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?
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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.
@v4ld1z I download my music onto each device, personally, but I do have some experience with streaming. I prefer it just to be rid of the companies, but I do also cut the quality of all of my music down from FLAC to 128kbps MP3s. I can’t hear the difference, even on high end equipment, so it’s just a gain for me. YMMV on that though.
I just use nextcloud to sync it all, though, and Symfonium on mobile/strawberry on desktop. It’s about 10 gigs for all of my music. I don’t have the largest collection, but 1.3k songs is still quite a bit
Use the left to find content, use the right to consume the content.
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.
Revanced to discover new music, then selfhost what you liked.
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
Yeah, I got 4 used 2TB hard drives on Amazon back in early 2024 with a $100 gift card and still had a few bucks left over, and now I see that you basically can’t find a single 2TB drive lower than $70…
I wish I started my homelab sooner…
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”
there is a hidden button called bandcamp, idk where you can get music to stream maybe api server that use your free ytmusic and spotify solutions)
why not both?
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
A as a step towards B man
I used to use YouTube music revanced, but at some point it asked me to verify my age to listen to a song my rage against the machine, and that was the last straw. I uninstalled YouTube music, took a dusty raspberry pi 5 from a shelf where it’d been sitting for like half a year and connected it to my router with an Ethernet cable. Then I installed qbittorrent (headless) and mounted its downloads under the
musiccategory (it stores the downloads in separate directories, depending on the torrent’s category) into Navidrome. I also have Prowlarr installed for easier searches of indexers. So far I have an 80GB library of music. I try to keep the size down by downloading 320kbps mp3s where possible.I use the Symfonium app, it was totally worth the 4.50€, I’d be willing to pay more honestly. On desktop I use Feishin.
I also have Listenbrainz set up as a scrobbler on Navidrome. The stats are pretty cool.
So in theory I’d be down to use torrents again if they weren’t as unsafe as I’m told they are. Do you use a VPN or do you just download away? What’s your setup look like in general?
Symfonium is awesome, I can agree with you for sure. I’d also be down to pay the price for it.
Slovenian ISPs don’t give a shit about piracy, so I don’t use a VPN. I did, however, decide against running the setup in Germany on my netcup VPS because they’re really strict about piracy.
I use Traefik as a reverse proxy in my setup and I run everything in docker containers (managed with docker compose). Would you like me to share my configs as well? (I ask just so that I don’t waste my time gathering them and making sure I didn’t share API keys or something :P )
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A 10,000 song library can be smaller than a AAA game install these days. The point of a large library is not necessarily to listen to it all, but can be to just listen to what you want when you want. I mean, do what you like, but I work from home full time and listen to music for most of it so it suits me.
Both. Use YT & Spotify as discovery engines (along with Pandora, Jango, and Soma FM), but download your favorite tracks and self-host.
I tend not to sail the Sea’s very often. I generally prefer to buy the albums or borrow them from my friends or the local library, rip them to Flac and then stream them to my phone using either Jellyfin or Navidrome. When I just want a radio station, I’ll open up Spotify. Many years ago, I had a collection of online radio stations I’d listen to, but over time they either closed their public streams and required an dedicated app or died off completely.
On your data bandwidth issue, both Jellyfin and Navidrome support on demand transcoding and can stream any bitrate you might want. There are options for it both in the web app and in most of the phone clients I’ve run across. I generally have my phone apps set to 96k MP3 as I can’t really hear a difference most of the time, at least not with the headphones I have in combo with the background noise that is generally around me and my preexisting hearing damage. Most folks can’t tell a difference between CD’s and a 128k mp3.
As for torrenting, I can say that you will probably want a paid VPN running AND active any time your torrent software is running. Beyond that I would recommend you check out [email protected] for more information.
I listen to a LOT of music - basically most of the day when I’m not on a call.
I don’t follow the mainstream so never had a spotify account, and am really listening either to radio-browser.info or a few channels on youtube that I sponsor, which link to the artists on bandcamp, where I buy the music I like.
To your point on bandwidth, I try to store music at the highest quality I can get, but then transcode to players.
I did try mp3fs to live transcode files to my phone in the past, but didn’t use it much in the end.
I’ve torrented some music in the past, but TBH, I find it in different places easier nowadays.
I used to find some interesting stuff with Napalm FTP indexer - but be very careful with direct connections to random FTP servers.
