Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

https://coppolaemilio.com/entries/i-left-spotify-what-happened-next/

by coppolaemilio • 1 year ago

458 349 1 year ago

coppolaemilio.com

geerlingguy• 1 year ago

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

RajT882• 1 year ago

Love JellyFin!

I do not mind the jankiness, since I can work around a lot of it with the API.

I do not even mind too much the Love Exposure bug:

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/10494

phanimahesh• 1 year ago

This is hilarious. The most probable explanation is that it's matching the tvshow part, but a repro would be interesting.

RajT882• 1 year ago

I have a hard time conceiving of what it could be.

Most users report it is the film whose artwork is used (definitely always was for me). One user mentions they get the art from "Love Exposure: The TV Show".

One of these days I am going to spin up a VM and try and work through a report case.

detaro• 1 year ago

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

sodality2• 1 year ago

Personally I switched Navidrome since I found the clients to be better and the scanner to be lighter, but there's a few things I miss: casting was nice, as well as centralizing my media on one everything-app.

thebluelad3• 1 year ago

I use Navidrome with Feishin as a client on PC and Symfonium on my phone. Symfonium allows me to cast in the same way as Spotify.

Symfonium is paid but appears to be one of the rare apps that is still thoughtfully created by somebody who actually uses it. The developer deserves the support.

JLO64• 1 year ago

I use Navidrome with Amperfy on MacOS/iOS and love it.

TiredOfLife• 1 year ago

For me Navidrome actually could run on my raspberry pi with my library.

Touche• 1 year ago

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

toomuchtodo3• 1 year ago

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

bob1029• 1 year ago

I've been working on a custom media server that does streaming, block-based storage on top of S3, with the local disk being used as a cache.

I implemented an override of Stream in C# that can be passed directly to an HttpContext file response. This gives me range-based response support on top of cached S3 media blocks for free. The front-end uses ffmpeg to do a quick transcode on uploads to guarantee fast start of mp4 content in my html video elements.

The cool thing with having a reasonable sized cache is that you can switch to glacier infrequent access tier (i.e., the one intended for quarterly reporting) and save a lot of money on storage. The other fun bit is that it is shared across all clients on the LAN, so if someone watches a show before you, you'll just read it from local during your run through.

For me, I don't need a lot of fancy bullshit in a media solution. An un-styled web player that just works on my MacBook is pretty much the only client support I care about. My media library currently shows up as a monolithic <table> without any pagination. Time to first frame on an uncached video click is well under a second on a 1gbps fiber connection using 32 megabyte block size to US-EAST-1 from Texas.

kaynyn1• 1 year ago

What are egress expenses though. I really want to go this way, but worried about the costs during egress data transfer

INTPenis3• 1 year ago

Is that wise though? I mean I understand the desire to use cheap off-site storage, but S3 clouds can be expensive when requesting files a lot, streaming data, lots of read/write operations.

toomuchtodo3• 1 year ago

https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing

dangravell• 1 year ago

(Disclaimer: this relates to the commercial project I run, but it is directly answering the parent)

It's not self hosted, more a middle-ground between rented Spotify and self hosted data sovereignty, but this is what we do at https://asti.ga . You store your music in some Internet-accessible storage, such as any S3 compatible endpoint, and Astiga connects and streams your library (and provides offline etc etc). AMA.

toomuchtodo3• 1 year ago

Very relevant to my interest, thank you for posting, I wouldn't have found you otherwise.

panopticon• 1 year ago

I embarked on a similar journey last year after YouTube Music took down some albums I listened to religiously.

I settled on Plex + Plexamp instead. I'm mostly satisfied, but there are some rough edges like Chromecast and web playback.

akdor1154• 1 year ago

Plexamp is awesome and i miss it a bit as a Jellyfin user... But i don't trust the plex codebase. My suspicions were firmed up when Lastpass got hacked literally through Plex.

knowknow• 1 year ago

What’s wrong with Spotify?

temp0826• 1 year ago

Afaik it's not terribly good to the artists. One of my favorite bands left the platform; I'm not there yet but if it happens en masse (or at least enough to effect me noticeably) then I'm out too.

thebluelad3• 1 year ago

If you listen on high-end equipment the audio quality is noticeably worse than many other solutions and depending on your music taste, Spotify often removes content or doesn't have it in the first place.

chillfox12• 1 year ago

Music disappearing is really annoying.

tomrod3• 1 year ago

"You'll own nothing and you'll be happy": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_ha...

hyperbovine• 1 year ago

For $15 a month I get access to (as far as my tastes are concerned) all the music ever recorded, instantly accessible from anywhere in the world on any device I own.

I recall a commercial from the 90s that sort of poked fun at this exact idea, as being laughably farfetched and "sci-fi".

You're damn right I'm happy.

Barrin92• 1 year ago

I've never understood the conspiratorial use of that slogan because it's unironically correct. Ownership is economically a cost and a risk and you're generally better off if you can utilize something without owning it or distribute ownership.

I'm much better off using free software than having copies of proprietary software on my shelf and the train is much cheaper than the car insurance.

chillfox12• 1 year ago

I got a smartwatch with a cell connection, some good earbuds and started going to the gym, then I learned that their watch app is complete garbage. It refuses to play the music I want, either playing something else or nothing at all. It will play it out loud on my phones speaker in the locker instead of through my earbuds. It refuses to download the playlists I want. It refuses to stream the music.

None of that is a problem with the Apple Music app, so it's 100% a Spotify problem.

Also, Music sometimes disappears from my playlists.

bni• 1 year ago

It's a shit company that I don't want to support.

dhosek• 1 year ago

My strategy for syncing my music library with my phone is that I have four smart playlists:

- songs rated 5 stars which I haven’t listened to for at least 8 months¹

- songs rated 4 stars which I haven’t listened to for at least 16 months

- songs rated 3 stars which I haven’t listened to for at least 32 months

- the 20GB of least-played music

(there are some other strictures as well, like eliminating Christmas music and some music files I have in my library more for archival purposes than anything else, but this is a decent approximation).

This gives me a reasonably fresh selection of music and at least at the moment, with my daily sync habit, when I listen to a song it goes out of rotation for a while which could be anywhere from a week to years.

⸻

1. This was originally 6/12/24 months, but I ended up boosting that time frame as storage grew tight on my phone.

joshuaturner• 1 year ago

This reminds me of my smart playlist on Apple Music.

It's called "long time no see" and it includes any songs I've listened to more than 10 times but haven't listened to in the last year. I've been using the same music library for nearly two decades now, so it works really well for me. It's like a constantly rotating nostalgia playlist.

HexPhantom5• 1 year ago

Love that you've got archival stuff and Christmas music filtered out - feels like everyone with a big library has a few odd folders that shouldn’t be in regular rotation

gigel82• 1 year ago

I have Navidrome with the "play:Sub" app on iOS (because it works with carplay) for a few obscure albums and it works ok, but I still pay for Spotify because it's convenient and it has most of the music I want.

When we start getting the same splintering that we have with video (too many subscriptions to count), I'll dust off my old eyepatch and start sailing the seven seas... :(

xanadu132• 1 year ago

yes yes yes

HumblyTossed2• 1 year ago

I self host Navidrome. Works pretty well.

makeitdouble• 1 year ago

Do you use a local client that accepts caching/offline playback of the content ?

I'm looking through the android clients and none seem to fully embrace keeping the most played tracks on device ("offline mode"). Tempo[0] has in on the wip list, while StreamMusic straight removed in it the latest update[1], so as of now it looks like a pretty tough feature to get.

Listening to music in remote places is nice, and that was the main reason for paying for Spotify for me.

[0] https://github.com/CappielloAntonio/tempo#readme [1] https://music.aqzscn.cn/docs/versions/latest/

thebluelad3• 1 year ago

Symfonium has been great in my experience and does offline and caching. Check it out: https://symfonium.app/

PaulDavisThe1st3• 1 year ago

Every couple of years, I buy a used Sansa Clip+ from ebay to replace the previous one that suffered physical damage. I transfer over the 128GB/256GB sd card. Voila - entire music collection in the size of a box of matches, no need for data connections, or a working phone, or fumbling with a screen when I'm working out.

HumblyTossed2• 1 year ago

Amperfy on iOS.

ezst2• 1 year ago

Dsub & forks should do just that

ishanjain28• 1 year ago

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

OsrsNeedsf2P2• 1 year ago

If you can't find a place to pay for it, then just do what Spotify did when they launched. I recommend Nuclear[0] for that

[0] https://nuclearplayer.com/

BLKNSLVR• 1 year ago

Love the testimonials!

iamdamian• 1 year ago

Why is acquiring music difficult? If it's DRM you're worried about, the iTunes Store is all (or at least primarily) DRM-free.

kretaceous2• 1 year ago

I self-host a couple of things including an Emby server to watch movies. Self-hosting a music library seems interesting. But I discover and listen to music far more than I watch movies.

This article tells me how good Jellyfin is, but the music collection process is not here. Do you download them manually? Do you buy records?

I grew up downloading music into my PC and then transferring them to my SD card which I used in my phone. Once I had a Spotify, it was just... easier. I can discover music faster with the "song radio" feature in Spotify. I can find and listen to an album as soon as I come across it.

I'd absolutely love to have a better media player and "frontend" than Spotify but I haven't solved the collection part of it. What can be done there?

johntitorjr• 1 year ago

I think the unstated assumption is that the reader has an existing music library. Where that library came from is an excercise left to the reader. I use bittorrent, which I admit is a little morally smelly, but I justify it by buying vinyl albums of any artists I listen a lot to. It'd take a lot of Spotify listens to match the money to the artist of buying a single album from the band website. Lots of vinyl comes with digital downloads too. When I'm at home, physical media is fucking rad. I mean, I can unplug the turntable, spin it by hand, and hear the music directly from the needle. No software, no gadgets. It's so primal, like the artist is whispering to me. I hadn't realized how much I lost switching to Pandora until I switched back to physical media.

Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything? e.g. Merge the artists 'Guns N Roses' and 'Guns and Roses' into the most correct one.

I can't justify the time to do it manually and feel like if I just wait long enough a turn-key AI solution will pop up.

chipsrafferty• 1 year ago

I can't justify the time to go torrent music every time I want to try something new. I don't have a "small list" of artists, I listen to tons of artists and if I immortalized it with a torrented library, how would I ever find new music?

defrost• 1 year ago

Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything?

MusicBrainz Picard ... one album at a time until you get the hang of it.

MP3Tag for manual cleanups and out of normal oddities, etc.

alisonatwork2• 1 year ago

I don't usually recommend software that isn't open source, but MusicBee is really great for organizing tunes. You can build really deep auto playlists based on any tag you like, you can do bulk updates across lots of fields, you can have it reorganize files into folders around any of the tags, including with fallbacks for missing tags, there's configurations to download metadata from online, all kinds of stuff. Plus it's a super customizable music player too.

ProfDreamer• 1 year ago

Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything? e.g. Merge the artists 'Guns N Roses' and 'Guns and Roses' into the most correct one.

I've recently started using Beets[1] to organize my music collection. It's a command line application that IMHO is not entirely intuitive to use at first. But once you get the hang of it, it works incredibly well.

[1] https://beets.io/

alisonatwork2• 1 year ago

I've never used Spotify so can't compare to that, but Bandcamp is like a much better version of the local record store. You can follow artists and record labels you like, which will give you email notifications whenever they release something. You can browse new and old music by all kinds of esoteric tags and subgenres. Every week or so you get an email of some new releases in your favorite genres. You can download in multiple formats, personally I download FLAC for backup and 320 for listening. It's easy to search for tracks or artists you discovered elsewhere, it's easy to listen to and scrub through tracks... Just great. If you're a gamer, it's like the Steam of music.

My only complaint is that when I buy a bunch of songs my credit card gets charged a bunch of times (one for each artist/label) which has triggered fraud warning in the past, but I guess they do that to avoid the hassle of routing money to each artist in their own currency... It seems mildly customer unfriendly to me but in a world where people charge a can of coke to their credit card maybe not all that weird any more.

crtasm2• 1 year ago

credit card gets charged a bunch of times

I avoid this by buying the virtual gift cards and redeeming them on my own account

l725• 1 year ago

I am a heavy user of bandcamp, but I find their notifications...lacking. I ended up taking their emails, categorizing them, and putting them in RSS [1]. This has cleaned up my notifications and makes it much easier to follow artists and to easily separate new releases vs news/merch/...

Also, I find bandcamp's wishlist manager to be severely lacking. I use the wishlist as a queue of things I need to check out or have already checked out (and may not have liked). But, it isn't really meant for having 1000s of albums in there.

So, I wrote a wishlist manager [2][3], which lets you organize, comment, rate, and listen to your wishlist.

I spend a quite a bit on bandcamp, especially since many of the bands I listen to are only available on bandcamp (no streaming services!). While I am glad it hasn't been enshittified by the acquisitions, I do think there could be a few small UX improvements.

[1] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email...

[2] https://flathub.org/apps/net.line72.campcounselor

[3] https://line72.net/software/camp-counselor/

LeoPanthera2• 1 year ago

I really want to use Jellyfin for music, but unfortunately it separates albums based on directories and not by reading the metadata, so if you have an album separated into "Disc 1", "Disc 2", etc, each disc shows up as a separate album.

I really don't want to restructure my library just for Jellyfin, so I basically can't use it.

meonkeys• 1 year ago

Pretty sure it does use metadata and folder/filename as fallback.

Musicbrainz Picard is great for normalizing metadata for music files/albums, maybe give that a shot.

LeoPanthera2• 1 year ago

It does read metadata, but splits albums by directory regardless. And my metadata is already correct.

crossroadsguy4• 1 year ago

My problem stays the same — finding all my music that is on Spotify from elsewhere. It costs a lot to buy those music files and that too if they are available (which isn’t always the case) and even after I buy I am not sure what were the T&C from that particular place I bought - whether I really own it, I don’t, a bit but not fully - etc. Finding from Linux ISO sites is a nightmare and an extra bad nightmare if we are talking about some 2K - 0.6K songs (because I have 600 from before I started streaming). I wish there was an easy way for this - plug and play kinda.

OsrsNeedsf2P2• 1 year ago

This is a vendor lock-in more than anything. As someone who listens to mostly dubstep and EDM and built my playlist off of Spotify, I can't move to Spotify because they don't have half my playlists

IlikeKitties• 1 year ago

You can rip them from tidal quite easily. Youtube also has lots of music to rip but in shitty quality. That being said, music piracy has declined quite a bit since spotify. I'd suggest getting into a private music tracker if you really want to.

bhaney4• 1 year ago

I wish there was an easy way for this - plug and play kinda

I can click a button in Lidarr to auth with Spotify and automatically search usenet for every album of every artist I follow on spotify, download them all, and make them available in Jellyfin. It'll even monitor the spotify account and import new additions. Getting the whole stack set up is pretty much the exact opposite of plug and play, but once you have it all installed it's amazing how much becomes smooth sailing. 2K songs is nothing for this kind of stack.

afavour• 1 year ago

I'm going to assume OP isn't interested in piracy given they were talking about buying...

sailfast• 1 year ago

Sure, but that’s piracy. Kinda like saying Winamp is alternative to Spotify. The music is kinda the most important thing.

crossroadsguy4• 1 year ago

I ran my own seedbox for close to 12 years on a VPS. My choice was either never upgrading the OS (which was always an Ubuntu server) or setting up everything all over again. There were few more things like a VPN, a note app at one point, 2fa setup and so on. Finally I stopped and this Nov the VPN will expire and I am planning to let it go really.

I see where you are coming from but all that experience really tired me out. People say once you do it, it’s forever but is it? I appreciate it that some people can do it — no I really do — but maybe it’s not for everybody.

Then there are managed solutions — oh, I am sure there would be, there were and are for seedboxes as well but the good managed seedboxes sometimes would cost as much or half of my annual VPS cost in a month, yes 1:12 or so. Now I believe there’s nothing wrong with pricing a managed solution high but not all can afford it or are willing to afford it.

I really appreciate it though. Would you mind sharing a tutorial if you’ve saved one somewhere and what disk, CPU, and memory I am looking at for this? That would be very kind.

jjulius3• 1 year ago

It costs a lot to buy those music files...

And the artists and everyone who worked on it thank you very much for paying for an album/song instead of just paying a streaming subscription fee.

crossroadsguy4• 1 year ago

Actually most of them are dead and no their families are not getting anything either I am pretty sure. Heck almost 80% of my songs I won’t be able to buy from anywhere at all.

Fun fact: I bought an MP3 from a record label site in my country and the file was from songs.pk. Yup!

There you go - artists thanking me :)

HexPhantom5• 1 year ago

And like you said, even when you do buy tracks, the T&C are murky. Some platforms basically treat it like a long-term lease rather than true ownership. Honestly, what we need is a modern, ethical "one-click" export + purchase system that lets you grab your current library in lossless format and actually own it.

thaumasiotes2• 1 year ago

It costs a lot to buy those music files and that too if they are available (which isn’t always the case)

Virtually all music, particularly modern music, is made available for free on YouTube. You can download it and it's yours.

For example, here's the official release of Taylor Swift's album "Evermore" for YouTube ("Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxrMpCMdYwk&list=OLAK5uy_m-v... . You should be able to pass the playlist to yt-dlp and automatically extract all the audio tracks.

I don't really want wholesale quantities of music, so I do this manually, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's tooling around for it.

ryanprop• 1 year ago

My use case is that I sometimes like to use my subscription music on an offline MP3 player. So I keep my YTM subscription and am using https://github.com/ryanprop/ytm-dumper to download its files and put them on my MP3 player.

This might work for your use case too, though if you're just using it to grab content, the artists won't get royalties..., then again that seems to be the same for Linux ISO sites.

chillfox12• 1 year ago

Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills.

I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions. The subscriptions really had gotten out of hand, it had gotten to about $200 (AUD) a month.

Quick napkin math is that I have cancelled about ~$150 a month worth of subscriptions so far. The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling at this point, but it's already paid for itself, so I will likely upgrade it to something much better later this year.

Currently I am in the process of replacing all the movie streaming services with Emby.

Spotify and Adobe lightroom is still on the todo list.

I will likely end up with Youtube, Fastmail and Borgbase being my remaining subscriptions once I am done.

Inviz• 1 year ago

What do we do about Lightroom? Capture one? How about sharing galleries?

presto8• 1 year ago

I like darktable as a Lightroom alternative.

iLoveOncall• 1 year ago

Rawtherapee has a better UX than Lightroom in my opinion and I've never felt limited by it.

MrDrMcCoy6• 1 year ago

Darktable and RAWtherapee are both excellent Lightroom alternatives.

anthropodie• 1 year ago

Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills.
I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions.

I have been doing the same for quite some time now but it's only recently I realized all these subscriptions services are just making rich richer. We should encourage self hosting as much as possible. I mean why should we pay huge corporations more money just for storage?

flessner2• 1 year ago

For "content subscriptions" (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix) keep in mind that a part of the revenue goes towards the content creators.

For anything else, I can also highly recommend using local or self-hosted software. Plenty of open source software has even exceeded proprietary alternatives in the last couple years.

tirant• 1 year ago

I really don’t understand the argument that these subscriptions are just making the rich richer.

In the first place why would that be a problem? If a company offers a good value and service for your money, isn’t it fair to compensate them for it? Does someone need to be compensated less just because they have been successful in the past providing good value for money? That would create weird or negative incentives.

Then, what’s the negative consequence of rich people getting richer? It’s not like the economy is a zero-sum game. The proportion of poor and extremely poor people has gone downhill in the last 200 years, while population has increased 8x (we’re probably around 10% of extreme poverty compared to +90%).

And then, there’s the lack of evidence of really rich people getting richer. How much of your money going to Spotify is really going to rich people compared to employees, artists, little shareholders? Maybe the impact of the earnings of Spotify is disproportionately helping normal citizens make a living compared to the very few big shareholders that are already rich.

What’s the alternative? Spending the same amount of money exclusively on Albums that probably bring a higher cut to big music companies and do not expose you to little or unknown artists? While at the same time you spend hours every month in the maintenance of your own music service while you could have used that time to help in some community projects or just earning more money to donate to causes impacting the extremely poor?

I’m really not sure at all that a subscription service like Spotify has any negative consequence for humankind.

layoric• 1 year ago

This reflects a lot of what I've been through as well. My subscriptions exploded when AU got a lot of different streaming platforms, and I think when paramount+ came out and took Star Trek off of another one I drew the line. I realised I still owned all the physical media, so time to make backups. Previous to that I moved off Gmail, that was by far the hardest, and still somewhat ongoing after 8+ years.

The hardest to kick for me now is YouTube Premium.. And in AU it's like $33/month AUD, but I just can't stand ads.

Now I self host:

- Own Mastodon instance - Photos (Synology) - Videos (Synology) - Audio (Synology) - Storage (Minio) - Code/Build (Forejo) - Security (Synology)

My NAS is blocked from the internet, while web facing stuff is on a separate server (old dell workstation). And now have added a PI hole to another older dell box. My partner's laptop will be moving to Linux and will also be a Windows free household. I used Windows since 3.1, I liked it up until around Windows 7. I'm glad I've moved to Linux, but disappointed to see what has happened to Windows in general.

I want to self host more services for family, but the experience isn't there yet without quite a lot of work.

The tags #homelab and #selfhost are pretty decent to follow on Mastodon btw!

Root_Denied• 1 year ago

The hardest to kick for me now is YouTube Premium.. And in AU it's like $33/month AUD, but I just can't stand ads.

Any reason you're not just running network level AdGuard and Firefox with Ublock Origin to block all ads on your home network? Even just FF+UBO would block YouTube ads.

The selfhosted subreddit is also a really good resource to use for interesting things to run.

godelski6• 1 year ago

I've been on this mission but unfortunately also trying to defend my PhD in a month. But I do have a lot more Linux experience. Here's stuff that I think will really help.

yt-dlp: a video downloaded. Originally designed for YouTube but supports a lot of sites. I suggest heavily aliasing this with options like sleep intervals, aria2, and make sure you download the user agent switcher. For YouTube you probably need to import cookies from a browser. But you'll be able to watch the videos without the ads.

Btrfs: it's a file system, like ext4 or ntfs. Has a lot of useful things like being able to create subvolumes, raid, cache drives (or volumes), quotas, snapshots, etc. Think anything that you'd do with zfs but it's been easier to use and it has a copy on write system that helps dedupe. You can also compress the file system! I use duperemover. If it finds dupes it replaces one file with a link (which btrfs natively supports). It'll hash the files so run it early and then set up a job (use a systemd timer)

Tailscale: take your network anywhere. God, tailscale is so fucking useful. You can even put it on a raspberry pi or your phones. It's nice to have it on an old phone which you can throw termux on and have a little server. I've used these to jump to another machine that has had issues where it could connect locally but not outside. You can also set up exit nodes so you can do things like push all your traffic through a vpn, make all your traffic use pihole, or just make it appear like you're somewhere else. You could use this to even make it effectively impossible for streaming services to know you're sharing an account. The data is going through whoever's house pays. If you get fancy you can set up rules to port specific traffic through specific locations but this is still a bit above my head. I just know it's possible. Unfortunately with iPhones you have less control. They can even break out of all this and you don't have full control. I need to get someone to explain more networking to me.

Systemd: it's annoying at first but damn there's so much to it that is helpful. Use systemctl edit to edit your service files. The ones that come with services like jellyfin aren't nearly as locked down as they should be (I intend to push to them in a few months). You should also use systemd mount for your drives. You need a companion automount file but your drives will go offline when not being used. This will really help with reducing energy costs. Be sure to note that there's even configs for you gpus. It also lets you control a systems resources. There's also nspawn and vmspawn. I wish these were a bit more popular because they can do everything docker can and more. Nspawn is a suped up chroot so you can really containerize things and even run different Linux flavors (I've even been play around with running an arm container on my x86 machine). Using machinectl you can enable these as services and even create triggers to spin up or down. There's also importctl so if you create an image (or someone else does) you can just pull that! Which kinda makes it easier than docker in many cases other than the fact that not many people have made images (or publicly available). Docker's big win is popularity but systemd has felt nicer in every other way (documentation sucks). There's so much more to systemd and that's why it's loved and hated. There's a reason it stuck, it just is too damn useful (don't forget to check out homectl too)

Ffmpeg: you probably know this one but it's also worth spending some time to learn it more and write some scripts. If you care more about storage I encode most stuff to av1 with nvenc. It's not archival but honestly I'm often getting 50% storage reductions and I can't tell the difference. Your source file probably wasn't archival grade anyways. Good enough for me. Hevc is also giving me good success.

There's a bunch of other little tools that help. For example, I have my main computer sitting behind my TV. If I'm working on it I'm in it via ssh. Otherwise games and movies are on the TV. I use ydotool as a keyboard and just made a shortcut on my iPhone and a trivial script on my Android so I can push commands that way and use a wireless mouse. There's kconnect but it's been more a hassle than help ime. I did the same for backing up photos on from my phones (they wake the drives first). Android can rsync but for iPhone I can't find a good free solution other than writing the hackiest shortcut you've seen (ssh in, check if file exists, if not then write. You can't rsync, the fucking thing will timeout and despite there being terminal emulators for iPhone you can't access your photos from them. I've found zero ways to link them and I'm upset). Check out things like fail2ban to jail users that do too many logins. You can also use nspawn to containerize these services, spin up and down, and between btrfs, homectl, and pam it is really easy to containerize users. You can mount their volumes on demand and get their accounts syncing across your intranet. It's kinda crazy what you can do.

My goal is to get some images so many of these things can start becoming plug and play. I'm getting close but obviously bigger priorities right now. I'd love help if anyone is interested. I'm not an expert in these domains so I'm sure I'm doing some things wrong but I'm learning a ton

fabatka• 1 year ago

What about backups? My greatest fear is self-hosting valuable stuff (like family photos) only for my NAS to fail one day and lose potentially everything.

mrheosuper2• 1 year ago

Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A quick math will show that it's not insignificant

SECProto2• 1 year ago

Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A quick math will show that it's not insignificant

If you run it 24/7 on a dedicated desktop with decent idle (i.e. no high power video card, low power CPU), it likely uses ~ 50W average. That gives an estimate of 0.05kW24hr30 = 36kWh, which would be in the range of $12/month at current australian electricity prices. If you have bad idle power usage (or somehow mostly active not idle), maybe you'd be looking at twice that. But for OP who was spending $xxx/month on subscriptions, it's a pretty negligible cost. If you really want to save this too, raspPi can do a lot of home server needs nowadays

01100011• 1 year ago

And while it heats your home in the winter, it also puts more strain on your A/C in the summer.

There are also noise and light pollution issues if it's near a bedroom.

bane6• 1 year ago

Unraid makes a lot of the home lab stuff pretty easy. There's a very active community, good docs, frequent updates. It costs a little, but it's one time and worth it, and can grow as you have time and money to add stuff to it.

udev40968• 1 year ago

You have to be extremely dumb to even think of using unraid. It introduces a hard dependency on whatever you do and is nothing more than a glorious wrapper for managing docker services

smj-edison• 1 year ago

What do you do for backups? I'm just setting up an Emby instance with a 4 TB hard drive attached, but I'm worried it'll fail and take everything with it.

Semaphor3• 1 year ago

Not OP, but I use a PI with attached SSD as a backup server, and then save that stuff to Backblaze B2 as additional cloud backup.

nickspacek• 1 year ago

Look into Backblaze B2. Use rclone, or another backup tool that has S3 compatibility (though B2 API has some additional bells and whistles).

With rclone, you can also have a step to seamlessly encrypt the contents on the client side before sending to an external provider like B2.

I chose B2 because it is the most affordable option, but rclone supports many backends.

dharmab3• 1 year ago

Amazon S3 Deep Archive and rclone for < 4-5TB. Backblaze in a Windows VM or container for 5TB+.

russelg2• 1 year ago

Is there really a point in backing up media? Unless you've ripped it yourself, I'm sure anything you have is easily obtainable again.

chillfox12• 1 year ago

In general I use Borg/Borgmatic with borgbase for backup, but movies are a little big, so for now I am just using zfs send/receive to keep a copy on a usb drive updated. Once I am done getting the encoding pipeline scripted (av1/opus/vtt) and the size goes down I will likely start sending it to borgbase as well, or maybe store a copy at my mums place.

I would prefer to use a cloud backup solution that supports zfs send/receive, but they are a bit pricy. zfs.rent seems like a nice solution, but not sure using a US location is a great idea.

russelg2• 1 year ago

Is there a reason you went with Emby over Jellyfin (forked from Emby)?

chillfox12• 1 year ago

Emby just felt more polished and focused while Jellyfin felt like it was on the path towards feature bloat. Also, I had more confidence in Emby supporting future devices I might get than Jellyfin.

When it comes to supporting multiple media types (video/audiobooks/music/etc..) I prefer using a seperate solution for each that is focused on that use case instead of an all-in-one solution.

I am using audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts, so I really don't need that from my video solution.

I have configured Emby to keep the metadata in nfo files next to the videos, so I should be able to easily switch to something else if things change in the future.

Ziggy_Zaggy• 1 year ago

With all the SWE in the mix, why not just roll your own media player...? It's not THAT hard. Same for movie player btw (and one solution can do both ofc).

HTML spec for media is pretty amazing these days, no real excuses outside of time.

chillfox12• 1 year ago

Time is pretty much the reason.

nadnad• 1 year ago

Would love to hear more details about your setup.

chillfox12• 1 year ago

It's a pretty simple setup. I run Alpine Linux with ZFS, all apps are in docker containers managed with docker-compose, Caddy for reverse proxy, borgmatic/borg for backup, and some scripts managing zfs snapshots.

BrandoElFollito• 1 year ago

The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling at this point

I have a ~10 years old desktop as my server (intel skylake and 24GB of RAM). I host about 20 services and the server is not loaded at all.

The services are the usual ones, nothing heavy such as LLMs, though

chillfox12• 1 year ago

I have got 26 docker containers running on it. Looking at current utilization, it's 6% of cpu, 10GB ram out of 16gb. The issue is disk access. The thing has total shit bandwidth to storage, this was a surprise to me and a bit of a learning experience. It has an nvme ssd and a 3.5 hdd, but in the end usb drives attached to the usb 2 ports are much faster than either. It's a Lenovo, so I guess they cut costs somewhere and the usb 2 ports should have been a giveaway, but I was tricked by the nvme.

HexPhantom5• 1 year ago

$150/month shaved off is no joke. It's funny how these subscriptions creep up until you're basically running a second rent in background services.

bambax• 1 year ago

Self hosting is absolutely awesome.

I upgraded my NAS to a recent Asustor a year ago and it changed my life. JellyFin for video works perfectly everywhere in my home, on any device, and it can also be accessed remotely, securely, with Tailscale, so if I'm in a hotel somewhere with my iPad it still works.

And my library is curated by me; it has classic movies and other movies I like, and zero fluff or random shows that I would never watch in a million years.

But self hosting doesn't stop here. Using Docker (via Portainer) I can publish any app in minutes, on either Apache or Nginx, securely with a Cloudflare tunnel (free) without ever exposing my home IP to the world.

This of course isn't as resilient as a proper server with a proper provider, but it's so much simpler and so much cheaper that for hobby projects it's largely good enough.

zaphodias• 1 year ago

I'm doing the same, I have family plans with my friends for pretty much anything so I don't think I ever reached such high monthly costs though.

I started my home server for self hosting Immich, not only for the cost but because I like to have my images close to me.

I also recently replaced Lightroom with ON1, it's definitely not the same quality but, as hobbyist, it didn't make much sense to pay that much for me anymore. It was by far the most expensive subscription I had.

lhamil64• 1 year ago

Where do you get media from? Piracy is an option, but if you want to do it semi-legally I guess you’d need to rip blu-rays, but that seems like it'd be more expensive than streaming services, and you’d have to wait for everything to be released on blu-ray (if it even does)

chillfox12• 1 year ago

I have a large dvd collection from before streaming was really a thing, but yeah I just get blu-rays of the movies I really like. Most of the movies I watch is ones I have already watched. I was really only watching 1-2 movies a month that were new to me with streaming, and few of them were actually new releases.

etra02• 1 year ago

I recently bought a mini pc too and gave the self-host shenanigans a roll. It was definitely worth it.

Using traefik + tailscale + dns challenge with CloudFlare, I was able to self-host and make my services available only through the vpn without loosing HTTPS on all the subdomains. It's lovely!

udev40968• 1 year ago

This is partly self-hosting. You are relying on clownflare and tailscale for your services to be accessible. Do better

elashri• 1 year ago

You can use lets encrypt with dns tests from wide variety of providers. Also you can selfhost the control server of tailscale (headscale).

etra02• 1 year ago

Why does this feel like nagging on projects I do on my free-time for my own?

I'm willing to learn but please try to be less condescending :)

someonehere• 1 year ago

If you haven’t been keeping up with Plex, self-hosters like myself and others are up in arms over the client rewrite. It feels like the Sonos update for us. Broken features. Useful functionality removed. UI that’s more streaming focused than self-hosting like it used to be.

If you haven’t gone down the Plex path yet, don’t right now as the community and developers sort out their roadmap. Plex seems to be open to feedback, but a lot of us feel betrayed. They had open user testing for the new apps but they didn’t implement or fix any of the reported issues.

al_borland2• 1 year ago

I’ve been using Plex since it was a Mac only XBMC fork. While it’s drastically different than where it started, I haven’t noticed any recent changes. I do 99% of my viewing via the AppleTV app and it hasn’t changed. I removed all the shortcuts for their streaming stuff long ago.

I’m running the server in Docker and pretty lazy about updating it. Is that the side that changed? It looks like I’m running 1.27 and 1.41 is out now. Should I be sticking with what I have?

INTPenis3• 1 year ago

The good thing about docker is that you can just spin up 1.41 in another container and check it out.

DarkCrusader22• 1 year ago

I moved away from Plex when they started shoving free B/C movies with lewd posters on my home page and made is very hard and confusing to remove (if removing it completely was even an option, I still don't know).

The whole reason I host plex is that I want an offline experience that I curate myself. The requirement for internet to authenticate and shoveling crapware in my face pushed me towards trying Jellyfin. The Jellyfin UI on TV and mobile is not as flashy and polished as Plex, but it is extremely functional and respects users choices.

Been a happy Jellyfin customer for years now though I only use it to organize and browse my library now. Actual playback is either MPV on PC or Kodi over NFS on TV. After trying many many players, these were the two I found best for respective platforms, nothing else even comes close.

schrectacular5• 1 year ago

I think this is the path. I like jellyfin but I find it has trouble with some files on some devices. Kodi handles pretty much everything. Not as nice for browsing though.

anthonypz2• 1 year ago

What about their plexamp app for streaming music? It looks pretty nice and seems like a good deal if you purchase the lifetime plan for 50% off during Black Friday.

schrectacular5• 1 year ago

Might not be true for all setups, but I find that Plex is a resource hog. Navidrome and Jellyfin are a lot leaner. Plex was using quite a bit of CPU just browsing the library.

Plexamp sounds awful to me, trebly and thin. Googling around I found it was a common complaint.

It DOES handle multichannel audio well, though I don't think it can do Atmos natively.

npodbielski3• 1 year ago

I never really understood what is the point od running something locally and then registering on .com domain. Like if I will loose internet connection I cant listem my own music? Seemed radicoulous. But I guess it does nit require much knowledge and people keep using it.

l725• 1 year ago

I give all my services a proper subdomain so SSL works. But I keep all my services internal and run a pi.hole with DNS for my local services. (I use wireguard to vpn into my network to access everything).

If internet goes out, DNS to my local services still works fine since it is being served directly from my pi.hole.

wallstprog• 1 year ago

On another note, Jellyfin can look inside .iso files, which afaict Plex is not able to. Very handy with my collection of ripped dvd's.

dankwizard2• 1 year ago

This article fails to mention the absolute butchering of features that takes place moving from a typical music streaming subscription to a self hosted Jellyfin library.

A large part of my listening on YouTube Music is going to a particular song or band I like and clicking "Radio", which generates a playlist of similar sounding songs. You can then fine tune it with a filter i.e "Popular songs, deep cuts" or specific elements of the song "More emo", "Slow paced" etc. This exposes me to a lot of new music and keeps it fresh and if I'm lucky I'll discover a new artist or song to add to my rotations.

You lose that.

A lot of these services overtime build mixes which takes your listening habits and tries to categorize them into specific mixes made up of your existing library & new music.

I don't browse any music forums and so apart from my favourite bands, I have no idea on when artists I like release new albums and would not encounter them on a self hosted solution, etc.

Semaphor3• 1 year ago

I have no idea on when artists I like release new albums and would not encounter them on a self hosted solution, etc.

Depending on what you like, bandcamp makes it easy. You can follow any artist (which is also offered whenever you buy), and from then on get release notifications. But of course, what’s available differs by genre. For metal, most bands are on BC, except most Japanese artists and major label stuff.

I buy, download, and put the flacs on my Jellyfin server.

There are, of course, also piracy solutions for that, pretty sure the *arr stuff has automatic downloading per artist.

closewith• 1 year ago

A slower speed on the hedonic treadmill is a feature of self-hosting, not a bug.

jjulius3• 1 year ago

It's a "YMMV" situation, because...

I don't want that. At all. It's algorithmic and there's nothing stopping artists and labels paying for placement in there. I don't want that.

I am a musician, and a DJ, and I've been digging deep through artist and label catalogues on my own for decades. The process of discovery via my preexisting routes is far more fruitful, enjoyable and rewarding than lazily letting an algorithm do the work.

But I like doing that. This works for me, not for others.

wormius• 1 year ago

I miss last.fm and audioscrobbler so much. Yeah it's still there, but it's not like the old days, which was far better for feeling like I was in touch with other users, finding tons of new music, and not hearing yet another Home Depot ad.

I half wonder if Spotify US is one of those harbingers of doom for the old web in the same way I think of Twitter and iPhone/SPAs/The Stream UI.

armSixtyFour• 1 year ago

I would have agreed with you 3 years ago. But now not so much.

Spotify "Radio" feature just tends to want to give me music I've already listened to over new music. Whatever algorithm they are using has waaaay overfit to what I have already liked.

There used to be curated playlists done by humans, now almost everything is "made for you by Spotify" playlists which, have the exact same issue as the radio stations, suddenly it's all the same music you've already been listening to, very little new music. If you want new music, you need to find a playlist made by a user instead.

lolive5• 1 year ago

Spotify « radio » is the best reason to listen to real radios ! [honestly the DJs on most of the radios I listen to are insanely skilled !]

Btw, is there somewhere a search engine to know when a given [set of] track was played where, in the internet radio world?

panstromek• 1 year ago

YouTube is much better than Spotify for this in my experience.

benfortuna2• 1 year ago

Does noone use the Spotify "daylist" playlist, that cycles between genres you have listened to previously?

This regular plays music I have never heard (both old and new).

friendzis• 1 year ago

suddenly it's all the same music you've already been listening to, very little new music.

However, if you expose the gods of the algorithm to a new artist, suddenly all the auto-generated feeds will try to include that band regardless of fit. Weird how these "social graph" systems tend to form and perpetuate bubbles.

On top of that, there are some weird shenanigans with meta-data. Listening to "foreign" bands may very easily taint the weekly mix with songs in a language you don't even understand and probably don't care about. An anecdata of course, I just looked at my "daily mix x", which appears to be in my local language, but with styles all over the place. Another mix contains mostly correctly turn of the century romantic pop.

I suspect the algorithm biases heavily on metadata so that it could be easily fed "albums/artists that publisher x paid to promote".

amelius2• 1 year ago

Spotify radio regularly makes me angry, and makes me want to press a "dislike" button really hard. But of course, that button is missing ...

djfergus• 1 year ago

This.

My guess/conspiracy theory is that Spotify has cut deals with record companies that pay less on subsequent listens to a track so the repetitive radio algorithms are more profitable.

jjice• 1 year ago

Anecdata incoming, but to offer an alternative view, I would really love to not use Spotify anymore since they change things constantly in ways I don’t like, but their music recommendations are fantastic for me.

Their generated playlists are great, and they do a good job recommending playlists I’d like from other users as well. And while I hate the format, their music shorts actually give me consistently good music. I just hate that it’s in the TikTok swipe style.

madmountaingoat• 1 year ago

Spotify has not viewed itself as a music company for longer than that. It's a platform for audio. And, while there are still music first people at the company, they are not in the power positions that they used to be.

The transition didn't start when they laid off Glenn MacDonald, but that sort of cemented it. They had already gutted curation before that and by this time you were far more likely to find people talking about AI in the halls than music. If you've never heard of Glenn, check out his book: "You Have Not Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music." Or his old online projects at https://everynoise.com/.

notnullorvoid• 1 year ago

Yeah I have no idea why music recommendation algorithms have gotten so bad. Rdio had the pinnacle of music recommendations in 2013. I wonder what happened to that tech after they shut down in 2015, and why no one has been able to reproduce it.

stuaxo• 1 year ago

I never got on with Spotify radio.

In fact, things have never been as good as last.fm used to be when it hosted its own music.

ThrowawayTestr3• 1 year ago

I've discovered so many niche bands and subgenres since I got Spotify.

maxglute• 1 year ago

How are LLMs for music recommendation?

Napster / audio galaxy... I mean your own legal burned music with AI generating a radio playlist.

eptcyka• 1 year ago

LLMs can’t hold the context of my library in memory. They come up with playlists constructed of music they are aware of, not necessarily music I have.

internetter• 1 year ago

I imagine not great. Almost certainly heavy bias to popular songs instead of "niche but relevant"

OccamsMirror• 1 year ago

Plexamp is really good for this.

The styles information that Plexamp has works really well and in my experience, as long as your library is large enough, works better than modern Spotify.

It was Spotify's degradation of their radio service and terrible "AI DJ" that finally got me off Spotify. Punishing them for platforming Joe Rogan was just icing.

urda• 1 year ago

I find Plexamps Radio features, and DJ's to work great against my library. It also helps if you, as an individual, have a diverse and large music library to supply for the sonic analysis.

nicoco2• 1 year ago

I'll argue music algorithmic recommendation on these platforms is a bad thing anyway.

First, the algorithm is opaque, so it can push stuff to you because the platform decide it has to get the spotlights. Maybe the label/producer/musician paid for it or whatever you want to imagine that is even worse. It is a well-known phenomenon that if some music is pushed to your ears, you'll end up appreciate it most often than not. This is how hits have been and are still made.

But even if the algorithm was not gamed at all, I still think it is a bad thing. It is not going to push you out of your comfort zone. Listening to new stuff is usually not pleasant at first. You will only "discover" things that are very similar to what you know and already enjoy.

If these recommendation algorithms were about food, they would "reason" like this: "Hey, you've really enjoyed this whole pack of M&M's, I'm sure you'll like this Kit-Kat bar now! Oh and you've had a glass of wine, what about trying out meth, it's pretty good too.". Do we really want our computers to reinforce such behavior?

Go to concerts, buy merch, buy albums on bandcamp (it has not enshittified too much yet apparently), donate money to artists; discover music through your friends and other humans recommending it. Recommend what you like to your friends. Cancel your Spotify subscription, none of that money is going to artists anyway. And use soulseek.

mon_• 1 year ago

What are the musical equivalents to Kit-Kat and meth?

jszymborski• 1 year ago

Leaving music streaming services has been a great excuse for me to rediscover music blogs like Gorilla vs. Bear and Stereogum, or even local culture magazines.

Another great way for discovering music I've found is just perusing Bandcamp, which is where I buy most of my music anyway. Love finding local artists, so I just put in some genre filters and the location filter. Found multiple great bands this way.

As for keeping abreast of new releases, Bandcamp is pretty good for that too. You can just follow artists and you get emails when new releases or merch or tours come around.

darkwater• 1 year ago

That was cool 10, 12 years ago. Now that everything has been exploited and enshittified, I want to go back to the pre-infinite-streaming experience. The only issue is cost vs being a pirate...

hashhar• 1 year ago

PlexAmp has DJs which allow you to get the song/playlist based radios.

LMS (Logitech now Lyrion) also has something similar in MusicIP (not as good as PlexAmp).

wintermutestwin• 1 year ago

IMO using a streaming service’s recommendations is a way to filter out bands that labels aren’t promoting. The services have to be getting paid for pushing - right?

If everyone is this lazy about music discovery, then music suffers. I am not using “lazy” as a pejorative. There are people who just couldn’t be bothered and that’s fine. Music just isn’t that important to you. But if the people who deeply love music are corrupted by the ease and dopamine, it will deeply wound music as a whole.

My problem isn’t discovering new music, it is “discovering” my massive library. I love AM, but the fact that 3 of the five large icons taking up precious screen real estate are devoted to discovering music that Apple is paid to promote is infuriating.

wiether• 1 year ago

IMO using a streaming service’s recommendations is a way to filter out bands that labels aren’t promoting. The services have to be getting paid for pushing - right?

I keep hearing this, I also read Mood Machine that says the same thing over and over again.

Yet, every week for years, thanks to Spotify I'm discovering artists that don't have the means to pay to be promoted in any way.

I'm not saying that I'm special or that I hacked the algo or that it's false that Spotify promotes artists that are paying to be promoted.

I'm just saying that, depending on how you consume (I'm using this verb on purpose) music on streaming platforms, you'll be more or less targeted by money-making thongs.

If you listen to the main playlists, they are basically 100% promotion based. But if you listen to a non-promoted artist's radio, you'll have far less promoted content.

HexPhantom5• 1 year ago

I think for some people the goal shifts from discovery to ownership - knowing your library, building it intentionally, and not being nudged by what the algorithm thinks you should be into

4k93n2• 1 year ago

its hard to beat the convenience of being able to right click/radio to get new recommendations but there has to be other options that arent that much more effort either?

i think you can add plugins to jellyfin. maybe there is a last.fm plugin? i know of some other last.fm alternatives like maloja or libre.fm but i cant comment on how good they are

dankwizard2• 1 year ago

Sure, but then what - A script to pirate the song? Or would your script generate the playlist and automatically buy the tracks from bandcamp?

bcraven• 1 year ago

I'd like to shoutout PG Vogt (from Reply All podcasting fame) for this episode of his new show:

https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/how-am-i-supposed-to-find-new-...

soraminazuki• 1 year ago

By moving away from streaming services, you can once again own what you bought and paid for. Algorithmic playlists are nothing, nothing at all compared to the loss of ability to use your own player, edit your files, back them up, or not be nickel-and-dimed to get around artificial restrictions. Not to mention that with streaming services, music can be taken away from you after the purchase.

mvanbaak• 1 year ago

One can have both: use the streaming services to discover new music, buy physical media of the bands you like most. Not everyone has this option, but it is an alternative.

boudin• 1 year ago

I've never seen this work. Either it plays the stuff I've listened in the past in a loop or shove some random things I really dislike (maybe hidden promotional stuff?). Personally it's the reason I've cancelled subscriptions each time I've tried, I always ended up listening to radio instead as the value brought by Spotify etc... was really poor.

IshKebab• 1 year ago

I use YouTube Music and it definitely does work but yeah it weighs songs you've already said you like way too heavily and generally seems way worse at discovering similar music than Last.fm or Pandora from over a decade ago. (If anything I remember Pandora being too good at finding similar songs - the playlist would end up almost monotonic because it found such similar music.)

Fortunately they do have a "Discover playlist" that completely excludes music you've heard before. Unfortunately that's all you get. No way to e.g. say "play me reggae I haven't heard before", and it's only updated once a week.

So yeah... kinda shit. But still better than the alternative which as far as I remember from the 90s is to only listen to extremely well-known bands and find good news music like once a year.

vagab0nd• 1 year ago

My favorite songs gravitate heavily towards 2 very different genres. This seems to confuse the hell out of Spotify. The "discover weekly" is comically bad no matter how hard I try to prime my library.

rolisz• 1 year ago

My experience with Youtube Music is that the recommendations are quite poor. So I wouldn't miss that. But it's hard to replicate the breadth of coverage of YT music (even though sometimes songs just vanish from my playlists). But I have started buying a couple of albums every now and then and slowly I am building my owned music library.

benterix2• 1 year ago

It was like this in the past, now it's crappy. The algorithmic optimization started eating its own tail. And it's a problem on all platforms, from Spotify to YouTube.

Let's take YT. In very simple terms, instead of taking a bold move and suggesting a few outliers (similar to differentiating the population as it's done in evolutionary algorithms), it takes an easy shot and, if I'm identified as male, suggests some videos with females with big breasts and other generic junk many people just click on autopilot. It works well for them because most people click and click and spend their days uselessly hooked and feel bad, but in my particular case I lose what I had earlier, i.e. suggestions of interesting bands (they still do happen but the selection is of much lower quality).

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

This hasn't been my experience at all. Not sure why Youtube would suggest big breasted female artists when I never, ever, ever watch the video when I'm playing music.

nsteel2• 1 year ago

I don't browse any music forums and so apart from my favourite bands, I have no idea on when artists I like release new albums and would not encounter them on a self hosted solution,

Music Brainz provides this at https://test.listenbrainz.org/explore/fresh-releases/

There's also Music Butler: https://www.musicbutler.io/

DontchaKnowit• 1 year ago

I mean right at the top he says hes just trying to listen to his own music. I dont get how this is a downside if you wanna discover new shit you can always just go to youtube.

Frankly 99.9 of my music listening is stuff I already know and enjoy. But I still like to listen to new stuff often. So this kinda thing is perfect for me 99% of the time.

kgwxd• 1 year ago

Those features can, and should, be made completely separate from the system that hosts the media. In fact, they used to be, with great success.

HTTP418• 1 year ago

Plexamp has this feature, i use it all the time.

touristtam• 1 year ago

I'll admit it, I have a fairly narrow range of music I like so the following works for me on this basis: I don't like Spotify and other music streaming services as they never are consistent with their licensing or good with their recommendations. And the adverts are obnoxious. What I like is radios like Radio Paradise: https://radioparadise.com/player or regular radios available through online streams (such as the French radio FIP: https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip). There is enough to discover on either and they are still mostly in the range of what I would/could listen should they not have existed.

9935c101ab17a66• 1 year ago

This isn't an article about replacing all-knowing streaming service content recommendations, it's about finding a solution for playing local music files you own in a convenient way.

indigodaddy• 1 year ago

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

rappatic4• 1 year ago

At least in the case of a music player, self-hosting simply isn't good enough for me. I'm not willing to accept a single second of added latency or buffering or downtime because I don't have multimillion dollar server farms. The fact is that the vast majority of us don't have the resources to self-host a Jellyfin instance that can provide near-instantaneous access anywhere in the world to every song ever made at 320kbps. And that's the bar for music. I can deal with a little added latency vs. Netflix on a Plex server or something. But I'm not willing to compromise with music.

This isn't even to mention the numerous features that Spotify has which are difficult or impossible to replicate on self-hosting. The "radio" feature, song recommendations, the DJ, AI playlists, stations, automatic playlist enhancement, social features, Canvas... the list goes on. And of course I never have to worry about managing a library of mp3 files. When an artist I like drops a new album, it'll be on Spotify at 12:00am exactly and work perfectly. This isn't possible with self-hosting.

When you look at it this way, the chance to pay 6 bucks a month to get all these extra features and ignore the headache of self-hosting is a no-brainer.

jjulius3• 1 year ago

I'm not willing to accept a single second of added latency or buffering or downtime...
... near-instantaneous access anywhere in the world to every song ever...

Nobody needs this. You think you do, but nobody needs everything everywhere all at once. If being wholly unwilling to wait "a single second" isn't sarcasm, then... yeesh.

rappatic4• 1 year ago

Fair. I was exaggerating a little.

My point is this: I spend over 100,000 minutes per year listening to music. Any unnecessary friction in the experience is therefore extremely frustrating and has a disproportionate effect on my life. In all my experience self-hosting, it adds a certain level of friction that just isn't worth it considering how much time I spend listening.

I am not hostile to self-hosting in other cases. I am very satisfied with my self-hosted Plex server, for example. But I don't spend 30% of my waking hours watching TV.

udev40968• 1 year ago

It's no-brainer for people who do not care about freedom or file preservation. Spotify can pull the plug on whatever your favorite song is and there is NOTHING you can do about it. Then again, spotify has hundreds of millions of clueless subscribers, such as yourself, who will willfully consume the most crappy audio codec and praise them for it

rappatic4• 1 year ago

Spotify can pull the plug on whatever your favorite song is and there is NOTHING you can do about it

There's plenty I can do about it. If Spotify decides to "pull the plug" on a song or artist I like, it's my prerogative to switch providers or decide to self-host. I'm not locked into a lifetime serfdom with them, and it's not like the files will magically vanish from the internet once Spotify decides not to host them.

who will willfully consume the most crappy audio codec

I listen to 99% of my music through Bluetooth on AirPods, so 320kbps is perfectly fine for my use case. If I was someone who cared deeply about audio quality, I would switch to a competing service with HiFi.

hundreds of millions of clueless subscribers, such as yourself

At least try to be respectful.

bigstrat20033• 1 year ago

The fact is that the vast majority of us don't have the resources to self-host a Jellyfin instance that can provide near-instantaneous access anywhere in the world to every song ever made at 320kbps.

The fact also is that the vast majority of us don't have a requirement to be able to access our media from anywhere in the world. Most people aren't traveling the world on a regular basis, they stay in one area except for maybe an occasional vacation.

And of course I never have to worry about managing a library of mp3 files. When an artist I like drops a new album, it'll be on Spotify at 12:00am exactly and work perfectly. This isn't possible with self-hosting.

If that's important to you, then indeed self-hosting will never be able to match it. But for me at least, my music listening has been 95% static since about 20 years ago. On occasion I hear something new that I add to the collection, but for the most part I listen to the same music I did some time ago. Paying $6/mo to Spotify just to listen to the same things I already have in my collection would be a gross waste of money. So for me it's the exact opposite: self hosting is a no-brainer because I simply would not get any value for my $6/mo.

rappatic4• 1 year ago

the vast majority of us don't have a requirement to be able to access our media from anywhere in the world

I don't travel internationally often at all. But when I do, access to my music becomes all the more important.

PhilipRoman• 1 year ago

I'm a bit confused, why would you have problems with latency for music? This is not real time sound mixing where you need millisecond latencies, the client can just download the whole thing and play it. Even high quality audio files are tiny (unless you're listening to 4 hour classical operas).

tastysandwich2• 1 year ago

For music, Navidrome is superior.

It is just crazy how easy it is to set this stuff up nowadays. I run both Navidrome and Jellyfin in docker containers. Then I use NordVPN Meshnet to securely connect to them outside of the home.

The experience is absolutely flawless. In Navidrome you can host an entire FLAC library and then transcode to Opus on the fly.

It's been over a year now and I have pretty much no issues whatsoever.

I highly highly recommend it

Edit - Opus not Opal!

mixmastamyk2• 1 year ago

Do you mean Opus?

tastysandwich2• 1 year ago

Yes my bad

vander_elst• 1 year ago

+1 for Navidrome, I self host both jellyfin and Navidrome. Navidrome wins hands down for music. With Jellyfin it's harder to categorize and then search, Navidrome provides a great experience out of the box.

rc_kas• 1 year ago

I'm sold, thank you will install it.

twilo• 1 year ago

Is it better than plexamp?

hypercube334• 1 year ago

I use and like plexamp but I also think it's a low bar to set; Winamp 2 streaming from a file share is a better UX experience and less work than the funky ux Plex and plexamp has.

apwell23• 1 year ago

run both Navidrome and Jellyfin in docker containers
use NordVPN Meshnet to securely connect to them outside of the home
host an entire FLAC library and then transcode to Opus on the fly.

i really have no idea what any of these words mean. Spotify's future is secure.

_Algernon_• 1 year ago

It has always been clear that people who are scared of performing a few google searches wont use these services.

atoav• 1 year ago

A docker container is a way to easily install software on a server without having to install dependencies yourself.

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a way of securely connecting to your home network without exposing it to the world.

FLAC and Opus are audio formats. FLAC uses lossless compression and offers the best uncompressed quality while not being as huge as a broadcast wave (.wav) file. Opus is similar to an mp3, that means it is a lossy compression, but it sounds extremely good at small bit rates/with bad connections. The transcoding-on-the-fly-bit means the user opens up the private Navidrome website running in their home from the road and the Audio they play is compressed and sent over on the fly as they play it.

Self hosting sounds scary, but it is an essential skill nowadays and extremely useful. Things I self-host (besides websites) include a partskeeper instance which is essentially a stock keeping system for electronics parts, jellyfin as a netflix replacement for films and series, my mailserver (mailcow), paperless-ngx (hooked up to a scanner, allows automatic text-recognition and tagging of invoices, letters, etc.) and homeassistant (smart home).

That probably makes it appear like I have to spend all my free time on this, but it takes surprisingly little of my time to maintain this, with a lot of it running on a single Raspberry Pi.

mystifyingpoi• 1 year ago

Self-hosting has its price, one of which is knowing what you are doing. Just keep using Spotify, there is nothing wrong with that.

Teever• 1 year ago

I'm curious how you came to find your self on Hacker News without either a passing knowledge of some of the things mentioned above or an innate curiousity to learn about the rest.

bladeee• 1 year ago

I understand that Navidrome is more specialized for music, but what specifically makes it superior to Jellyfin, in your opinion?

liotier• 1 year ago

Navidrome's killer feature is its simplicity, and not just the dead simplicity of setting it up: Jellyfin has everything and the kitchen sink, which is nice - especially for video, whereas Navidrome offers a well-honed, long matured, music search/browse/play standard API, namely Subsonic which opens a world of clients for a multitude of platforms and all tastes... On that front Jellyfin feels narrow in comparison.

steine654• 1 year ago

Smart Playlists mainly. They let you add logical filters to create playlists. Think IF song_name NOT contains "live". That's not syntactically correct but that's the idea. Also lots of apps can connect to navidrome so you can import everything easily. Like Feishen is a desktop music player, and

mfld• 1 year ago

Can Navidrome/Jellyfish integrate with Sonos? For me, the Sonos app still is not able to reliably index/play music from a network share.

schrectacular5• 1 year ago

Yes but you have to use the S1 player and run a second container with middleware, bonob. At least that's what ended up working for me.

dash2• 1 year ago

It is just crazy how easy it is to set this stuff up nowadays. I run both Navidrome and Jellyfin in docker containers….

Wow, I’ll get grandma to do it! Ha ha, just kidding, but I’ll try it myself. Ha ha, just kidding.

Honestly, I just want to scream “self-hosting isn’t going to happen, stop trying to make it happen.” I absolutely welcome the hobbyists doing this fun stuff in their free time, but the idea that they will ever win over ordinary users is total fantasy. And it’s accompanied by reality-denying stuff like how “you don’t need” feature X or Y. Sure, I long to go back to organising my own mp3 files like it’s 2002. And because you’re angry about corporate power, Spotify or whoever definitely provide no features of value to anyone! This is all pure mood affiliation.

Sorry. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad your setup works for you. But I think you are not using the word “easy” in the same way as most people.

bugfix• 1 year ago

Those aren't competitors of Spotify/Netflix; they're alternatives for people who are willing to tolerate small inconveniences to have full control over their library.

Of course it's not as easy as signing up for Spotify/Netflix, but setting them up is easier than ever (even easier for tech people).

ajyey• 1 year ago

Disagree. With a little bit of technical knowledge which I’m assuming most people browsing hacker news have, these services are easy to spin up and use.

If you can read a README you can set up Navidrome and point it to your local library in 5 minutes.

bergon• 1 year ago

I've never tried NordVPN Meshnet, but just want to add an alternative I've fallen in love with: Tailscale. It's amazingly simple to set up and use. Today all my devices are connected to each other, and my jellyfin service is reachable through my chromecast, phone, computer and Ipad. As well as my filehost VPS.

I've been self-hosting for quite awhile now, and these days it's such a breeze.

udev40968• 1 year ago

Anyone concerned about recommendations might wanna look at musicbrainz. You can write a script for fetching the recommendations based on your current library every week

dandersch2• 1 year ago

Can you elaborate? I'm not aware of musicbrainz having any recommendations/discovery features.

udev40968• 1 year ago

Sorry, I meant listenbrainz

ruuda• 1 year ago

I wrote my own networked music player, https://github.com/ruuda/musium. It's not nearly as fully featured as Jellyfin, but it does do what I want in exactly the way I want it. A feature I implemented a while ago is to make it show me albums I listened to a lot in the past, but not recently, and it's been great to rediscover some of those albums.

sandreas4• 1 year ago

I personally use Jellyfin ONLY for Video stuff.

AudioBookShelf[1] is for audiobooks and podcasts.

For music I use

  navidrome [2]

The smart playlist feature[5] is awesome. Having 3 services instead of one seems overkill, but specialized apps instead of one generic one feels different. One interesting aspect of navidrome is, that it has implemented the Subsonic API, which MANY Apps make use of. My personal favorite is

  Substreamer [3]

but you could also go with DSub[4] or others.

1: https://www.audiobookshelf.org/

2: https://www.navidrome.org/

3: https://substreamerapp.com/

4: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/github.daneren2005.dsub/

5: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/smartplaylists/

anthonypz2• 1 year ago

Neat! Can you stream navidrome to a smart TV? I have speakers connected to them and I usually stream to it using airplay on iOS.

sandreas4• 1 year ago

Substreamer is available for iOS and Android, DSub is Android only afaik.

If your smartTV supports Subsonic API, it probably works, but if not, it's possible to point Jellyfin and Navidrome to the same audio directory.

armsaw2• 1 year ago

If you use an AppleTV, there’s also a pretty decent navidrome client called LMP.

hypercube334• 1 year ago

The thing I miss and can't find a replacement for is lastfm inside of Spotify. It gave two things and did it exceptionally well:

1. Helped me take something I like or am super into at the time (band or song) and give me a playlist

2. actually suggested with a high hit rate something I didn't know about and it was available to play right now.

other streaming or stations just loop into what I already have which sucks. Side note that I'm into pretty niche non mainstream music such as Melodic Death Metal and Industrial so self hosting seems interesting but I also spend a good chunk of my time looking for more music. (Most of the bands I am really into only have sub-20k plays a month on Spotify).

I really miss Napster letting you browse people's music when you found someone who was also into things you liked - pure gold mine only second to a LAN party where you could dig through the file server.

schrectacular5• 1 year ago

Soulseek provides a similar experience! You browse users' files and find folks with great collections of cool stuff.

sandreas4• 1 year ago

I tend not to overload my personal library with stuff I'd never listen to.

However navidrome at least supports lastfm via external Integration: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/external-integrations/

I never used it so I can't tell if this is what you're looking for or at least the right direction.

l725• 1 year ago

I really miss Napster letting you browse people's music when you found someone who was also into things you liked - pure gold mine only second to a LAN party where you could dig through the file server.

If you are a bandcamp user, find people with similar purchases to you and follow them. It is a good way to browse for new albums based on people with similar tastes.

mystified50162• 1 year ago

Thanks for mentioning audiobookshelf. I'd totally given up on using jellyfin for audiobooks. It just absolutely butchers any book split into multiple files, which is basically all of them.

I'll give audiobookshelf a look!

sandreas4• 1 year ago

You're welcome. The Android app is pretty good, but for iOS it remains unreleased, so you have to deploy yourself. Prologue seems to be the best iOS App.

There are other unofficial Clients (e.g. in flutter), but I tend to use audiobookshelf as streaming player paired with vlc to play downloaded offline files (the app is not so great here)

magic_hamster• 1 year ago

For me it was never an alternative because I don't use Spotify at all.

For streaming I use Soma FM almost exclusively, everything else I curate myself.

I never had a problem discovering more music through good old forums and more recently, LLMs. Trying out their recommendations is a fun exercise on its own as some songs they recommend will be totally obscure, but mostly they are on point.

HexPhantom5• 1 year ago

I went through a similar phase where I thought, how hard can it be to just manage my own music like it's 2008 again? Turns out, kind of annoyingly hard. The part about music players being stuck in time really hit. Winamp nostalgia aside, most local players feel like they haven't evolved in a decade

INTPenis3• 1 year ago

That's why the author moved beyond that stage and to apps that connect to existing music libraries hosted on jellyfin. Apparently there are a lot more options out there than I knew about.

iamacyborg• 1 year ago

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

ezst2• 1 year ago

My question would then be, what do you think needs "evolving"? This space hasn't seen transformative changes in decades, with ample time to converge towards effective paradigms and implementations. Stability would be pretty much what I would expect, or even desire there.

Sheeny96• 1 year ago

If there were a recommendation algorithm plugin for Jellyfin (even if it just calls out to the API of some existing external web service), that might pull me over. Until that's the case, the recommendations will keep me on Spotify

nsteel2• 1 year ago

Assuming there's last.fm/listenbrainz reporting plugins for Jellyfun, then both those services will provide recommendations based on what you have listened to. Maybe not as good as Spotify's but it's something.

https://listenbrainz.org/my/recommendations

https://www.last.fm/player/station/user/{username}/recommend...

sotix• 1 year ago

I’ve tried using jellyfin for music, but I’m so much happier than jellyfin or Spotify when I’m using my old iPod. There’s something special about curating a collection. New music is deliberate and exciting. And I already had a decently sized library! I just picked up a pair of AirPods Max now that they released a USB-C - 3.5mm cable, and it’s wonderful. The beauty of the headphone jack is that the newer tech of the headphones just works. I suppose using an iPod for music aligns with why I enjoy using a kobo for reading ebooks. It’s nice to have a focused device disconnected from the internet. Best of all, the iTunes Store is DRM-free, so it remains easy to acquire music.

lanfeust62• 1 year ago

I don't tend to re-watch or pirate video, so Jellyfin/plex is out. I thought to have a navidrome setup just for music, but it's redundant since I just listen from my machine, and for other places (except the car) I won't subject others to my music.

mystified50162• 1 year ago

Jellyfin is pretty good these days. I have it hooked up to radarr, etc, and my non-tech husband can pirate and watch anything he wants easier and better than Netflix et al.

Honestly that's about 90% of what my homelab does.

_spduchamp• 1 year ago

I bought a 4TB external hard drive from a thrift shop and found it is loaded with a huge unorganized treasure trove of MP3s that stops maybe around 2008. The tags and file names are a bit of a mess (looks like bad character encoding for anything with accents), and there is no genres or categorization. I'd love to use a subset of this archive on Jellyfin or Navidrome.

Any suggestions for a tool that can clean up file names and tags, and apply some sort of genre categories? I've tried Picard, but the process seems too manual for such a large archive.

_-_-__-_-_-2• 1 year ago

beets, it's ridiculously good, https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/#

quesera• 1 year ago

I've used beets to import and tag a huge personal music library:

https://beets.io/

mr_coleman• 1 year ago

When it comes to self hosting, Jellyfin is really not a Spotify replacement. There are better, more purpose driven application. A good example is Navidrome. It is a less featureful Spotify clone but it has more functionality than Jellyfin.

I respect the author's self hosted journey and encourage everyone to go down that path.

turtledragonfly• 1 year ago

Just tossing in my own recommendation: I use Lyrion Music Server (previously Logitech Media Server (previously Slim Devices/Squeezebox))[1]

It's open-source, self-hosted, has various good plugins (eg: I have some Pandora stations I listen to, as well as my own music collection). You can synchronize music across multiple devices in your home (I just have 2).

Even though the physical devices (Squeezebox Touch, etc) are no longer sold, it's pretty easy to build one yourself with a raspberry pi.

It's one of those cases where a company created something great, and strongly-open-sourced it enough that the project can't die even though the new owners are not giving it the love it deserves.

So, I hope to keep using it for the rest of my days (:

[1] https://lyrion.org/

jonathantf2• 1 year ago

The problem with this is is the same problem I had when I tried to switch to Apple Music, the network effect. I can't see my friend's playlists, work on collaborative ones, have automatic "blends" with friends etc if I have all my music on a JF server.

latentcall• 1 year ago

I’ve been using Roon for a few years. Proprietary but it works amazing for me. The big feature is the auto-tag feature so I don’t have to be anal about music tagging.

Defletter• 1 year ago

Stopped using Jellyfin after it played ear-splitting screeches directly into my eardrums. It was a song from an exported iTunes library, I knew iTunes would skip over the song and didn't know why, nor was I particularly bothered. I have to assume now that the file was corrupted, and Jellyfin uncritically played it anyway. I knew I had a few other songs like that in the library and stopped using it for fear for my ears, my headphones, and my speakers.

psyfer• 1 year ago

There's a lesser known player app called Voicelane where you could drop youtube URLs into a playlist where you are allowed to play on loop. I would browse music and songs on YT and listen to them on one of my Voicelane playlists. It's pretty neat

NoPicklez• 1 year ago

Apart from the HomeLab tinkering aspect, I don't know why you would do this over Spotify or Apple music.

I use Spotify the same way I managed my music on Windows media player, creating my own playlists of various genre's and years. What Spotify allows me to do is find the music I want straight away rather than finding a way to procure it.

I can do all of that and not have to self host anything.

LauraMedia• 1 year ago

I have a local Navidrome server, which I don't really use as a "Spotify alternative" (I don't mirror my casual listened songs) but as a big database of videogame and series/movie soundtracks.

It helped me when I tested out Apple Music for a few months and I noticed it's absolutely not working as well for me.

Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

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