Edit: Also please tell me if a meme is even allowed as the thumbnail for the post in this community - just feels like it gets some of my current desperation across :D
Since the last time I posted here sharing my new home server, I’ve gotten a little more acquainted with the services I’m using. After getting acquisition of shows and movies sorted, I ventured into music (streaming).
As many here, I’m used to using streaming services for music, ie. Spotify or YouTube Music. Naturally, I tried a similar approach by setting up my Arr stack to feed its music into Jellyfin where the music is picked up by Symfonium. I tried it out for a couple days and liked it quite a bit since it keeps my phone clean of “unnecessary” data but I still retain access to music. Unfortunately, the way I acquire my music limits my selection quite a bit unless I venture into torrenting, which I’d prefer not to. So unless I figure out a safe way to torrent on my server, I’m stuck with getting access to a very limited selection of artists and albums.
In addition to that limitation, there’s also the files formats of the music. Most of the music I’ve downloaded was only available in FLAC, which is awesome if you’ve got the bandwidth and data plan for playback, but for me it means that I spend 3GB of data for a day of streaming music which is just not sustainable.
In comparison, I can set up a Revanced version of Spotify in addition to my Revanced YT Music to get access to all the music I could want. Unfortunately, that comes with the caveat of still being tied to the companies I’m trying to get rid of - albeit not financially anymore, but I’m still sharing my data.
Ultimately, I’m not sure what to do. What I love about self-hosting is the independence from all the companies we’re being fucked over by in all kinds of imaginable ways. But if it’s free, outside my sharing data with them, can I really compete?
I’d be interested in hearing your opinions and thoughts on this. How did you solve music streaming with your build?
Personally, I just have the local files saved on my devices and listen to them locally. No usage of the network, no need to set up Navidrome or anything like that, it works really well! I don’t really change the music I listen to that much, but if I did need to sync between devices, I could simply use Syncthing!
One slight gripe is that, when listening to music on my phone, I get notification pings interrupting my music. When I get the time, I want to get a dedicated MP3 player to avoid this issue, probably some iPod or a clone that supports Rockbox.
Por qué no los dos?
I use Tidal and Bandcamp
I’m hearing great things about Quobuz
Bandcamp and Quobuz allow you to buy and download music
And I have to mention, as I do in any thread like this: If you self-host music you bought you’re a friend to me. If you pirate from billionaires, I don’t care. If you pirate from small bands, stop it.
i selfhost the music collection i own on LPs, to replace spotify/yt music i use Archivetune
Self host, takes less time then you think after the initial library build. Easy to do in a weekend. If you have some money to spend on music then buy music from the artists you love. Can all be in one place, none of this exclusive garbage, quality as high as you want, can rip music that’s never been released digitally, and I think most importantly - access to your music library without an algorithm telling you what to listen to. You’ll be surprised how your listening habits change and how well you know your music after jumping off the engagement treadmill.
By the way if you want a really cheap and easy setup for the time being while you figure out jellyfin/navidrome and docker and all that.
Symfonium app can run from a google drive that you can spin up for free and throw some music into. And then if you end up self hosting you can just point it to your server.
I’ve got a server set up already and am using Symfonium but thanks for the suggestion regardless :)
Can you just point it at a shared network directory too?
It says it supports network shared folders or NAS that use SMB or webdav… So yeah should.
Good to know. Could be helpful setting up basic, low-maintenance servers for family members.
Yeah it has become my go to for recommending to people with struggles with Spotify.
Plus if they ever purchased albums through amazon they have all the MP3 files anyways available to download and I have them throw the files in a drive.
Does it display album art? I thought that came from the server software. Or can symphounium source that?
I mean most of my album art is stored as part of the file. So I dont mess with it much but a quick look at the FAQ suggested it looks up data that matches artist name and albums and you can add your own images on your phone that dont save to the server but stay consistent apparently to the song or artist.
So yeah. Still just a BAMF of a software.
Cool. Thanks. I must have missed that. I only saw options for content providers.
I’ve mostly gone with pirating. I’ve built a massive library of flac songs, as for when I’m outside I can’t stream cause I’m stuck with ADSL, but I usually keep some albums I’m into on my phone and I also use Grayjay to discover new music.
ADSL? You poor soul :/
Yeah, country’s infrastructure is kinda stuck with it since running new wires costs to much, but they do run them when they’re redoing the streets
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System NAS Network-Attached Storage SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
[Thread #263 for this comm, first seen 29th Apr 2026, 17:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Use Navidrome for music and transcode mp3 streaming. Done and dusted.
That’s a different problem than access to music which I’ll leave up to you. But I’ll note that music exists out of the sphere of corporate dominance. And by that I mean, artists that self publish.
I find it interesting how quickly one abandons the principle struggle central to the meme on this post. Like, “I use Linux and don’t give corporations a dime but I LOVE Jay-z”
I’ve seen so many people suggest that that I’m honestly ashamed I just didn’t know Jellyfin and Navidrome could do that. I guess the file sizes are sorted then.
The thing is, what I’m using is good shows and movies but music isn’t that much of a focus. Maybe if I used a different indexer that’s “dedicated” to music, that’d not be a problem. So that leaves me with torrenting or Soulseek, the former of which I have experience with, but it’s unsafe unless you use a VPN, and the latter of which I don’t and don’t know how to set up on my server (yet) because I don’t know how Docker, containers and whatnot work. CasaOS is very user-friendly like that, but I don’t really know how to import or deploy programs in general. That’s what made even make the post in the first palfe because I felt stuck, not knowing how to proceed now. Falling back to year-long habits is just easier instead of overcoming challenges and growing with them is the gist of it.
I agree. I guess growing up in capitalism, it’s justdifficult to outright abandon every single habit you’ve built up overnight. It takes time and patience and as long you’re aware of it and try to move in a good direction, that’s good enough for me.
-arr stack is your friend. Read up on VPN kill switch. Isolate via docker networking. Run unbound DNS resolvers with dnssec.
What time is it? Key question of the movement
I went with jellyfin. Got 10 gigs free from box and Mount it with rclone.
If you have less than 10 GB of music, this is best. If you have TB of music, maybe not
Leeching off corporations’ infrastructures for free is a noble endeavor and everyone should do it.
Network traffic, unique accesses, etc are metrics used by investors and media to measure their success, so we’re still contributing to it, and also, we’re preventing alternatives from gaining more fame, so getting rid of corporations should always be the preferred path
spotify and google will figure out a way to block modded apps eventually.
nobody can take your home server and its content away from you
Bum music off of Spotify and save up for a home server in the meantime, got it.
Today servers can be nothing more than a $50 nuc from eBay with a larger drive in it, or an external one.
My server today is an old Small Form Factor Dell. It has no problem running VMWare ESXi, with multiple Windows and Linux VMs, ripping DVDs, converting videos and streaming, all at the same time.
The issue now is storage is getting pretty damn expensive
Fortunately I bought my storage just before the latest increase. I’ve just put my replacement cycle on pause until prices come down.
More risky for me but fortunately I have 3 local copies of everything.
In a dystopic future, somewhere…
Chilling out listening to some music
BANG!
“Put your hands up! No sudden moves!”
“But, but…”
“We tracked down self-hosting activities, and we’re confiscating everything and taking you to jail”
i also only download flac files, and i keep them in my
~/music/losslessdirectory. i use picard to organize that, and wrote a bash script to keep a synchronized opus format copy in~/music/lossy. on my phone i use termux/ssh to rsync the lossy files to my phone and avoid streaming altogether. for reference, my lossless directory is 221gb, and lossy is 19gb.If you use something like Navidrome to host your own streaming service you can set up automatic transcoding and enable it on your phones streaming client (I use Symfonium). This way I can always access my whole library at any point with it not using too much of my mobile data. But my flac collection is quite big and even if transcoded completely I could not fit all of it on my phones internal storage.
Same almost. I have an ~800gb main library of mostly lossless files that I squash to around 150gb by transcoding to 196k or something opus that i put locally on my phone. I also strip embedded cover art which can save a stupid amount of space sometimes; relying on folder hierarchy with cover.jpg/png files. (Bitrate is pretty overkill for me so I may drop it to 128-160…)
I haven’t had the time to manage the tags properly on my reference library*, but my folder hierarchy encodes artist/album/title with optional years and track numbers. I wrote a linter script to check the structure, that every folder has a cover art image, and to warn about lossy formats not in directories suffixed with [lossy] (purely for documentation purposes; not used in script logic).
My transcode script generates tags from the folder and filenames, only copying genre tags if they exist and stripping everything else. Lossless files are transcoded while structure, art, and lossy files are copied. Then that result is synced to my mobile devices. So whenever I add music my workflow is to just name file folders properly and download or extract art then I just lint, transcode, and then resync.
*(Tags of my reference library don’t matter so much to me, but the squashed lib needs consistent tags for mobile apps for behave as I intend)
Do you have your scripts hosted somewhere? Sounds like a really cool idea!
I hadn’t bothered because it was mostly LLM slop I edited until it worked, so it’s specific and not robust. Just had to hack something together the night before I had to leave on a trip… Haven’t had time to tag my music properly, so I’m still using it. The magic sauce is just ffmpeg and the mutagen Python lib.
why not both?
Soulseek has far more music on it than you can typically find on free public torrent sites.
Just a heads up.
i started with lidarr and very, very quickly stripped that our for just slskd
Same here. Lidarr had trouble finding most of the stuff I was looking for. I wish I had some kind of automation like the are stack for slskd. Maybe I try soularr that promises that, whenever I feel like exploring this part of the sea.
Tubiferry plugin for lidarr.
Wow that seems way easier and feature richier than the other service I was looking into. Definitely gonna try that one! Thanks
