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.
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.
My hangup with self-hosting is due to the fact that I have a family for whom managing their entire library would be a full-time job. It’s unfortunately worth the $15/month for me to not have to constantly take requests for new music, add that to the server, troubleshoot when things don’t work, etc.
This is how I feel with just my spouse. Spotify absorbs so much ADD energy and immediate new music whiplash that I can’t help but be OK with it.
The alternative is to be up at 4:00am on Oct 13 ripping T-Swizzle MP3s from YT.
I had my partner put in the addresses of my *arr stack into their phone and showed them how to add things they wanted. They never close any tabs so all I need to say is what weird-ass unrelated name handles whatever media they want and I’m done.
You don’t have to host your whole family’s library though. You can start with whatever you want and be on the road to improving your setup.
I wrote something similar about returning to traditional music formats on my own blog https://audiovalentine.com/2025/01/death-to-spotify-a-survey-of-alternatives/
You go!! I’ll keep all my cds, tapes, and records as long as we have players for them!
Would any of these apps allow for monitoring your listening activity? Similar to Spotify’s annual wrapped playlist?
@oldmansbeard @nfreak If the device you’re playing them on can run www.last.fm app then that would give you that kind of insight to the data it uploads on your listening habits
Last.fm still exists??
Yup. I joined in 2006 and use it nearly every week.
Do you know of anything that works locally on mobile devices?
Pano Scrobbler
You can connect navidrome and many other music players to listenbrainz.org. Like Spotify it creates an end of the year report and it also does recommendations like the weekly spotify playlist.
Nice! For an Android music player free and compatible with your setup you can try Tempo on FDroid
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.
To contribute a bit to this response, this fork has been releasing new versions based on the pending PRs of GitHub.
Is symfonium foss? Been looking for a good navifrome frontend for android.
It is not free or open source but is software. FWIW I use it and like it. It’s a one time fee and not a subscription service. The fee is under 10 USD. The program requires minimal permissions and doesn’t even ask for (I.e. opt-in) for much more than it really needs to run. I find it relatively intuitive and it works with android auto which is something I really want in a media player/library at the moment.
Dsub2000 and Tempo are active FOSS alternatives.
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.
This setup is very similar to mine
Is this your personal blog ?
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.
It’s not even AI, music players have been doing this for ages. It’s tagging and labeling of the songs
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
Thank you for writing and making content.
In this era, I feel like I’m in the Good Place: it’s impossible to make “good” ethical choices while engaging with modern world. Every day, some platform or artist is found supporting blood money, genocide, unfair labor, treats other artist/collaborators like shit, exploitation… Then we all have to pivot to some obscure alternative with its own issues, lest we be immoral internet users.
I’m so tired of all this shit… /rant
i just wanted a place i can hang out with real people without corporations mediating it. also no brainwashing by advertising.
seems like i found it for now.
Y e p. It’s a nightmare tbh. No ethical consumption under capitalism etc etc
That saying too often gets used as an excuse to not even try moving away from patronizing a harmful business, as though it isn’t worth any inconvenience since we’re screwed no matter what.
The only way to be a truly moral person on this planet is to not participate in society and go completely 100% off grid. Even then the Good Place did a great episode on that, and they’re right, you’re not really living then either. It’s all just about what you’re willing to put up with
You have to draw your own lines. For me I dont focus on all the bad choices, I pick something im interested in and then look at the options and try pick the choice I like the most. One thing at a time and before you know it you’ve made major choices in several areas of daily life.
Bit off topic, but I noticed this post has quite more comments than on reddit (currently 59 to 38) and more votes as well. /r/selfhosted is quite crowded usually, kinda impressive there’s more discussion happening here.
It’s the type of crowd that self hosting brings. We’re very much more Lemmings than Redditors by trade, so it does make sense the community here is better.
That, and fuck reddit.
Self-hosters are probably the type of people who are interested in getting away from “big tech” corporate solutions for everything, so it makes sense that they would prefer Fediverse versions
One reason could be that the audience on lemmy has a left-ish bias and there’s a political component to the Spotify exodus.
Edit: don’t get me wrong, I love seeing content and engagement on here.
Yesterday I got into a “funny image” post showing someone who couldn’t use the correct date format online and quickly found a comment, with tailors, about the most efficient way of searching through a date-time format. I stopped and just thought that was the most "Reddit"moment I’ve had so far here and it felt nice
Should put a note on your blog that Lidarr’s Metadata database is being rebuilt, currently the Lidarr APi spits a bunch of 5xx errors when searching for artists/albums/etc.
https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/issues/5498
If you currently have a library on the stable build the Lidarr team could use some help building the cache, they made this tool:
https://github.com/DeviantEng/lidarr-cache-warmer
It’ll search every artist in your Lidarr library so that the new database has a cache to quickly call upon.
I think I made a note about that, but you’re right I should make it more apparent. I did use the blampe/hearring-aid build here which solves the issue for the short term, but I’ll add a clearer note to futureproof it for when the main builds are fixed.
Yeah and it’s been proper fucked for months. I set up anew server on my Mac mini M4 months ago and every now and then I spin up lidarr again to see if it is fixed and nope, won’t recognise a single album in my entire collection and can’t even manually add an artist.
Headphones is pretty terrible and slow, but it has the benefit of working.
You can petty easily point Lidarr to an alternate cache server. Either use the docker images they provide (link below) or of you already have Lidarr with plugins setup, you can do it that way (also explained in the link below)
https://github.com/blampe/hearring-aid?tab=readme-ov-file#-docker-images
Thanks for this, I’ll give the plugin change a go.
Love my Navidrome server, though I use Substreamer on Android since it’s “free” and free.
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.
Bought a 200€ lifetime abonnement and my daughter have to pay to use Plex on her phone even when using my 200€ paid Plex server. They lost me when they asked the user of a paid subscritpion pay. Fuck it.
Must be a misunderstanding. Paid server; users do not need a subscription.
Ho they need it when using the application on android even if you have a lifetime server subscription. They may have reverted, but I was contacted by all my familly one week. They were asking why I wanted to make them pay to access my mediacenter and some told me to ask them directly if I needed money for some components.
Some even paid thinking the money went to me and I needed it for something.
I had an hard time understand the trouble since it was mentioned now where on the website of Plex that now user have to pay the application to access my paid server.
I took this as first signs of enshitification and left.
Plex joined google on my black list now.
Based on your comments, it sounds like maybe English isn’t your first language (no shade; your English is miles better than my any-other-language). But that, coupled with a Plex announcement that could’ve been written more clearly, it almost most certainly was a misunderstanding.
To be clear, when Plex removed their fully-free model, the only thing required was at least one paid subscription in the chain. Your lifetime paid server qualified, and no one else would’ve needed to pay. They haven’t reverted to this, this was how it was when they removed the fully-free model. I agree, Plex does carry some responsibility in making sure it was crystal clear. I wonder if they would’ve refunded your users that paid unnecessarily if you’d asked?
That Plex has continued to enshittify is without question. I just don’t think their paid model is the most egregious example of it.
Ha, thanks for the explanation, this explain that. It was a shit storm and on android when you opened the app ypu would be greeted by a popup asking to subscribe.
I seen that on the tablet and went full open source without looking back.
Yeah that not my first language, thanks for the understanding.
It was a bit of a shitstorm even in the English world. Plex definitely could’ve written the requirements more clearly.
I’m glad a full open-source stack works for you; I wish I could. There’s a few of my Plex users who just couldn’t make the jump to something like Jellyfin (and I’m unwilling to be their tech support), and honestly for me PlexAmp is so good as to make the problems of Plex overall be worth it.
Take care, friend.
I went for gelli as an android client for jellyfin, work great buy no chrome cast. I think my daughter use some thing like jellyamp which can chrome cast.
I use https://docs.wizarr.dev/ for on boarding user, it helped reduce the need of support. For the worst in tech I Boughy them a HDMI key. Set everything and sent it to them. They just had to connect to their WiFi… Which was pretty hard for some. Buy painless for me, they have childs to do tech support.
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.
Dunno about plexamp, but Plex has an auto-scan built in. Its disabled by default, but works like a charm. It listens for new file events and general finds things before you complete a download or copy
Unfortunately, directory monitoring doesn’t work if your music is on an NFS share.
A quick search shows alternatives to keep the functionality: https://github.com/TRaSH-Guides/Guides/blob/master/docs/Plex/Tips/Plex-media-server.md#scan-my-library-automatically
YT video linked in that post. Ultimately just takes a bit of effort to figure most things out IMO.
I had issues with auto scan years ago, just re-enabled it and it’s working fine now so that’s resolved, thanks.
The other issue is still a problem, and why I’ll be switching to Navidrome for music. Jellyfin wasn’t mature enough last time I tried to replace my lifetime Plex pass, but I have a feeling I’ll be ditching Plex entirely soon.
In PlexAmp, on the bottom right, tap the gear. Tap account. Tap “switch user”.
Now switch users.
You hosting your plex service for other users outside of your home? I’m finding the ease of access for other users / the wife is the largest driving point for me to continue using plex.
I could configure a VPN and attach my jellyfin server to that network however that’s a large hurdle for some of the general population users I have on my plex currently.
For something on-topic the wife and I agreed that she should move to the student sub as she’s studying and kick me off Spotify entirely. I’ve got until the EOM to get plexamp / something else self hosted. Interested to see what comes from this post as it’s pretty relevant for me right now.
Admittedly I could Bluetooth to my head unit in my car and stream Grayjay music to it, but that’s just leaning on an unfree service.
I love the idea of Jellyfin, but since I host for my extended family, and it has to be wife approved (re: easy) plex is the answer. If you already have a plex pass it’s annoying brainer. If you don’t, weigh the pros and cons because there are cons.
Spool up an instance of Plex, and install PlexAmp. Put a handful of your favorite albums on it, see if you like the features and the interface.
Yer I host Plex for 10+ folks and it’s an easy send. Really wish I could pipe it through CloudFlare but not willing to risk it currently.
I’ll give plexamp a go, man my tastes are all over the shop so it will be an album dump (that I should have done years ago) spinning up some old cds and the external dvd drive 😂
The other “issue” isn’t an issue at all. Plex handles all that stuff just fine and super easily.
There definitely can be profiles. You can either create fully new users (with their own logins, etc) or home users. Assign them restrictions as necessary. Of course this is all done in the plex web app, but user switching is done easily in PlexAmp.
