I use navidrome[0], its a music streaming server you can selfhost and then use a player that supports the subsonic api for playback. I use the strawberry[1] music player on my desktop and substreamer[2] on android. Navidrome can also scrobble your music to last.fm if you tell it to. The actual music files are mounted with rclone and --vfs-cache-mode full to a directory.
As someone currently running a Navidrome instance with 40k songs...yeah, I wouldn't wish that on anyone(horrible performance), but it is an option I suppose.
In two places. The web client takes _minutes_ to load the artist page. It's slow enough that I get the Firefox warning stating that the page is slowing down Firefox. The web client (seemingly) doesn't load the song/tracklist in chunks and attempts to load every song at once(at least on the artist page).
The second issue isn't specifically a "Navidrome" problem, but every iOS and Mac desktop client I've used(and I've tried _every_ one that Navidrome lists on their site) attempts to load every song on load and basically becomes unusable.
I'm about two notches away from writing my own music streaming server. Navidrone is barely functional for me...and falls under software I hate, but there are no better options.
I have no such issues using Navidrome (docker image from linuserver.io) with 150k songs. On the client i use sonixd which also have no problem running. It might be something on your server
As someone also hosting thousands of songs who has been using Navidrome for months I can't say I experienced any performance issues.
The codebase is fairly small so it should be fairly straight forward to investigate and narrow down the performance issues you're experiencing.
A shameless plug, but you may also like Quod Libet[1]. Although not for everyone, it has very advanced searching and the more unusual integrations and features all implemented as plugins.
Another Navidrome user here. I used Subsonic for a decade before the developer eventually abandoned it, and Navidrome is a great replacement (and doesn't make me install Java like Subsonic).
I host mine on a Digital Ocean VPS with 1 core and 1GB of RAM, syncing my music from my home PC to DO Spaces storage with rclone. Works perfectly
Another Navidrome user here, hosted on a $5 Linode Nano. I have rclone set up to mount an S3 bucket with the music files. Scanning them is a bit slow, but otherwise I've had no issues.
I highly recommend Symphonium as an Android client. It is receiving constant updates, highly polished, has an offline mode, Android Auto support, and so much more.
How many Gb do you have on and how much do you pay for that S3 bucket? I'm thinking of doing that but I wonder what'll be the cost. I'm not sure what to put on the AWS calculator, becasue it depends on usage and whatnot!
I have a little over 250GB and I pay $5/month. This is using DO Spaces S3 compatible, not AWS S3. The droplet is $7/month so $12 total. Never even gets close to being out of resources.
I also use Navidrome on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 2.5" 1TB disk connected to it via usb. I don't use metadata and or last.fm; My folder structure info enough for me. Easy enough to play music on mobile devices around home.
For playing music in the living room i use an Ikea Sonos (Symfonisk bookshelf) and the standard Sonos app connecting to the collection via smb.
For the car i transfered (most of) the collection to a sd card. Makes it also it's onw backup :)
I could also use Spotify since the kids love it, but i don't really use it that much myself.
I use Navidrome (https://www.navidrome.org/docs/getting-started/). Works great for my needs; on iOS I have the "play:Sub" app but it will work with any Subsonic clients, or just a web browser.
My favorite band's presence on streaming consists of a greatest hits compilation (and I believe the same is true of their back catalogue on digital stores). I have their CDs but they've also retired so I imagine they'll never have a meaningful digital/streaming presence. Any recommendations from streaming services have a blind spot for them.
You gotta work with the algo. Sometimes if you only listen to one genre for a while it gets stuck in a rut. It does get annoying when it keeps playing the same song I've only listened to once and then skipped every other time.
I'm not sure about other people, but I hate Spotify's recommendations, and I think it's because my unit of music discovery is albums, not tracks. The Daily Discovery playlist is just randomly selected tracks, and I can't even listen to that. It's too scattered and doesn't go deep enough.
The old Discover tab/page was amazing for finding new albums, but they killed it for some reason.
Perhaps this is more what you are looking for: throw together a playlist with a particular "vibe". Doesn't have to be large, 5-10 tracks works fine. Either switch on enhanced and look at the suggestions, or use the separate section for suggested additions at the bottom. Add the ones that fit the vibe, reject the rest. Repeat. I've found that it mines niches particulary well and discovers new tracks much more effeectively than the pre-canned discover playlists, or daily suggestions.
I’m not the author, but I’ve gone down the same path as them (Plex + ripped CDs.)
My breaking point was when - as a premium subscriber already - Spotify insisted on promoting their family plan, Taylor Swift’s new album and whatever the flavor of the current week was via full-screen modal popups in the app with no way to prevent them. I asked support several times and was told they didn’t have a toggle.
I tried moving to Apple Music, but the discovery patterns in that app didn’t align with what I was looking for, and offline play has been nerfed so hard I can’t find any way to do it any more.
I’m now on Plex + Plexamp for music and happier for it.
I very much hate them. I know I'm going be the old man yelling at clouds on this one, but I genuinely believe that algorithms are garbage "curators" and no substitute for individual humans (DJs, radio show people) with taste, because algos can (and will) be gamed.
There is no human with music tastes as specific as mine besides me. But an algo can take all of my listening history and recommend whole genres I didn't even know about. I don't think Spotify's is one that can be gamed.
"Serving you things you, an individual, like" and so-called "conspiracy theories" are in no way incompatible.
I'm saying this as someone who's seen a relatively long 'history' of what is popular in hip-hop as an example, and I think there are observable trends that go beyond mere "oh, the kids always like something different from the adults."
You're right, which is why I (as a music nerd) have gone out of my way to ensure that it's more than that. In a nutshell, here's why, despite every reason not to, one could still believe me.
When I as a youngster had to defend hip-hop against my parents, I was able to reference the music itself, see, this comes from that tradition, this sound come from here, roots in African and Black American traditions, this rapper is actually a saxophonist and adopted his style from jazz etc. etc. Citations and sources and the like.
As I've found/seen in entirely too many music conversations today, the kids can't do that. As in, if I'm like "okay, this guy who sounds like he's JUST mumbling, what am I missing here? I'm open minded and used to these conversations, go."
Crickets when you get to this level. They can no longer rely on "But music always changes, why do you hate young people, blah blah."
I paid for plex, I stream my own music from anywhere via the callback into my home net. I can chromecast, play in-car, whatever. If I have IP "it just works"
Its backed on an RPI-4 NAS I built, running the plex arm linux code. I have another RPI-3 in the living room as a headless music source to an amp. In the past I've used HDMI to VGA+audio splitters to scatter output to devices. This is my music, on my disks, under my control. I own these rips, the bits are mine. I keep the discs behind them on the shelves just in case but I haven't opened a CD case in nearly a decade.
Plex isn't perfect, but its pretty good. plexamp is available when you take subscription, and periodically plex offer lifetime buy deals, which I leapt on.
Jellyfin is [edit: not - it's from emby] another variant of the same codebase (forked)
I also paid for tidal. I don't like these music rental schemes, I like to own my CDs and rip but for exploration, finding what you don't know, its really useful and unlike some of the other choices, its owned by musos. I think at some level its still greenwashing the truly awful world of A&R/IPR on music, but if anyone has to get payola here, it might as well be musicians.
Jellyfin is excellent. Swapped to it from Plex about a year ago. Haven't looked back once. I run the server on an old M1 Mac Mini, it's the first time I've felt I have my own personal Netflix. I can stream 40gb 4k HDR Atmos rips to old stereo 1080p plasmas with ancient Firesticks (on wifi) in bedrooms in my house with almost zero delay, even when fast forwarding, and getting near realtime frame previews as you skip. It's lovely software.
In the UK businesses generally write computer hardware off over 3 years, or 5 years if it's a really extravagannt purchase, this little M1 is now written off from a business perspective... so... They make really great low powered, insanely fast & quiet home servers... It's a lovely time to be alive! :-)
They are still £500 on eBay, compared to the Lenovo micro systems which are less than 1/2 the price for a 10th gen and doesn't have everything soldered down it doesn't seem like a great deal yet.
I'll probably be waiting another few more years before I have an M1 for my home server.
Mine just works with Wireguard. I took a couple extra steps to make it convenient:
1. Public DNS entry gives jump box IP. With some http forwarding the Letsencrypt flow initiated from the internal Jellyfin server.
2. My Wireguard server (running on the jump box) runs dnsmasq and answers DNS queries for wireguard clients with the wireguard IP for the Jellyfin server.
3. DNS server on the home network gives those internal clients the local IP.
Works great now; obviously not plug and play but I had fun setting it up.
I have a similar setup, with an internal Jellyfin server on my lan. Every phone in my household has Wireguard that automatically connects if you are not on my wifi (which means pi.hole, nextcloud, access to cameras, and other services are also available).
It works quite well. Each family member has their own 'Library', since we all have very different taste in music, plus an 'All Library' that includes everything. We can also stream movies and tv shows I own and have ripped.
The clients are OK. We are mostly using Finamp for music playback.
I like knowing my music is always available to me, can't be removed, and is always the same version (I don't necessarily want a new remastered version)
I used Jellyfin for the first time recently. It was very smooth and worked flawlessly for my use case (watching episodes of a TV show on my phone after downloading them on my computer).
I never used Plex because it creeped me out. Maybe I misunderstood something but it seemed like it was needlessly phoning home.
I'm really trying to like Jellyfin, but unfortunately the Roku app is just absolutely terrible by comparison. The thing that grinds my gears the most is I can't see how much time is left in what I'm watching without pausing.
I feel like they had a boom early in the pandemic and then just completely flamed out. Now I feel like support is terrible across the board - It's not just jellyfin that sucks on Roku, so does Netflix/Hulu, and don't even get me started with channels just entirely disappearing because of developer disagreements and licensing.
That said - Jellyfin really sucks on Roku. The android tv version of the app is miles better.
Emby, a (somewhat) open source C# project, is not a fork of Plex Media Server, a closed source C/C++ project. Emby was forked as Jellyfin however, as a reaction to Emby becoming more and more of a closed source project.
Plex was forked from XBMC which is renamed to KODI an open source project. Think the fork was around version 8 or 9. KODI is up to 20. Downside to KODI is it does not have streaming built in like Plex. But has built in emulation again like earlier version of XBMC.
what do you mean by "KODI ... does not have streaming"? I have rpi with KODI on my son's TV and it streams everything over CIFS from my NAS - the NAS doesn't transcode or otherwise do anything but host the cifs share.
Does Kodi serve up files? e.g. Can I install Kodi on my PC with all my media, then watch that stuff on my phone when I'm away from the house, or grant a friend access to my library?
That's what Plex does: it has server apps and client apps.
Plex can act as a 'head unit' and do format transform and metadata management. Then stream it to a secondary plex client. KODI does not do that. That is the one killer feature Plex has over KODI. In all ways KODI is better except in that use case. Picking data from a CIFS is basic XBMC/KODI/Plex functionality and has been in there for a long time going back to the original xbox days. Jellyfin is similar with its ability to transcode and stream that to a client. In some cases they let you stream it thru a web client (which is kinda cool).
It is a nice feature for low bandwidth applications. Say a VPN to your phone, or a friends house who has crappy internet. If I remember correctly there were a lot of clients also for TV's which have absolute rubbish CPU power and no local storage (for holding metadata). Also the centrally managed metadata is nice when you have more than one client. You can get the same effect with KODI and using a DB like mysql or mariadb. But it is sort of finicky to setup correctly.
I personally use KODI as I do not need that particular streaming feature. Also it is broken with ISO's which is one of my major use cases.
yup, the plex streaming music solution works perfectly for my family as well.
I wish plexamp was a little better though. the interface is a bit unintuitive/inconsistent and it doesn't behave well with android auto.
Wow $15 a month? What's in that box, you're not just using it for some music streaming right? I've got my reverse proxy running on a 3.45€ instance from hetzner and I can't imagine you need much more for some music streaming right?
You're scaring people away from selfhosting with that $15/month. There are plenty of cheaper options, including under-$1/month with a dedicated IPv4 and enough storage for thousands of songs (or hundreds if you're using flac): https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month/
Those 1$ offers usually come with just a single 10GB disk, so pretty useless for storing anything. Unless you manage to store the files elsewhere, which will probably have costs again.
The negative reactions to you saying $15 are a good example of why there are no good Spotify and Netflix alternatives for people wanting to stream their own media.
People claim to want it, but they put a very low monetary value on it. No new business can survive on $3 a month subscriptions.
That's 600 to 1200 USD a year per customer, an _entirely_ different class of service and relationship.
The completely different order of magnitude endpoint I was thinking of is much more like the sort of 'streamed remote file storage as a service' (using off the shelf tech and software with a tiny bit of maybe custom glue) and almost zero support; with you get what you pay for levels of congestion and peek usage pains as potential problems to complain to that greedy last mile ISP you were forced to use because it was cable or barely better than dialup DSL.
iCloud is $0.99 for 50GB. Surely somebody can offer a 5GB stream-your-own-music plan for $10/year? Another person in this thread apparently is already running one, but the minimum plan starts at 250GB! And 5GB to 250GB is also a huge jump for most people.
What do you do for podcast? I feel like its the biggest (and really only) regression Plex ever did. Theres a plethora of other apps, but they all kind of suck and don't work with everything. My pain point is lack of Sonos support.
Spotify has podcasts but literally has the worst UI for keeping up with podcasts. They make it as difficult as possible to find what you've already listened to and what you're currently listening to, outside of the last few played podcasts.
Does plex have anything for audiobooks (preferably streaming with the option to download locally)? I quit audible after they removed desktop support but I managed to get all my books out of their DRM, but right now they just sit on an external ssd and I have to manually load them onto whatever laptop I'm using (which also means they don't keep their place between devices)
I've never used plex so this might be completely out of the ordinary for even more normal plex use cases, but is there a web client?
I use Android, iPadOS, Fedora Linux, MacOS and possibly in the future Windows (my last job required it, my next job might too) and unless the standard plex app supports audiobooks I doubt I'll find much consistency using native apps for each of those operating systems, if they even exist on all of them
Yes, they have a web client, but their audiobook support is not great. Plex is primarily geared towards music (albums/tracks), and the podcast support is built on top of it by independent clients. I recommend Prologue for iOS and Chronicle for Android.
I've heard good things about audiobookshelf [1] as a cross-platform alternative, but it is pretty early in development.
I'd never thought to use Plex with audiobooks before but this post and guide got me started. Now I've got all my [Amazon audiobook service] books saved safely for when someone inevitably tries to pull the plug on it. And streaming through Prologue is a way better experience than the commercial option
Seconding audiobookshelf. The web player and apps are both pretty good.
In general, I think a dedicated app for the content of interest typically works better than a general media server like Plex or Jellyfin. The same applies to books (Calibre/Calibre Web) and comics/manga (Komga).
Same. I'm actually surprised at how well Plex works without having direct remote access over the Internet. The only port open on my router is the one for Wireguard.
If only Google could stop screwing with my Android Auto. I have an older car and using Android Auto on the phone was nice! Then they killed it and replaced it with Assistant "Driving Mode" which they ruined and now it only works when inside Maps while navigating- which means you cannot use it unless you put in directions to where you are going. Most of the time I know where I am going. I need to put in fake directions and ignore them in order to listen to my damn music. We are moving backwards! If there's one place where I have a short fuse/temper for these aggravations it's while I'm trying to drive!
I wish Plex or Jellyfin would get support for audiobooks. I can keep my music library on my phone but my audiobook library is much larger and sometimes I get an itch to listen to something I don't have on me.
Plex has a setting at the library level that tells it to remember your last spot in an audio track. So if you set up your audiobooks as if they're music, this will allow you to listen to them reasonably through plex/plexamp.
That's not really a satisfying solution - you're missing out on the metadata matching features of the system. But it does get you there.
There's another app, audiobookshelf[1], that does this better. There's a server component analogous to plex server, as well as a web app or a mobile app for playback. The user experience is way better, but organizing the audio files is rather a pain.
I just spent 5min browsing their website and I still have no idea how much it costs, or whether they offer cloud storage or I need to install a media server application on my NAS at home. And how come they can offer "free movies"? Could anyone explain what their business model looks like? The website looks rather sketchy…
Plex through its web interface and apps offers free streaming of some live TV and movies. Free as in beer.
For enthusiasts, it can also catalogue and offer a portal for your local media collection. That is also free.
The Plex Pass is not free. It offers some neat customization features for the app, plus hardware transcoding of media which I suspect is the reason most people pay for it.
I like this method as well but boxing up my computer and carrying it around with me is a little unwieldy. Plus, the headphone cable is really short and if I move my head too quickly it gets yanked out of the back.
It's certainly an option, but it lacks the flexibility most people have come to expect.
Storing your media locally is fine, but you only have it when you're physically at your machine. To go portable you have to manage syncing files to an external device. Now you've got two libraries to manage.
Yes, we lived with this kind of thing since digital music existed, but it was a pain then and it's a pain now. Keeping one centralized library that any device can play from means less effort required to maintain the library.
Plus I can play my music in the car from my phone and never have to hear an annoying radio ad again.
I sync all my music to my phone. It's really not a big deal. But I'm not the type of person who is constantly discovering and adding new music, so I don't sync very often.
It's far bigger of a pain for me to deal with streaming. I don't have an unlimited data plan so streaming on the go is right out.
>To go portable you have to manage syncing files to an external device. Now you've got two libraries to manage.
Just copying whatever music I want to listen to on the go and playing it back locally is far simpler and easier than dealing with Plex/Jellyfin, hosting a server, managing a VPN, and all the other sysadmin nonsense.
This is even assuming physical media exists to rip in the first place. Plenty of smaller labels these days only do vinyl and streaming. CD is a dead format.
CDs are the current punkest physical format. They are cheaper to produce than cassettes even. You can listen to them in your car. CDs are not dead to serious music collectors, and are in some ways superior to vinyl (not in the dynamic range department, however).
Not cheaper for very short runs. I know friends who will put out cassettes with as few as 10 copies. CD production doesn't get cheaper until you're talking larger quantities (like 100+).
When anyone talks about streaming music or video they are talking about downloading it as they're watching it. You are hallucinating a definition that no one uses. Try to understand the context if you can.
I have plex server running on my NAS, but started running Jellyfin and the Gelli app from f-droid to do this. Plexamp seemed like a great option, too, but it's hard to beat foss.
Edit: I do love Spotify, however, since I've been able to listen to so much more music than ever, but I resent that they can, and have, pulled music from their selection.
Amazon used to offer exactly that kind of service. You could upload your own music files or get them automatically when your purchased an album (digitally or physically), then play them from a web player or locally installed client app. It worked great, so of course they killed it and now you can only listen to music they license/allow streaming.
This was different, Amazon allowed you to upload any of your own music and stream it from them. You didn't have to buy the music from them, it could have been old mp3s you downloaded from Napster ages ago for example.
I stopped listening to music entirely when Grooveshark up and died. There's probably entire bands that I've forgotten because I relied entirely on their playlists.
Always seemed as simple as that to me, but I've also never understood the need for specialized NAS software. And all I want out of NAS hardware is a box with a bunch of bays and a board with a bunch of ports/slots.
That being said, if you're trying stream your collection on the road (over your phone/at work/on a trip) it has to get more complicated than that. I'm not putting my shares on the public internet without a secure intermediary in some sort of streaming server. I used Gnump3d for that many years ago, but simply have settled for the 200 gigs of music on my phone's SD card since. I can't consider living with only 200 gigs of music such a hardship that I would be willing to set a new, possibly insecure thing up.
edit: Aiming ports towards the internet has been a job for me off and on, and the responsibility for keeping things updated yet also protecting against the new dangers potentially presented by each new update is something that I need a significant reward for.
Yea, a networked Linux box serving an NFS mount has worked perfectly for me for a good 20 years. Never felt the need for anything more complicated. Works for movies, too.
This post made me wonder whether they quietly removed the feature. It's still there though. All my uploaded music from the Google music days is still there and there is still an option to upload new stuff.
It's not as well-integrated as it use to be in the Google Music days though.
Exactly right. I'm very confused by all this because I literally stream music from friends and local bands that I've uploaded to my personal YouTube Music account.
It's incredibly painful to do this with a large library, as they've stopped supporting the desktop uploader. It's all drag-and-drop uploads, so it's not easy to keep it in sync with a folder of music.
Also the playback experience is painful and uploaded files are poorly supported across devices like Google Home, where it constantly wants to do playlists or mix in other music. I'm not sure Google Home even supported playback of uploads, though I abandoned the service shortly after the Play apps went away.
I use Jellyfin, it's about the same thing as Plex, but free. I host it on my homelab along with a half dozen other services, and I can stream any of my media from anywhere. There's even pretty nice third-party clients. I use finamp on android, it's specifically a music player frontend for jellyfin, and has options to download your files and play offline.
So far, the biggest problem is simply learning how to find music again. Spotify was too convenient for discovery.
But, I've been happily streaming my collection for a couple of months now, and removing Spotify and the radio has gotten rid of most of the last remaining advertising vectors in my life. It's nice. I very much enjoy knowing that I own and control my media and the data about my usage of it. There will never be ads or a creepy business model. If something goes wrong and knocks the server offline, I have my music cached on my phone.
I wish this were more accessible to everyone. Setting up a public-facing server, or even a private one with a VPN tunnel is too much hassle for the average person. It's so very worth it though. Owning your own services is so liberating
Soulseek seems to be still around because it was adopted by serious music lovers who are also techies. Browsing the libraries of some of the users on there can be breathtaking as to the size of libraries and amount of care in curating and categorising them.
I dont think anything bette came along so people are just still there sharing their libraries.
I also use Jellyfin along with an Android app call Synfonium. It has heaps of customisation and works with many media providers including Emby, Plex, Subsonic etc.
I didn't know that, but glad to hear it. I've just been using Bandcamp because it's got a very simple straightforward interface, isn't bloated, often has better pricing, more formats available to download. Most importantly many of the 'smaller' artists tend to be there.
I'd love to try Jellyfin and Finamp at some point. Last time the biggest issue was how it would not transcode the music from flac to opus in realtime. Plex can do it pretty fast even with a super low power Intel Atom. The provided AAC is quite a bit slower, so I'm still staying with Plex and Plexamp.
I've found out the best places to find new music are the ones on the illegal side of things. There are still torrent sites with amazing communities, recommendation systems and all the possible music available in all qualities.
Too bad it's not really OK to mention them by name, but if you dig a bit, you can find them.
Unfortunately foobar seems to have a hard time with some albums using freedb. It is an excellent application tho I'm always happy to see people mention it.
One of my hobbies is buying used CDs on discogs or from my local record store and ripping them with ExactAudioCopy. I use Picard (gui) and metaflac (CLI) to manually edit the tags. For each album's comment I try to put the artists involved and the album liner notes, if any.
For a web player, Navidrome is excellent. I use the play:Sub iOS app to access it on my phone and stream to my apple tv, which is connected to my audio stack. I also stream to my bose color link II bluetooth speakers.
I also subscribe to apple music via the family apple one plan. Generating a station based on a song usually leads to decent results, at least for jazz.
Technical aspects aside, I don't see how it can compete in cost comparing with something like Spotify. If you host it by yourself and pay for the rights of the music, I can see it costing more than 10 times for the same content.
Storage is dirt cheap and I already ripped my CD collection more than a decade before Spotify started up. Besides that half the stuff I have isn't on Spotify to begin with.
I mean, if you listen to the same few old things over and over again, sure. I listen to dozens of new releases a month...and that's not even counting back catalog.
Chiming in as a happy Plex lifetime pass user, using it for my FLAC music library as well as other media.
I do however, still maintain a Spotify account for primarily non-English music, especially new releases, which seem incredibly difficult to find anywhere else.
I find that iTunes has the largest access to non-English music, making it very easy to find and buy (compared to having to import the album or single and ripping it), even easier than pirating for a lot of these albums which get zero support outside of hyper niche and exclusive trackers.
The only real downside is navigating iTunes is a huge pain these days. Trying to explore the sub-genres they used to have kicks you back to the main store page. So you have to know which artist/album you're looking for.
This is why I had to return my iPhone and go back to Android, there was no possible way to get my music library onto my phone with a linux computer. The only way it seems to work is if you have a Mac or Windows PC and iTunes.
Not everything is available in a company's streaming catalog, even if you pay for it.
You can self-host something like Navidrome/Ampache and use a subsonic app like Amperfy https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy and download your whole library (or cache as you go along playing tracks).
I'm also out of touch, and so naturally I use mpd on my little home "server" (Guix System on rockpro64). It serves me well, though sometimes I wished for a more convenient way to tag or rate music.
I've built a whole UI around it that does that. But it's old and insecure, if you want it I can fish up an installable copy but you'd have to isolate it from the internet.
Roon: a very promising service, but one geared more towards the audiophile audience and with hardware requirements I'm not interested in investing in at this point.
If you've spent all of the time and effort to put your audio collection on local storage that's also encrypted and mirrored, you are the audiophile audience!
Roon is a great option. I don't really understand OP's objection? Roon supports over 800 different playback devices in addition to software so it's pretty unlikely you don't already have something that supports it.
Their main USP IMO is their catalogue and their multi-room support.
The catalogue is a work of art - incredibly detailed information about every artist and album, lyrics for most. I know a lot of other streaming services have good info about the things in their catalogue but, as has already been mentioned, these catalogues are volatile where Roon's catalogue doesn't carry the risk of being pruned at any time.
I also got stuck on that same part. I'm just going to guess they thought there was a requirement to run the Roon server on a Nucleus (the premium hardware they sell to host Roon). I personally run mine on my NAS in a docker container and it's been running great for years.
> If you've spent all of the time and effort to put your audio collection on local storage that's also encrypted and mirrored, you are the audiophile audience!
There are two main meanings of the word "audiophile". It can describe 1) a person whose music playing experience involves more than just the default music player app that shipped with their phone, and/or iTunes, and/or Spotify. It, much more commonly, also describes 2) a person who buys diamond-coated gold CAT-6 Ethernet cables, because they make the zeroes rounder and the ones straighter as the bits travel from their computer to their $2000 preamp, tuned to inject noise that makes the music sound just right.
OP is definitely 1), but I think they also want to make sure they're not confused with 2).
Is there room in your paradigm for an audiophile 1.5? Someone who buys the $2000 pre-amp but knows full-well that interconnects are snake-oil; someone who knows that spending more than $1000 per separate will not be worth the money unless you have a dedecated listening room with accoustic panelling.
There is definitely a room in my paradigm for this category. There is room in my heart. This is who I aspire to be, if I ever feel like getting more serious about music. What I don't have, however, is the right term for this type of person. I just don't think they'll call themselves audiophile - they wouldn't want others to confuse them with the other "audiophiles" - i.e. the philistines (1) and the crackpots (2).
I agree with this. I consider myself a person who is very interested in a quality music-listening experience in that I want it to sound good (I can't believe how many people listen to music out of their phone's speaker these days) and I want a high degree of control/convenience out of my music player (mostly oriented around playing entire albums and/or dynamically building playlists on the fly based on where the mood takes me). But I really don't want to be called an audiophile, because of the crazy pseudoscientific baggage that word carries. So for a product to label itself "for audiophiles" creates a little "ugh, poor choice" flinch in me.
Even then, $1000 is very unlikely to be a meaningful investment.
The hard upper limit is the equipment the mastering engineer used to listen to the track when mastering it. Even if your equipment can reproduce more detail, that's likely unwanted detail.
Something you'll frequently notice when listening to youtube shorts on a big home theater setup – a lot of wind noise below 80Hz which the author couldn’t notice, but which is deafening. The same, though more subtle, happens when listening to professionally mastered audio with an excessive audiophile setup.
That's definitely true! This, I think, is the major misunderstanding about HiFi - high fidelity means highly faithful, i.e. the equipment is designed to create a faithful reproduction, and not to needlessly embellish.
If the track you are listening to was recorded in some teenager's bedroom on a crappy cassette deck, then it should sound as such. This is equally as important as being able to pick out the detail on a track that has been produced with all the latest state of the art equipment.
Music is fundamentally about communication of emotion that transcends language and the purpose of a good HiFi is to facilitate that communication.
However, when it comes to consuming things like video content, particularly that made for youtube, tiktok, etc. then it is probably unfaithful to even attempt to listen to it on a high-end system, just as you say. It's like eating MacDonald's in a michelin starred restaurant or scranning gourmee steak from a takeaway container while drunk on a street corner at three in the morning: context matters.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] thread1. https://brushedtype.co/doppler/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28914331
[0] https://www.navidrome.org/
[1] https://github.com/strawberrymusicplayer/strawberry
[2] https://substreamerapp.com/
The second issue isn't specifically a "Navidrome" problem, but every iOS and Mac desktop client I've used(and I've tried _every_ one that Navidrome lists on their site) attempts to load every song on load and basically becomes unusable.
I'm about two notches away from writing my own music streaming server. Navidrone is barely functional for me...and falls under software I hate, but there are no better options.
I’ve been happy with Clementine, but I wish it didn’t have that many features - going to give strawberry a spin.
[1] https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io
I host mine on a Digital Ocean VPS with 1 core and 1GB of RAM, syncing my music from my home PC to DO Spaces storage with rclone. Works perfectly
I highly recommend Symphonium as an Android client. It is receiving constant updates, highly polished, has an offline mode, Android Auto support, and so much more.
For playing music in the living room i use an Ikea Sonos (Symfonisk bookshelf) and the standard Sonos app connecting to the collection via smb.
For the car i transfered (most of) the collection to a sd card. Makes it also it's onw backup :)
I could also use Spotify since the kids love it, but i don't really use it that much myself.
For some people Spotify absolutely does not have good recommendations, at least that has been my experience
The old Discover tab/page was amazing for finding new albums, but they killed it for some reason.
My breaking point was when - as a premium subscriber already - Spotify insisted on promoting their family plan, Taylor Swift’s new album and whatever the flavor of the current week was via full-screen modal popups in the app with no way to prevent them. I asked support several times and was told they didn’t have a toggle.
I tried moving to Apple Music, but the discovery patterns in that app didn’t align with what I was looking for, and offline play has been nerfed so hard I can’t find any way to do it any more.
I’m now on Plex + Plexamp for music and happier for it.
Is it open/transparent? Okay, then they could just be lying.
How does it weigh things? There's no such thing as "objective" here.
Okay, from the outside, what's stopping me from "ddosing" fake streams from vps' or similar?
It strikes me as utterly naive to presume "fairness" here.
I'm saying this as someone who's seen a relatively long 'history' of what is popular in hip-hop as an example, and I think there are observable trends that go beyond mere "oh, the kids always like something different from the adults."
When I as a youngster had to defend hip-hop against my parents, I was able to reference the music itself, see, this comes from that tradition, this sound come from here, roots in African and Black American traditions, this rapper is actually a saxophonist and adopted his style from jazz etc. etc. Citations and sources and the like.
As I've found/seen in entirely too many music conversations today, the kids can't do that. As in, if I'm like "okay, this guy who sounds like he's JUST mumbling, what am I missing here? I'm open minded and used to these conversations, go."
Crickets when you get to this level. They can no longer rely on "But music always changes, why do you hate young people, blah blah."
Its backed on an RPI-4 NAS I built, running the plex arm linux code. I have another RPI-3 in the living room as a headless music source to an amp. In the past I've used HDMI to VGA+audio splitters to scatter output to devices. This is my music, on my disks, under my control. I own these rips, the bits are mine. I keep the discs behind them on the shelves just in case but I haven't opened a CD case in nearly a decade.
Plex isn't perfect, but its pretty good. plexamp is available when you take subscription, and periodically plex offer lifetime buy deals, which I leapt on.
Jellyfin is [edit: not - it's from emby] another variant of the same codebase (forked)
I also paid for tidal. I don't like these music rental schemes, I like to own my CDs and rip but for exploration, finding what you don't know, its really useful and unlike some of the other choices, its owned by musos. I think at some level its still greenwashing the truly awful world of A&R/IPR on music, but if anyone has to get payola here, it might as well be musicians.
I'll probably be waiting another few more years before I have an M1 for my home server.
1. Public DNS entry gives jump box IP. With some http forwarding the Letsencrypt flow initiated from the internal Jellyfin server.
2. My Wireguard server (running on the jump box) runs dnsmasq and answers DNS queries for wireguard clients with the wireguard IP for the Jellyfin server.
3. DNS server on the home network gives those internal clients the local IP.
Works great now; obviously not plug and play but I had fun setting it up.
It works quite well. Each family member has their own 'Library', since we all have very different taste in music, plus an 'All Library' that includes everything. We can also stream movies and tv shows I own and have ripped.
The clients are OK. We are mostly using Finamp for music playback.
I like knowing my music is always available to me, can't be removed, and is always the same version (I don't necessarily want a new remastered version)
I never used Plex because it creeped me out. Maybe I misunderstood something but it seemed like it was needlessly phoning home.
I feel like they had a boom early in the pandemic and then just completely flamed out. Now I feel like support is terrible across the board - It's not just jellyfin that sucks on Roku, so does Netflix/Hulu, and don't even get me started with channels just entirely disappearing because of developer disagreements and licensing.
That said - Jellyfin really sucks on Roku. The android tv version of the app is miles better.
That's what Plex does: it has server apps and client apps.
It is a nice feature for low bandwidth applications. Say a VPN to your phone, or a friends house who has crappy internet. If I remember correctly there were a lot of clients also for TV's which have absolute rubbish CPU power and no local storage (for holding metadata). Also the centrally managed metadata is nice when you have more than one client. You can get the same effect with KODI and using a DB like mysql or mariadb. But it is sort of finicky to setup correctly.
I personally use KODI as I do not need that particular streaming feature. Also it is broken with ISO's which is one of my major use cases.
* Pay $15/month for a VPS (whatbox in my case).
* whatbox has a notion of first class apps, including Plex. Click a button in their GUI to install it.
* drag and drop your music using whatbox's GUI file browser
That's it.
https://whatbox.ca/plans
Getting that down to $5-10 would be worth it for most who aren't into the social aspect of music services.
People claim to want it, but they put a very low monetary value on it. No new business can survive on $3 a month subscriptions.
~35 - 36 USD a year? Depends on what's going on and the volume. Probably no support or paid per incident support.
No one wanting to self-stream will pay that, so then you would need to look for investment to stay alive until you have scale.
The completely different order of magnitude endpoint I was thinking of is much more like the sort of 'streamed remote file storage as a service' (using off the shelf tech and software with a tiny bit of maybe custom glue) and almost zero support; with you get what you pay for levels of congestion and peek usage pains as potential problems to complain to that greedy last mile ISP you were forced to use because it was cable or barely better than dialup DSL.
Spotify has podcasts but literally has the worst UI for keeping up with podcasts. They make it as difficult as possible to find what you've already listened to and what you're currently listening to, outside of the last few played podcasts.
I've been trying to use Spotify for a few podcasts and the UX is just terrible.
I can't believe they spent millions of dollars getting Joe Rogan exclusively and then not invest a tiny bit in improving the podcast experience.
Here's a good guide on how to set up Plex for proper metadata with audiobooks: https://github.com/seanap/Plex-Audiobook-Guide
I use Android, iPadOS, Fedora Linux, MacOS and possibly in the future Windows (my last job required it, my next job might too) and unless the standard plex app supports audiobooks I doubt I'll find much consistency using native apps for each of those operating systems, if they even exist on all of them
I've heard good things about audiobookshelf [1] as a cross-platform alternative, but it is pretty early in development.
[1] https://www.audiobookshelf.org/
In general, I think a dedicated app for the content of interest typically works better than a general media server like Plex or Jellyfin. The same applies to books (Calibre/Calibre Web) and comics/manga (Komga).
That's not really a satisfying solution - you're missing out on the metadata matching features of the system. But it does get you there.
There's another app, audiobookshelf[1], that does this better. There's a server component analogous to plex server, as well as a web app or a mobile app for playback. The user experience is way better, but organizing the audio files is rather a pain.
[1] https://www.audiobookshelf.org/
I just spent 5min browsing their website and I still have no idea how much it costs, or whether they offer cloud storage or I need to install a media server application on my NAS at home. And how come they can offer "free movies"? Could anyone explain what their business model looks like? The website looks rather sketchy…
For enthusiasts, it can also catalogue and offer a portal for your local media collection. That is also free.
The Plex Pass is not free. It offers some neat customization features for the app, plus hardware transcoding of media which I suspect is the reason most people pay for it.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=boombox+on+shoulder&iar=images&iax...
Storing your media locally is fine, but you only have it when you're physically at your machine. To go portable you have to manage syncing files to an external device. Now you've got two libraries to manage.
Yes, we lived with this kind of thing since digital music existed, but it was a pain then and it's a pain now. Keeping one centralized library that any device can play from means less effort required to maintain the library.
Plus I can play my music in the car from my phone and never have to hear an annoying radio ad again.
It's far bigger of a pain for me to deal with streaming. I don't have an unlimited data plan so streaming on the go is right out.
Just copying whatever music I want to listen to on the go and playing it back locally is far simpler and easier than dealing with Plex/Jellyfin, hosting a server, managing a VPN, and all the other sysadmin nonsense.
Vinyl has outsold CD's in dollar terms for years now, and for the last several has sold more in raw units as well.
I was off by a year or two. Point still stands.
https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/
CD sales have declined, yes, but the perception is a bit skewed because CD sales dwarfed vinyl even in its best years.
Many indie labels that I enjoy discovering about, sell CDs after their concerts.
It is quite alive.
Whether you grab your MP3 off of local storage (eg: HDD), off of LAN storage (eg: NAS), or off of WAN storage (eg: Youtube), you're streaming.
Edit: I do love Spotify, however, since I've been able to listen to so much more music than ever, but I resent that they can, and have, pulled music from their selection.
That being said, if you're trying stream your collection on the road (over your phone/at work/on a trip) it has to get more complicated than that. I'm not putting my shares on the public internet without a secure intermediary in some sort of streaming server. I used Gnump3d for that many years ago, but simply have settled for the 200 gigs of music on my phone's SD card since. I can't consider living with only 200 gigs of music such a hardship that I would be willing to set a new, possibly insecure thing up.
edit: Aiming ports towards the internet has been a job for me off and on, and the responsibility for keeping things updated yet also protecting against the new dangers potentially presented by each new update is something that I need a significant reward for.
It's not as well-integrated as it use to be in the Google Music days though.
Also the playback experience is painful and uploaded files are poorly supported across devices like Google Home, where it constantly wants to do playlists or mix in other music. I'm not sure Google Home even supported playback of uploads, though I abandoned the service shortly after the Play apps went away.
So far, the biggest problem is simply learning how to find music again. Spotify was too convenient for discovery.
But, I've been happily streaming my collection for a couple of months now, and removing Spotify and the radio has gotten rid of most of the last remaining advertising vectors in my life. It's nice. I very much enjoy knowing that I own and control my media and the data about my usage of it. There will never be ads or a creepy business model. If something goes wrong and knocks the server offline, I have my music cached on my phone.
I wish this were more accessible to everyone. Setting up a public-facing server, or even a private one with a VPN tunnel is too much hassle for the average person. It's so very worth it though. Owning your own services is so liberating
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.symfonik.m...
I subscribe to the odd free service. Fallback to my cd/ripped collection that is large. But I am totally bored with it.
Moved to radio mixes via SoundCloud and mixcloud and advert free stations. Which is pretty satisfying but for bookmarking, that requires interruption.
Too bad it's not really OK to mention them by name, but if you dig a bit, you can find them.
For a web player, Navidrome is excellent. I use the play:Sub iOS app to access it on my phone and stream to my apple tv, which is connected to my audio stack. I also stream to my bose color link II bluetooth speakers.
I also subscribe to apple music via the family apple one plan. Generating a station based on a song usually leads to decent results, at least for jazz.
It no longer exists but if you search around there are other similar sites.
I do however, still maintain a Spotify account for primarily non-English music, especially new releases, which seem incredibly difficult to find anywhere else.
The only real downside is navigating iTunes is a huge pain these days. Trying to explore the sub-genres they used to have kicks you back to the main store page. So you have to know which artist/album you're looking for.
It's a shame it's been so abandoned.
Not everything is available in a company's streaming catalog, even if you pay for it.
Pros:
Cons: [1]: https://github.com/agersant/polarishttps://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/hiy7gs/guide_to...
If you've spent all of the time and effort to put your audio collection on local storage that's also encrypted and mirrored, you are the audiophile audience!
Roon is a great option. I don't really understand OP's objection? Roon supports over 800 different playback devices in addition to software so it's pretty unlikely you don't already have something that supports it.
The catalogue is a work of art - incredibly detailed information about every artist and album, lyrics for most. I know a lot of other streaming services have good info about the things in their catalogue but, as has already been mentioned, these catalogues are volatile where Roon's catalogue doesn't carry the risk of being pruned at any time.
There are two main meanings of the word "audiophile". It can describe 1) a person whose music playing experience involves more than just the default music player app that shipped with their phone, and/or iTunes, and/or Spotify. It, much more commonly, also describes 2) a person who buys diamond-coated gold CAT-6 Ethernet cables, because they make the zeroes rounder and the ones straighter as the bits travel from their computer to their $2000 preamp, tuned to inject noise that makes the music sound just right.
OP is definitely 1), but I think they also want to make sure they're not confused with 2).
The hard upper limit is the equipment the mastering engineer used to listen to the track when mastering it. Even if your equipment can reproduce more detail, that's likely unwanted detail.
Something you'll frequently notice when listening to youtube shorts on a big home theater setup – a lot of wind noise below 80Hz which the author couldn’t notice, but which is deafening. The same, though more subtle, happens when listening to professionally mastered audio with an excessive audiophile setup.
If the track you are listening to was recorded in some teenager's bedroom on a crappy cassette deck, then it should sound as such. This is equally as important as being able to pick out the detail on a track that has been produced with all the latest state of the art equipment.
Music is fundamentally about communication of emotion that transcends language and the purpose of a good HiFi is to facilitate that communication.
However, when it comes to consuming things like video content, particularly that made for youtube, tiktok, etc. then it is probably unfaithful to even attempt to listen to it on a high-end system, just as you say. It's like eating MacDonald's in a michelin starred restaurant or scranning gourmee steak from a takeaway container while drunk on a street corner at three in the morning: context matters.
See also: https://hard-drive.net/hd/entertainment/100-gecs-song-blasti...