Full disclosure, I’m pretty new to selfhosting myself, and I haven’t written a guide like this before, but hopefully this scatterbrained writeup is enough for someone out there lmao
This is just what works for me and how I set it up. Always open to ideas for improvement as well.
Is this your personal blog ?
I just rolled some of this out on my setup. I already had lidarr running, but didn’t know about the metadata issue.
Beets is running excruciatingly slow importing my music collection. Anyone have any insight on this? I’m running the Linuxserver.io docker container with a very basic config.
Soulseek is new to me and I set that up with a vpn.
One of the main advantages of Spotify for me is the AI. I could host the music myself just fine. But having an AI come up custom playlists is another thing entirely.
If you’re not trying to cultivate your own tastes then you’re just letting a corporate blackbox drive your interests and aesthetics.
Like radio then?
Also that always happens. You don’t always discover the best band but you are more likely to discover the ones that spend more on marketing
It’s not even AI, music players have been doing this for ages. It’s tagging and labeling of the songs
Nice! For an Android music player free and compatible with your setup you can try Tempo on FDroid
To contribute a bit to this response, this fork has been releasing new versions based on the pending PRs of GitHub.
Good shout! Admittedly I’ve been happy with Symfonium so I haven’t looked into FOSS alternatives but this looks really good. When I get a chance I’ll add it to the writeup for sure.
Quickly read through the writeup, excellent work. I’ve been meaning to do something similar to this but haven’t been able to properly commit the time to do the research required to make it all play nice.
I’ll be doing this sometime soon 👍
Yes! For Spotify I’ve been using stats.fm (app/site). Iirc it’s paid (one time in app, but cheap). And they walk you through emailing Spotify support to get ALL of your listening history from day 1 to import into the app. After that it will just continue via connection to your Spotify.
I know the self hosted communities are very pro open source, with which I largely agree, but PlexAmp is such a good player it makes sense to at least try it.
Annoyance: Can’t scan your music library from the PlexAmp app, can’t scan it from the Plex app either. Super frustrating when music as added and you have to struggle with pop-up navigation on the Plex desktop site on mobile.
Game breaker: maybe it’s just really hard to find and undocumented, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to use profiles with PlexAmp, either to have individual play history and playlists, or to age restrict some music content.
Love my Navidrome server, though I use Substreamer on Android since it’s “free” and free.
This is a nice resource. For someone like me this would be a big project. I’m curious, it sounds like a lot of moving parts. Assuming it was running ok and I didn’t really touch it for two years, five years; what is the likelihood it would still be working?
Fantastsic post!
FWIW I suspect Jellyfin is the better choice for libraries with both music and movies. That said, we live in a world where multiple FOSS options exist to serve these roles. That should be appreciated and noticed by waaaay more people.
all the jellyfin music clients have weird glitches with band names and metadata. this has been with almost every (android) jellyfin client on 3 different Jellyfin servers over the years
i was almost completely sold on Jellyfin being my music server but it wasn’t quite ready for me, or possibly there is something about my library it doesn’t like.
What?
Just have your files properly tagged by picard/lidarr.
Improper tags = Weird behaviour you caused.Using Finamp and Symfonium on my phone.
Good write up. Spotify is the lsdt for me to replace
Was just thinking about doing this over the weekend cuz youtube music’s offline functionality seems to have gone down drastically.
Spotify has a feature where if it is playing on another device, you can control it with any other device logged into the account, is there any good way to replicate this with a linux desktop and an android phone?
That whole Spotify Connect feature and Sonos support is what keeps me in the ecosystem, unfortunately…
I’ve tried to get away from Spotify for years and the reality is the competition still sucks. I still have Tidal and YT music subscriptions but 90% of my music is on Spotify. I don’t know why is it so hard to match this.
Self hosting music is absolutely not worth it though it seems like that’s the only way to match Spotify quality of the experience.
If you use Plex it’s an absolute cinch to host your own music. Even if you don’t use Plex already it takes 5 mins to setup and you’re streaming your music to your hearts content.
And where do I get the music? Every time I want to listen to something I’m spending 20 minutes searching for it on some forsaken pirate websites? I’m way too old and not poor enough for this.
It’s not as hard as you’re making it out to be, but then again, the assumption that the barrier to entry is high is what keeps piracy niche, and as long as it’s niche copyright enforcement doesn’t notice as much… so I guess it all works out.
But there are sites that you can visit that use rotating family accounts to download music straight from qobuz and the like. Theres nothing sketchy there, it just violates the ToS to use accounts like that.
Ive been a pirate since the late 90s and it’s a service problem for the most part. So saying a song name on Spotify and getting what you want 99.9% of the time is an unbeatable experience. Not to mention curated and generate playlists. No piracy setup matches this that I’ve seen.
So the first sentence says TV and movie streaming replacement is trivial… Can you elaborate for someone who still uses the pirate bay for movies?
I would imagine they mean something like jellyfin/plex, which don’t necessarily get you away from torrents. Unless you want to go the slightly more legal route of ripping DVDs and Blu-rays and re-encoding everything for yourself. I say “slightly more legal” because while you are legally allowed a backup or archival copy of your own media (in the US), you still usually have to violate the DMCA to break encryption so you can rip your archival copy.
