A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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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 |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.
[Thread #221 for this sub, first seen 17th Oct 2023, 08:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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My entire media library is sitting on a NAS, fed to me through a Plex instance in docker. Works great
Plexamp is pretty great. Plex was functional when it came to music but plexamp's features and ui really makes it feel like my own spotify
I tried it very briefly, when it still brand new, because the regular client didn't support replaygain. Found the UI/UX quite complicated, because of the super minified controls. Has anything changed in terms of that?
Plexamp was launched twice, first as a Plex Labs desktop-only app, then completely overhauled as a cross-platform app with 'droid and iOS releases.
It has changed a lot since, the UX is much smoother now, with tons of new settings + features implemented. There's no other selfhosted solution that comes close IMO
UI is still a bit complicated. Plex uses its own implementation called loudness leveling rather than replaygain. I've found it to be just as good for the most part.
Love plexamp, hate the way plex forces album-centric metadata.
Same but Jellyfin. I don't keep anything outside of shit that's not easily streamable on demand.
Yeah, it's mostly videogame music and J-metal.
People will recommend Navidrome- but if you're like me then your music collection is organized by folders and not metadata. Navidrome does not and will never (developer said as much) support folder-based browsing.
I recommend using Gonic https://github.com/sentriz/gonic and then a compatible Subsonic client. Gonic has been the simplest and smoothest out-of-house music streaming experience for me.
I use gonic with sonixd on my laptops, but probably might move to supersonic from sonixd.
On my phone, Tempo is really awesome!
I think you're on the right track with Wireguard.
I'm also running Jellyfin, but mostly Navidrome for music. I've been pretty satisfied with the latter.
Consuming music outside the house has been a significant issue. I mostly tried to go the offline route: download some music to play while you're out of the house ... and on Android the experience has been overall very poor. My least worst experience was with Substreamer as a client, but still not anywhere near good.
Where I'm at today is with always-on VPN through Wireguard and the experience is significantly better than any other solution I've tried before.
It's been years I haven't played with mpd, so I can't comment on that.
+1 for navidrome.
I'm also using that and have it exposed to the web using a cloudflare tunnel. What I didn't like in the beginning but really appreciate now is that the service itself doesn't have a lot of permissions and cannot delete files or change their metadata. I'm hosting it in a docker container and everything except the config file is mounted read-only.
I'm not sure how relevant that is but it gives me more peace of mind exposing it publicly.
Thay sounds potentially better than having to vpn in to use it.
How are you liking navidrome?
Not OP, but I also use Navidrome, hosted as a docker container on Synology NAS with reverse proxy for streaming outside the house. Have found the Symfonium app (paid) to be a great replacement for Spotify.
Seconding Synphonium, it's surprisingly good and gets updates very regularly.
Navidrome replaced Spotify for me, with Symfonium on Android, I'm never going back. On PC you can use any Subsonic client, and there are plenty I threw Tailscale on top to access it when I go out.
Performance is good and streaming works well. Not a fan of the webinterface personally but there are client programs available for all platforms since navidrome exposes the subsonic api.
Personally I use sonix on windows and linux as well as symfonium (paid but really great app) on android.
The only thing I am missing from it is better user management so that I can restrict specific users from accessing parts of my library.
Regarding access from outside my network I specifically wanted to avoid needing to be connected to a VPN so that's why I use a cloudflare tunnel. Since my upload rate is not very good I have a Pi-Hole DNS server at home so that queries to my domain while in the home network don't need to leave my network.
Thank you for the info. Sounds like I've got a fair bit to look in to. 👍
Navidrome with Substreamer on mobile for auto-generated recommendations based on already played music works great for me.
Navidrome sounds interesting, I haven't heard over of it before.
Wouodbyou recmkend it over jellyfin?
It is also very resource efficient. I am running it on a Raspberry Pi 2 and it works flawlessly.
Plex server streaming to Plexamp here. Currently handling around 50k tracks all stored on my NAS no problem. Soundiiz supports Plex, so converting Spotify playlists over to Plex is pretty straight forward, provided you have the songs.
I use plexamp too with a large library so I can comment on the android side (I didn't know some of these differences existed)
I'll also comment that I sort all my music by folder and Plex does ok with this Not great, but it works
The best part is the TIDAL integration IMO. You can have both local tracks and streamed tracks without having to deal with downloads. Best of both worlds.
I forgot about TIDAL integration, since I'm not a subscriber. I only subscribe to Spotify for the family account. My three teenagers and my wife would all mutiny if I stopped paying for Spotify. I just now convinced them that Plex is stable enough to use for video. Small victories.
Dont know about the multiroom thing but Navidrome is pretty solid
It definitely has to be Jellyfin (server) + Finamp (client) + tailscale (mesh VPN)
Symphonium is another good mobile client.
On iOS there’s also Fintunes & Manet Music.
A little prettier but not as feature rich.
I'm using S2 on Android to use Jellyfin as media source. Really great player. I've bought the full version, definitely worth it.
Been using Plexamp for a little over a month by myself only complaint is meta data is sometimes not the best but that might be my choice of music as well. Also still missing some features I would like to see.
I'm running roon. It's expensive but self hosted, and has an excellent set of features around a library that seamlessly blends locally stored content with cloud content from either qobuz or tidal. It is great for discovery because I can click into the performers/composers of a track/album and see their other work. Or view a composition itself and see other artists who have performed it.
I wouldn't say it's for everyone but it's been a good fit for me.
I was using Plexamp for a while but now I've mostly converted my library to OPUS so I can fit it all on my phone. I have a script to automatically copy the directory structure/artwork and convert from my main FLAC library, and keep it in sync with my phone using syncthing. I use Musicolet for playback. If your library is bigger or you don't have much free space then this is of course not an option, but it works for me.
Anyone here experiment with Funkwhale? Wondering if it's a practical choice to make a personal library available in a personal cloud.
Navidrome over wireguard, and music library in folders and proper tagging trough beets and picard. using subsonic as a client for it. tried plex and plexamp but I'm moving away from them.
If I could move with all my Spotify favorites and playlists to other services, I probably could replace spotify.
If I could figure out how to move all my favorites and playlists AND continue discovering obscure music from around the world with ease, I would replace Spotify.
I can't think of another way for me to discover something like Indian Metal, all female Cuban acapella group, or power ambient deep in the middle of nowhere farmland NY. It's not like those are going to be played on the radio. But I can type a random combo of letters and numbers into Spotify and start a radio based on the first band I don't recognize. Let the discovery commence.
I run nextcloud which has a music plugin. The plugin exposes an ampache and subsonic api. All you need now is a client. I use ultrasonic on android. This is for out of home streaming. In home both plex and jellyfin offer dlna for pretty much any networked device made in the past 15 years. That's how I listen on an AVR. On a PC I could use that or just browse to the nextcloud music plugin and listen in browser.
Another very fast and folder based system would be mStream: https://mstream.io/
It works very well, also good mobile apps (Android + iOS)
Thank you, I've not heard of that one. Time to have a read...
Plex w/ plexamp Jellyfin w/finamp
Thats what I would go with but theres tons of options here as well
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#media-streaming---audio-streaming
Very gold alternative for plexamp is symphonium