any mediaplayer (VLC, Foobar), without transcoding anything, with a Wireguard VPN connection to reach outside home network. I tag metadata with an editor, and construct subfolders within the parent directory itself. Or am I missing something?
newscombinatorY 1y ago
In the meantime, Spotify still cannot handle two different artists using the same name. It's almost 2026, and they still haven't fixed the issue with recommending songs from irrelevant "artists" who "borrowed" their stage names from more popular ones.
sotix 1y ago
I've been so happy with my iPod, iTunes, and CDs. It's very simple to manage, works without internet, and I already had a decently sized collection of music on there. Listening to new music is so much more intentional. And it works with my Sennheisers and AirPods Max using the headphone jack! I've been buying complete albums to listen through. My three favorite recent purchases have been Paul McCartney's Ram, Jack Johnson's In Between Dreams, and John Mayer's Paradise Valley.
lukev 1y ago
Spotify is definitely one of those tools that has some ethical issues, but that is so damn convenient it's hard to imagine giving up. I could do something like what the article describes, but it'd definitely be a lot of work. So instead, to support artists, I decided to set a budget and start collecting vinyl. It feels right. I still get all the benefits of Spotify for discovery and convenience, I support artists, and I appreciate having a tangible artifact representing my enjoyment. Plus, album art is way cooler at full size.
- riehwvfbk 1y ago
  Does the fact that Spotify's CEO finances AI weapons change the calculus? https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2025-07-31/spotifys-ceo-owns-an-ai-weapons-company-some-musicians-say-its-time-to-leave https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2025-...
JimmaDaRustla 1y ago
CTRL+F for "lidarr" Close tab Lidarr is not in any way a solution for music collection.
- darkstar999 1y ago
  If you substitute just that one section with ripping CDs/vinyl you own it's still interesting.
- crashprone 1y ago
  You could've skipped the first 2 sentences, started with the third and finished with one more explaining why Lidarr is not a good solution. I was able to find a blog by joekarlsson which echoes your sentiment, is the album first architecture that makes Lidarr a bad choice? Any alternatives you'd recommend?

279 points by starkparker 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

I've been thinking about doing the same thing as the OP for a while, but haven't really gotten around to it. I've started scrobbling to last.fm in order to see if their recommendation algorithm can be a replacement for Spotify. The jury is still out on that. As my financial situation has gone from a place where I felt I could not really care and still save a healthy amount per month, to a place where I feel it is more necessary for me to try to keep up with my finances I've gone from really liking Spotify to a realization that I've probably spent enough money on spotify over the last 15-ish years to buy a cheap car or quite a sizeable music collection, had I just spent that money on music directly. I have gotten my money's worth from Spotify for sure, I listen to it a lot and have probably gotten to hear magnitudes more music than if I merely bought an album or something every month instead, but at this point I can't get over the fact that if/when I unsubscribe to Spotify, I will have nothing and will have to spend a lot to get access to the music I actually care about again. In a sense, I wish there was an audible style subscription for music. Give me the ability to sample music as a replacement for spotify radio, or/and some playlists like discover weekly and a few personalized ones, and a credit to pick something to buy permanently.

stogot 1y ago

Is there a way to do this for Mobile?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Jotalea 1y ago

Good for you. But for me, personally, I went with the lazy route. I just downloaded the songs I like and saved them to a USB stick, plugged it into my speakers and called it a day. Honestly, I don't really know much about audio quality other than higher kbps = higher quality (I might be wrong on that though). My library consists of ~120 .m4a files, 128kbps, most (if not all) downloaded from YouTube.

denimnerd42 1y ago

I really want to do this but like any hobby it takes too much time. My biggest frustration as a youtube music user is that the app doesn't appreciate that it might not always have a good internet connection and takes forever to fallback to your downloads when loading the library. If I used an open source app or my own app I could fix this stupid bug but I don't have any control. :(

jerf 1y ago
If you just want independence, just start collecting MP3s or CDs or whatever. I've been collecting physical music since the mid 90s and my whole MP3 collection is still under 128GBs, so I just copy it anywhere I want it now. Unless you really put some effort into it, storage will probably grow faster than your collection will. Also, you don't need to think of it as an all-or-nothing proposition, or something you need to drop in one month. Just start. Peck away every so often and in 5 years you'll have enough independence to tell any streaming service what it can do with itself.
- denimnerd42 1y ago
  The large flac/mp3 collect I have from my ripped CDs is the reason I even consider it. I just find the toil to be not worth it over minor foibles I have with streaming music. It would sure be nice though to have the time.. I operate software at work for a living. I don't want to come home and operate it too :( Was all about it in HS and college though.
  - jerf 1y ago
    If you've already got it, I'm not exactly sure what you think the toil is? You just copy it places. Maybe just the MP3s for things like phones. Then use an MP3 player. If you mean the inaccuracies of the metadata, again, you just peck at it as it bothers you. You don't have to fix it all at once. Any decent MP3 player can do searches for specific songs. Nor do you have to do a hard cut from streaming services. I do have it all hooked up on Syncthing so my changes stay in sync but that's not exactly a hard thing. It's only marginally harder than a straight copy, and sometimes honestly even a bit easier given how dodgy phones can be about large normal copies.

echelon_musk 1y ago

> Always ensure you're obtaining music through legal channels > My setup uses sabnzbd integrated with Lidarr for handling downloads of content I've purchased. Sure. I believe you.

renterforever 1y ago

It's interesting, but the author's motivations are a little muddled: > several issues became impossible to ignore: artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream and later: > My setup uses sabnzbd

cortesoft 1y ago

So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? What is fair compensation for writing a song? In the old days, artists would join a label and put out an album. The artist would earn about 10% of sales or so (varies of course, but on average). So a $15 CD would earn an artist $1.50. The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005. So it would take about 300 streams of a song to earn the same amount as selling a CD used to make. I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen? There are many albums I own that I have listened to way more than 30 times, which is what it would take for a 10 song album to get 300 song 'streams' Is that a fair compensation? Why or why not? I think artists should be able to earn money from creating music, but I don't know how we decide how much they actually deserve if we aren't just going based on the price the market sets.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
troyvit 1y ago
That's why I like bandcamp. Artists choose the price for their music and I'm free to pay that price, or more, if I think that's fair compensation.
steveBK123 1y ago
> I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen? Fundamentally, inflation-adjusted there are 1/2 as many dollars coming in the front end to the US music industry in the 2020s as there were in the 90s peak, per most sources... even though population is 30% higher. So per-capita music spend in inflation adjusted dollars is down like 60-65%. And there's probably far more artists to spread that around to now with the long tail of bedroom producers / part timers / etc all the way up to Swift. So surely artists are making less than they used to, regardless of how the pie is sliced up because there is a smaller pie. Given the trend in everything else in our economy, I am dubious that the newer streaming arrangements are incrementally more artist-friendly than the old physical media music industry.
claw-el 1y ago

seemaze 1y ago

My own self hosted audio journey ended with Lyrion Music Server[0], formerly Logitech Music Server. It is now open source and run by the community. There are plugins for Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify, local radio, song lyrics, and more. It also does great multi-room audio syncing via DLNA, Airplay, and Squeezelite. I recently setup transcoded streaming so I can listen to my library remotely on Apple Carplay at a reduced bitrate. It's certainly not perfect, but more perfect than any other open or commercial platform I've trialed. Can't recommend it enough! [0]https://lyrion.org https://lyrion.org

al_borland 1y ago

I've gone back and forth on this. I recently signed up for a streaming services again (Apple Music), but I'm being very intentional about how I use it. I'm currently going through the 500 greatest albums ever made, according to Rolling Stone. I don't necessary agree with their rankings, but it's giving me exposure to things I normally wouldn't listen to, gets me out of the algorithms, and feels much better than having it play a bunch of random stuff no one has ever heard of, just to fill the void. I'm treating the online catalog more like a store, only listening to albums I've added to my library, and deleting ones I don' think I'll listen to again. This has helped avoid falling into the algorithms when overwhelmed from near infinite choice. It is likely some of the albums I run across in venture will be purchased and added to my local library so I have them and am not only renting. I do want to support things like the iTunes Music Store, because I don't want to end up in a future where the only options for music are streaming and piracy. Since it's DRM free, I don't have an issue buying from there, but I like that I can sample full albums for extended periods of time (as long as I keep paying) via streaming. From my attempts with YouTube Music and Spotify, the library wasn't really setup well to do what I'm doing, and if I were to get these albums through other means, like the poster who I can only assume is pirating everything now, I wouldn't ever want to delete anything, and my library would be full of junk I'd never listen to. The most seems to also really glaze over the cost of the setup and storage. I have a NAS at home, and not even counting the initial investment in the hardware, the cloud backup alone costs me $30/month. Assuming a person wants backups, having your own library may not be the money saver it sounds like, depending on the setup.

mingus88 1y ago
$30/mo seems pretty steep for backups. How much storage are you talking about, and what tier? All of the music I purchased from bleep and bandcamp is still available to download again, and the CDs I rip from the used book stores are in a box to be ripped again if I ever need it.
- al_borland 1y ago
  5TB through Synology's C2 service.

muratsu 1y ago

Going through the trouble of maintaining a home server is not worth it for me. I wish dropbox offered some extra service for music/video.

leovander 1y ago
If you organize your folders correctly, you could probably have that dropbox folder synced with one of those services. The maintenance isn't too bad once its up and running, probably more hurdles (proxies, etc) if you are accessing outside the home. If you are the only user, you can use tailscale to access your hosted apps when out of the home.

clueless 1y ago

really the biggest service spotify has for me is its music recommendation engine... and so the big question with all this setup is: is listenbrainz's recommendation engine better than spotify?

ramblin_prose 1y ago
on spotify recommendation is just a euphemism for 'we are being paid to promote this' so yes
- clueless 1y ago
  that's not been my experience with the "discover weekly" feature
- ramblin_prose 1y ago
  oh, you've been listening to antichrist siege machine lately? check out sabrina carpenter!

justatdotin 1y ago

I'm interested in the general direction, but for different reasons. IDGAF about AI artists and industry financials - but Helsing killer robots... I also recognised different features I would miss. After an initial bump, the discoverability benefits declined to negligible. What I did greatly value was the unified interface. For that reason, the winner for me is to use plex as the media server, giving plexamp for all clients.

gregwebs 1y ago
Navidrome looks nice but it looks like it is Desktop only. I am using Plexamp as well. I tried some alternatives but couldn't get them to work reliably. People miss Plexamp as an option because they try the regular Plex app and not the simplified Plexamp.
- sroerick 1y ago
  Navidrome is compatible with browser apps through a protocol the name of which eludes me at the moment The web interface also runs pretty flawlessly on mobile browser. I was actually shocked at how responsive it was.
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    Subsonic API: https://www.subsonic.org/pages/api.jsp https://www.subsonic.org/pages/api.jsp
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  Navidrome is a server, not a desktop app. It's more analogous to Plex than Plexamp. If you want a mobile app that can do Subsonic (the protocol Navidrome uses), Symfonium on Android is amazing.
- bambax 1y ago
  Navidrome is a server. You can use it directly by connecting to it in a browser, but its point is to serve the music to a client, of which many exist for both iOS and Android.

guhcampos 1y ago

The genius of streaming was being more convenient than piracy. With streaming prices hiking up, recommendations getting worse and their libraries becoming plagued by one-song-releases and AI Slop, piracy is becoming a thing again. The same is happening for video, apparently, as people get tired of having to pay for half a dozen streaming services more than they used to pay for 300 cable channels. Apple actually used to have a platform that was decent at providing legitimate music at reasonable pricing and convenient means to play it with iTunes. I wonder if Apple Music can become that again.

sfRattan 1y ago

Just added my old music collection to my private Jellyfin server on my home network. The UI for music is not as polished as some focused alternatives like Navidrome or FunkWhale, but it's good enough... And I like having both fewer apps installed on my devices and fewer discrete services running on my homelab. It was fun to go back through the collection of music I've been accumulating since high school and moving from hard drive to hard drive: mostly ripped off CDs from the library or purchased in used bookstores, later purchased from iTunes, Amazon, and BandCamp once DRM-free downloads became the norm. Updating album art and re-curating the collection has been a walk down memory lane --- I'd (back then) embedded most of it at 200x200 to fit on a tiny Sony MP3 player, and then an iPod, without wasting space. The music library holds up better than either my old DVDs or the rips I made of them... Even lossy MP3s don't sound as rough as 480p looks on a large display today. If you're looking to update the metadata in your own music collection, I can happily recommend: * https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ for searching for album art. * https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ for editing music metadata in files. If you're wanting to replace Spotify or other music subscription services on the go (i.e. from a phone) with something like Jellyfin, Funkwhale, or Navidrome running at home, I've tried and had some success with both tailscale and netbird (though these both require some networking knowledge).

noduerme 1y ago
I recently switched to Jellyfin when Plex started charging for remotely accessing my home server. For anyone considering it, I found Tailscale + Jellyfin work a charm. There aren't great docs for doing so, and I beat my head against it for a little bit, but all you need to do really is to add both your local IP range and the Tailscale IP range to the allowed ranges for Jellyfin. With that, any device on your tailnet can access it. I went further and set up a cloud VM with a public web address behind an auth, installed Tailscale on the VM, and set it up to reverse proxy port 443 to the Jellyfin tailscaleIP:port on my tailnet. So now I can get to it through any web browser or Jellyfin app on devices that aren't on my tailnet. I'm extremely happy with the results, and the nice thing is that unlike Plex this setup is never subject to forced changes in the future.
- 1y ago

wilsonnb3 1y ago

The table comparing the authors solution to Spotify is missing the biggest benefit of streaming services, which is the cost. It would cost way more than $11 a month to buy all of the music I listen to.

bigstrat2003 1y ago
If you're always listening to new music, that makes sense. But are you really? Or are you listening to the stuff you already know and like, with an occasional sprinkling of new music? My impression is that most people are more in the latter group than the former, and at that point you need to consider whether you come out ahead if you buy music rather than renting it. I know that I personally would waste a ton of money paying for Spotify, because I'm 99.99% listening to the music I already know and like.
- nomel 1y ago
  For some napkin math: I just transferred my library from Spotify to Apple Music (with the new built in tool!): 13k liked songs. I started using paid Spotify from invite, before public release in the US, so 15 years. Lets go very conservative (for me) and say every 3 songs is from the same album, at $12/album (LOL!): $52k, or $288/month. Spotify cost: $2.1k, or $12/month If I had to pay for albums, I would definitely be listening to less varied music.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    I mean, I did say if you're listening to new music all the time then Spotify makes sense. It sounds like you are, so it makes sense for you. But not everyone does that. For myself, I already have the music I like. I would say that once every 3-4 years I come across a new artist I like and I purchase a few of their albums. If we're really aggressive, let's say I buy two new albums per year at $12 each... so my marginal cost is $24/year versus $144/year with Spotify. It all comes down to one's listening habits.
    - nomel 1y ago

dijit 1y ago

I wish I had a way of just bulk buying everything thats “in my library” on Apple Music. I know its not Spotify, so maybe not related, but I have a much better experience with PlexAmp and would love to be able to buy my way out. Even if its €1,500 or something. It should be noted that I actively fought against Apple Music as a subscription service, but buying music became (very rapidly) a third tier experience once they started pushing in that direction.

james_marks 1y ago

See also https://subvert.fm/ https://subvert.fm/

sunrunner 1y ago

I'm always glad to see people move away from Spotify's model and towards options that better support artists directly, and I definitely don't mean this to take anything away from the article despite how it sounds, but just seeing the system diagram reminds me that it's amazing the lengths that systems-minded people will go to to create their own Rube Goldberg-esque systems to 'optimise' the experience. I counted thirteen separate components. If it works for the author then more power to them, but I personally want to spend less time futzing with technology when it comes to this kind of thing and more time actually just actively listening to new music. I buy from Bandcamp or Apple, sync locally, and I'm done. Bandcamp's iOS app is better than Apple's Music at this point (though not a hard bar to reach). And I find new music organically from listener-supported streaming public radio. I haven't mentioned analysis or recommendations, but honestly I so rarely seem to find anything through the typical algorithms and recommendation-type mechanisms that I genuinely like, and stumbling across something new just from having public radio on in the background still feels magical, organic, and overall such a good way to broaden your musical horizons. Still, a good starting point for people wanting their own similar setup.

sfRattan 1y ago
> stumbling across something new just from having public radio on in the background still feels magical, organic, and overall such a good way to broaden your musical horizons. I've largely given up on algorithmic recommendations and gone back to human curation. There are humans out there writing about music, movies, and everything in culture. I've found the ones whose tastes I largely trust, and I follow them via RSS to read about the things I might like. Are some of those critics probably using algorithms themselves? Sure. Let them dive into that swamp and pull out the gems. I'll stay on the shore, watch, and wait.
- sunrunner 1y ago
  > human curation More and more I feel like recommendation algorithms for discovery of anything seem to just not actually work for finding things which are new and exciting, but perhaps that's by definition. If information is surprise then the most interesting things are those which aren't like the things I already know. And the easiest way to find those things I find is to just tune in to something where you don't know what you'll hear, and simply wait. That's it. It might take a while, but I bet you'll find something that feels new, exciting and perhaps expands your tastes a bit. And what could be better?

toddbonzalez1 1y ago

It's annoying how the author mentions "artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream" along with buying from Bandcamp but doesn't describe how they integrate music from Bandcamp into their collection, instead linking to programs that seem designed exclusively for downloading from torrents and usenet. I also have a Navidrome setup that is my main music streaming method which I've used for a few years now. I buy from bandcamp quite often and downloading and importing music from bandcamp (and managing metadata generally) is the most tedious part. I use beets[1] and if I buy, say, a mix of 10 tracks and albums, I then get 10 URLs and I have to download and run `beet imp` on each mp3/zip file. I do this over SSH with a bunch of copy-pasting since I haven't convinced myself it's worth the time[2] to change my method. It looks like there's some way to scrape bandcamp and automate this process based on the existence of this tool, bandcamp-dl[3]. If anyone has their own method to suggest I'd appreciate it. [1]: https://beets.io/ https://beets.io/ [2]: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ [3]: https://github.com/Evolution0/bandcamp-dl https://github.com/Evolution0/bandcamp-dl

dankwizard 1y ago

Ha, this is the guy that got absolutely butchered in his Reddit post [1] about the same link. OP has extensive history in the piracy subreddits and believes piracy is not theft. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1n87xho/why_i_ditched_spotify_and_self_hosted_my_own/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1n87xho/why_i_d...

don_quiquong 1y ago
I mean the use of lidarr is a dead giveaway. Don't need to snoop his history to put 2 and 2 together
s3p 1y ago
I read the comments. Despite clearly explaining that he was supporting artists, people just said "no you're lying" and baselessly accused him of piracy. Anyway OP seems like a great person. And if he did like pirating, cool! You are free to live your life how you see fit :)
BLKNSLVR 1y ago
> believes piracy is not theft That's true by definition isn't it? Piracy (Internet piracy, since that's the context) is copyright infringement, not theft.
- dankwizard 1y ago
  Maybe by definition, but if you're a game developer and you find out everybody is pirating your game and not purchasing it from Steam/physical store, it's akin to them walking into the store, sliding the product under their jacket and walking out. You're not going to say "They are infringing on my copyright".
  - sfRattan 1y ago
    > akin to them walking into the store, sliding the product under their jacket and walking out That is a misrepresentation of what is happening across computers and networks. Here is a better analogue: If someone walks up to my car, taps it with a magic wand, mutters some incantations, waits a few minutes as a perfect duplicate slowly materializes, and then drives away in the duplicate... Of what have I been deprived? Maybe privacy, depending on what I had in the car at the time it was duplicated... But that's tangential to the point here. There's a worthy argument that the above scenario is still a wrong (some kind of tort, maybe). But there is simply no argument that the above scenario is equivalent to theft. Theft deprives someone of a scarce material resource. Copyright infringement subverts someone's exclusive, government-granted monopoly. Unlike being secure in one's possessions, copyright has never been understood as a natural right. People grok this distinction intuitively, even if they neither fully understand the technology nor possess the words to articulate it well.

therealfiona 1y ago

Been rebuilding my music library from my sailing the high seas days when I did not have money. CDs sound really good. Some much better than streaming Spotify. Glad I own the media. A buddy was listening to an Audiobook on Spotify, paused it and came back to it no longer being on Spotify. Between stuff like that and no toggle to disable AI generated music, I don't think I'll be going back. _grabs minidisc player and goes for a walk_

prayerie 1y ago
hah, i always take my MZ-N1 with me whenever i go outside as i genuinely find it simpler to use than trying to manage a local music collection on an iPhone, does make me feel a bit pretentious though :-)
cobbzilla 1y ago
Or discovering that the song you loved has been edited by the artist, and your favorite line is now garbled because it’s not PC anymore? So glad I had the original CD, so I can listen to it how I remember it!
- theshrike79 1y ago
  What if how I remember it is with a skip that happened because the radio DJ bumped the player while I was recording it to tape? :D

SirMaster 1y ago

I don't understand. At the start of the article the author says this is why Spotify is good. "For years, I relied on Spotify like millions of others. The convenience was undeniable stream anything, anywhere, discover new music through algorithms, and share playlists with friends." How does one discover new music through algorithms or share playlists with friends on this proposes self-hosted stack? He claims it tiges him everything Spotify offered plus more. "Here's how I built my own self-hosted music streaming setup that gives me everything Spotify offered and more." But I don't see how it does those things, and those are the main reasons I use Spotify. 80% of the time I listen to automatic playlists based on my music tastes and hear new and old (but new to me) music constantly. If I don't like it I skip the track to the next as much as I want. How on earth am I supposed to do that if I have to buy and curate every new album into my collection?

gausswho 1y ago
Haven't used it myself but the author's tool for recommendations is Lidify.
- SirMaster 1y ago
  But that doesn't come close to the flow and convenience of Spotify. So I have to manually invoke Lidify, then see the recommendations, then buy the songs, load them into my library, then mix them into my playlists. And what if I don't like them? Now I bought songs that I have no interest to listen to again. How many songs can I even buy per year for $99 a year that Spotify costs. $1 per song? I certainly cycle through way more than 100 new songs a year with the Spotify algorithms to hear new music. I just don't see how he can make a claim that his setup is even remotely comparable to Spotify.

McAlpine5892 1y ago

Recently I gave up on Apple Music. The clients had gotten so bad from a UX perspective that I found it frustrating to use. Especially on desktop. There is also no easy way to cache your _entire_ library to disk. Other services+clients are heaps of Electron that I'd rather avoid. It took some effort and pain but I have a pretty solid self-hosted system now that requires no futzing around: 0. epoupon's Lightweight Music Server (LMS) [0] is an awesome, barebones Subsonic client written in C. It's really good and deserves to be more well-known. 1. wrtag [1] is a less-fully-featured beets written in Go that handles tagging. 2. amperfy [2] is an excellent Subsonic client that runs on iOS. It's configured to automatically cache anything and everything on LMS. 3. Syncthing [3] syncs music files. Needs no introduction. Rock solid. 4. Swinsian [4] a macOS music player that is very reminiscent of old iTunes, but much better. The information density is so incredibly refreshing after using Apple Music. 5. Everything talks to each other seamlessly over Tailscale [5]. All together, an entire open-source stack maintained by volunteers that easily outdoes Apple's own UX in the music department. [0] https://github.com/epoupon/lms https://github.com/epoupon/lms [1] https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag [2] https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy [3] https://syncthing.net https://syncthing.net [4] https://swinsian.com https://swinsian.com [5] https://tailscale.com https://tailscale.com

jihadjihad 1y ago
[flagged]
- xyst 1y ago
  It’s always been pretty terrible. When I was in college, Apple gave it to students for free (or at a steep discount, maybe $2.99/mo?). The 2015 client was god awful but I honestly couldn’t complain since it was just a few bucks. But once I graduated and the university locked me out of the .edu account. I didn’t feel it was worth keeping anymore and dropped them for Spotify or Pandora.
  - brewdad 1y ago
    I really should go back to Pandora. It fits my listening style of picking a genre or era and just letting things play. Spotify artist radio works ok but I really enjoyed Pandora’s algo more. My wife loves to build Spotify playlists though and I can’t justify paying for both.

traverseda 1y ago

Worth noting that lidarr is broken right now. It relies on a metadata server provided by the lidarr org (like that's not going to blow up in our faces) and that metadata server is currently down. It's been like that for I think 6 months? https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/issues/5498 https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/issues/5498 >If you're starting a NEW lidarr library, you should wait. It's not ready for that.

toastercat 1y ago

I just use Plex hosted on a Raspberry Pi, and Plex Amp. I download mp3s from Bandcamp/wherever, and use beets [0] to auto-tag. EDIT: FWIW, I don't recommend most people host their own music. Spotify/YouTube music is easy to use and has most music people want to listen to. I only self-host because I'm the type of person who has built a collection of mp3s since 2005, and the few times I tried switching to Spotify, I would commonly not be able to find specific things I wanted to listen to. [0] https://beets.io/ https://beets.io/

nickthegreek 1y ago
Some services like youtube music also allow you to upload your own tracks and mix them in the playlist so you can have the versions of songs you want or ones that they don’t have.
- toastercat 1y ago
  Ah interesting, I remember this being a feature of Google Play Music 10 years ago as well. Nice to see they kept it around.
theshrike79 1y ago
I self-host digital media (and have physical copies of the very best stuff) because I want to be able to access the things I like even if there's some legal bullshit about the content. And when it's on my NAS and backed up, I can be pretty sure that I can still access it in 10 or 20 years.

rpgbr 1y ago

Wow, that’s a lot. Just install any offline music player on your phone and transfer songs to it…?

theshrike79 1y ago
My current music collection is 399GB (mostly lossless Flacs). I'm not buying a phone with 512GB-1TB of storage just for my music, 5G is available everywhere and my home internet connection is plenty fast. I can just stream it from home - maybe sync some locally if I'm going off grid. And moving files manually one by one to my phone? Oof. It's not the early 2000s, we have better solutions.
- ragazzina 1y ago
  >I'm not buying a phone with 512GB-1TB of storage just for my music, If a 512GB phone costs you $300 dollar more tahn the one you would have bought, it amounts to $2 per month for a 5-year phone. Spotify is three times that.
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    $300 will also get me a used mini PC[0] with 2TB of storage[1] I can set up at home in an evening with Navidrome+Audiobookshelf and not have to buy a phone with massive storage at all! :D And as a bonus everyone in my family can listen to the same collection without having to upgrade to a 1TB phone. And I can use the same source in my car, on my laptop, desktop etc. All without having to waste 400GB of space for music storage on every device. [0] https://www.ebay.de/itm/156667490633 https://www.ebay.de/itm/156667490633 [1] https://www.ebay.de/itm/296887285188 https://www.ebay.de/itm/296887285188
- a-french-anon 1y ago
  Then convert it to Opus. I have a similar ~440 GB in FLAC and would never opt for such a complex solution when one of the major benefits of FLAC is that you can do proper encoding yourself.
- rpgbr 1y ago

jnaina 1y ago

I have over 400 CDs and SACDs in my collection, from the 80s to the oughts. Have ripped them to my Roon server connect to a Qnap NAS with now over 30 TB storage, as Flac or DSF files. For those CDs that have over the years degraded and can't be ripped, I wrote a scrapping agent for an (in)famous Russian Music Archive site and have > 1M magnet links stored on a MariaDB instance running on the Qnap. I only download albums/tracks as backups, for those I have paid for, via Put.IO My Marantz Amp is Roon Ready and the Roon App (both the desktop and the iPhone version) is pretty good and sound quality is amazing as the App streams the files bit perfect without any downmixing, via ethernet. Roon unfortunately doesn't handle DVD-A and DTS formats properly. I use Plex server and Infuse running on the Apple TV for those, and they work well. (Yes, I know I can convert .dts files to multi-channel FLACs using ffmpeg, but too many files, and I have not gotten around building an automated conversion workflow)

rsync 1y ago
Genuinely curious… Did you, in fact, rip your SACDs at their true, higher, resolution? If so, how ?
- kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
  You can get hacked Blu-ray players to rip SACD.
- jnaina 1y ago
  Yes, in the early days. Now I download SACD "backups". You need to use the below software and get yourself an Oppo 105 BD player. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/0yvj4ytl1tgk4r0eqt385/AA4yicmH1HmnKV3JCugOE5s?rlkey=8iyyb1qsy5bjqul9tj9rbxj58&e=1&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/0yvj4ytl1tgk4r0eqt385/AA4yicm... Full instructions here: https://www.hifive.sg/index.php?threads/ripping-sacd-on-a-oppo-105.2/ https://www.hifive.sg/index.php?threads/ripping-sacd-on-a-op...

sys_64738 1y ago

I setup Plex recently and can access it on the go from an Android phone over cellular. I can also use "Alexa, ask plex to play <whatever>" to stream to the Echo Dot. It's quite amazing to not have to bugger about anymore.

fastball 1y ago

> and the fact that despite paying monthly, I never actually owned anything. FYI, when you purchase digital music through iTunes/Amazon/etc, you still don't actually own anything. You are purchasing a license for personal use, which can be revoked for various reasons.

privacyking 1y ago
Woosh. That's the whole point.
- fastball 1y ago
  That was definitely not the point. The author was contrasting a streaming service with purchasing digital music files, implying the latter is "ownership".
cobbzilla 1y ago
I thought you could buy songs as downloadable mp3 files on Amazon? Did they stop allowing that?
- fastball 1y ago
  You can download an MP3, but you still don't "own" it in the conventional sense. You are licensing it, and a downloaded MP3 is how you utilize that license. If that license was revoked for some reason (admittedly not a likely scenario), continuing to have the MP3 on your system would be a violation. In practice I doubt this would ever be an issue, but just wanted to point out that you effectively never "own" a digital reproduction of something unless you are the actual copyright holder (or the copyright is permissive), and digital copies can be clawed back in a way that a CD or physical book you purchased cannot.
  - brewdad 1y ago
    So long as the copy is DRM-free, which I’m pretty certain Amazon and Apple are these days, there is no means to enforce such a revocation. Of course, you could find yourself unable to download a new copy should you ever need to.

xyst 1y ago

Only components I would swap out here is Cloudflare Tunnels and use of docker. I have my own tailnet with a self hosted head coordinator (headscale). No need to expose music server to public internet or tie your setup to a service that can easily go down or suddenly find yourself paying for it. Access service from within tailnet While docker is great for development purposes. I have found for self hosting it adds a bit of overhead (particularly memory and cpu) and complexity to installations (port forwarding between container and host, firewalling, ip discovery, cpu/gpu passthrough). Sure containerization is great if you have the funds/hardware/time and need to scale across thousands of instances/servers. But becomes overkill for these types of use cases. I would replace with deploying on top of nixOS and manage remotely with nixos-anywhere with declarative configuration. Going to bookmark this since I have been putting off setting up my own media server. OP tailors to music but also want to make my collection of Blu-ray, and photos accessible.

bambax 1y ago
Docker with Portainer is really simple and much more straightforward to use than having to remember what services run on what ports, etc. I have been self hosting a bunch of apps and web services on an Asustor for a couple of years now, with Cloudflare CDN in front of it, and everything runs smoothly and never breaks.
- philipallstar 1y ago
  I just went to the Portainer websites and I can't figure out what it does, exactly. All I know is they've chosen nice fonts. Do you mind explaining what it does for you?
  - bambax 1y ago
    It adds a GUI to Docker so that you can manage your containers from a web page instead of the cli (create, configure, start/stop, etc.) You don't need it if you know Docker well but it's a nice to have.
    - 1y ago

ljoshua 1y ago

I’ve never been on the Spotify train, but with an all-Apple household, including HomePod Minis in multiple rooms, I’ve been stuck in iTunes/Apple Music land. We own our music, which is nice. And I dutifully pay the $24.99 per year for iTunes Match so that I can tell Siri what to play on HomePods, but I will be 0% surprised when they deprecate that service. Anyone have a good non-Apple way of getting Siri to play songs from a personal music collection on HomePods? My kids use it most.

mr-pink 1y ago

its all been down hill since rdio shut down

the_gastropod 1y ago
Bahhhh don’t remind me. It’s unreal none of the contemporary players in the music game learned a thing from Rdio’s seemingly universal admiration.

throwaway743 1y ago

Vanced ftw. Blocks all youtube ads and plays with the screen off.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

qixv 1y ago

This sounds really interesting. Can you handle connected devices i.e. play on Sonos, Bluesound devices, Denon HEOS?

lynx97 1y ago

I refuse to use streaming services since they exist. Pay per month to listen to everything? No thanks. These days, I buy everything I like on BandCamp. I have a "mirror script" for BandCamp sites I find interesting, to be able to listen into the stuff, and decide if it is worth buying. I use a MPD based setup on a rpi at home. Built a small web interface to control the thing (MPD clients are plenty but rarely sufficiently accessible). Even wrote my own AI based presenter[1], which will make a description of the cover art part of its moderation. Nice for me, since I am blind. A simple feature (took me a few hours to write) that a proprietary vendor will actually never offer. In this particular case, if I don't scratch my itch, nobody else ever will. When I am mobile, I use the "Shuffle All" button in the BandCamp app to play through the things I've hand-selected over the past 10 years. [1] https://github.com/mlang/llm-mpd https://github.com/mlang/llm-mpd

bambax 1y ago

I did the same as the OP except I use Amperfy on iOS and Tempo on Android. Navidrome is super simple to setup and finds new music immediately. Never breaks. It's not exposed to the Internet directly but via a Cloudflare tunnel (like the OP) and an obscure url that I'm the only one to use. I also wrote a little Python script to transform Spotify playlists into Youtube lists of urls. Shazam can add songs to a Spotify playlist so it's a way to discover new music.

b3lvedere 1y ago
I hate to be that guy. Obscurity is not security.
- delusional 1y ago
  There's technically no distinction between a random url, and a random prime that is part of a keypair. There's a difference of "degree" of randomness, but not of approach. In both cases you get owned if somebody guesses your random bytestring.
- mvdwoord 1y ago
  Don't worry, we hate you being that guy too ;) Obscurity sometimes gets you enough, if only just cleaner log files. Something something threat model.
  - b3lvedere 1y ago
    I know. I know it's way easier. And i know everybody hates that guy :)
- bambax 1y ago
  You're right, but I'm not really after "security". It's not like I'm hosting state secrets. I may move to tailscale though, which would be the same thing without exposing anything publicly. Besides I already use tailscale for other things.
sniffers 1y ago

charcircuit 1y ago

>My self-hosted setup is about controlling my listening experience and owning what I pay for, not avoiding fair compensation to artists. It's ironic to say in an article about illegaly streaming music. It's possible to both buy a CD and legally stream music and the artist will get money from both actions. By illegally streaming the music the artist is missing out on money they would otherwise earn.

theshrike79 1y ago
What bit of this is "illegally streaming"? 1. Author buys music legally from Bandcamp 2. Author adds said music to their local self-hosted solution 3. Author listens to said legally bought music on their phone, streamed from the home server Where is the illegal part?
- Mashimo 1y ago
  > Where is the illegal part? Right here in the stack: >Lidarr -> sabnzbd Someone else mentioned he is also very active in piracy sub-reddits. Think of piracy what you want, but I doubt all music OP has was paid for ;-)

pjmlp 1y ago

I never used Spotify, still buying CDs and MP3. And if I had place for it, I would be getting vynils as well. Additionally I buy many of those directly from bands, on smaller venue concerts, where they sell their stuff and even get to talk with us directly. It is already enough music to consume in my lifetime, more people should focus on controlling the feeling of FOMO against the industry, be it music, movies or games.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago
Hey, I am also a boomer.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Yep. :)

konart 1y ago

I had my music stack way before Spotify because this was the only way (and completely illegal at that time) One thing I _really_ want to point out is: >One-time server setup + storage This is a fairy tale. No, you will have to support this stack, things will break as they always do and hardware is not free either. And this works more or less well for techy people. (only a small portion of them). Spotify because a thing because most people do not want to do all that. Or store hundreds of CDs.

charles_f 1y ago
> you will have to support this stack, things will break as they always do and hardware is not free either. Hardware is hardly the first thing that will break when you consider the number of pieces in that architecture, including a bunch that aren't self hosted.

poisonborz 1y ago

It seems to me music streaming is the most widely developed self hosting stack. There are literally dozens if not 100+ platforms, servers and clients - so it's very easy to find what you need, even if it's much different than what OP got.

aspenmayer 1y ago

I ditched Spotify for Montreal’s own CKUT and its best known (to me) program, WEFUNK Radio. No problems for over 20 years now. Oh yeah, none of these have ads! Listener supported radio and streaming is where it’s at. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CKUT-FM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CKUT-FM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEFUNK_Radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEFUNK_Radio https://www.wefunkradio.com/ https://www.wefunkradio.com/ DJ Static and Professor Groove are too legit to quit. They’re the second DJs to ever podcast, apparently, as they’ve been on air since 1996 and streaming online since 1999. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SomaFM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SomaFM https://somafm.com/ https://somafm.com/ If you don’t know about SomaFM, now you know. A true SF original. https://www.bagelradio.com/ https://www.bagelradio.com/ Also a special shout-out to BAGeL Radio, formerly rebroadcast by SomaFM. A one-man project that is amazing and unique, also from San Francisco. If you like indie stuff, it’s as good as Indie Pop Rocks of SomaFM, with a bit wider range in genres played.

emsign 1y ago

It misses the only feature why I'm using Spotify: the vast music catalogue instantly available. Coming from foobar2000 I think of all the other features of Spotify as being mostly annoying or unneccessary.

rootsudo 1y ago

This does sound like a fun service to roll out actually

philipallstar 1y ago

This is nice, but the real thing that's needed is an easy way to buy music and dump it into that stack (and preferably keep a copy so I can redownload it). A shop front that lets me log into other shop fronts, or something?

ramon156 1y ago
you mean like bandcamp?
- philipallstar 1y ago
  Oh - yes. I've never been to that website before. I guess if I could buy something on Bandcamp and it loaded straight into my local setup that would be exactly what I'd want, yes.

LauraMedia 1y ago

I myself started collecting music on Bandcamp and recently set up a server with navidrome to have my full collection of music (mostly game soundtracks as of now). It's a bit of a struggle to get access to "common music", because virtually no one offers mp3 downloads anymore, but a lot of the music I used to listen to is already over on my own server, for the low low price of 4€ a month.

quitit 1y ago

The bonus here is that the artists you like will get a much better share versus spotify's very low pay out rates, especially if you're into more obscure acts which fall under spotify's "no payouts under the 1000 plays/year threshold", which conveniently works out to be around 2/3rd of the entire platform. https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/track-monetization-eligibility/ https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/track-monetiz...

HelloUsername 1y ago

I never really understand all these very complex setups. I have a Music folder on my (Synology) NAS that I can browse and play with any mediaplayer (VLC, Foobar), without transcoding anything, with a Wireguard VPN connection to reach outside home network. I tag metadata with an editor, and construct subfolders within the parent directory itself. Or am I missing something?

newscombinatorY 1y ago

In the meantime, Spotify still cannot handle two different artists using the same name. It's almost 2026, and they still haven't fixed the issue with recommending songs from irrelevant "artists" who "borrowed" their stage names from more popular ones.

sotix 1y ago

I've been so happy with my iPod, iTunes, and CDs. It's very simple to manage, works without internet, and I already had a decently sized collection of music on there. Listening to new music is so much more intentional. And it works with my Sennheisers and AirPods Max using the headphone jack! I've been buying complete albums to listen through. My three favorite recent purchases have been Paul McCartney's Ram, Jack Johnson's In Between Dreams, and John Mayer's Paradise Valley.

lukev 1y ago

Spotify is definitely one of those tools that has some ethical issues, but that is so damn convenient it's hard to imagine giving up. I could do something like what the article describes, but it'd definitely be a lot of work. So instead, to support artists, I decided to set a budget and start collecting vinyl. It feels right. I still get all the benefits of Spotify for discovery and convenience, I support artists, and I appreciate having a tangible artifact representing my enjoyment. Plus, album art is way cooler at full size.

riehwvfbk 1y ago
Does the fact that Spotify's CEO finances AI weapons change the calculus? https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2025-07-31/spotifys-ceo-owns-an-ai-weapons-company-some-musicians-say-its-time-to-leave https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2025-...

JimmaDaRustla 1y ago

CTRL+F for "lidarr" Close tab Lidarr is not in any way a solution for music collection.

darkstar999 1y ago
If you substitute just that one section with ripping CDs/vinyl you own it's still interesting.
crashprone 1y ago
You could've skipped the first 2 sentences, started with the third and finished with one more explaining why Lidarr is not a good solution. I was able to find a blog by joekarlsson which echoes your sentiment, is the album first architecture that makes Lidarr a bad choice? Any alternatives you'd recommend?