[HN Gopher] FunkWhale: Decentralized Music Server
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       FunkWhale: Decentralized Music Server
        
       Author : alexfromapex
       Score  : 112 points
       Date   : 2021-01-21 15:48 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (funkwhale.audio)
 (TXT) w3m dump (funkwhale.audio)
        
       | kylegill wrote:
       | This looks sort of like a Plex for music, and in a way (if you
       | use some creative thinking) a self hosted Audius [1], neat!
       | 
       | I've been thinking about how I'd do this to ditch my library on
       | what was Google Play Music and is now YouTube Music.
       | 
       | [1]: https://audius.co/
        
         | flatiron wrote:
         | Plex isn't terrible for music. They have specific music clients
         | now https://plexamp.com/
        
       | apexkid wrote:
       | How does funkWhale deal with piracy of music and copyrights?
        
         | rglullis wrote:
         | It doesn't. Funkwhale is not meant to be run as a service for a
         | large number of users. People running a pod should be cleared
         | by fair use, much like someone with a iTunes library that is
         | accessible through the home (or company) intranet.
        
           | loceng wrote:
           | How would it fall under fair use?
        
         | apexkid wrote:
         | How are royalties paid to the music labels?
        
       | robbyking wrote:
       | The name -- and service -- feels very reminiscent of GrooveShark.
       | 
       | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooveshark, for the youngins.)
        
         | Yetanfou wrote:
         | That is because it is meant to be a successor to Grooveshark.
        
       | casi wrote:
       | Ive been running a private funkwhale for me and my friends since
       | november '19 and its been great. Works lovely with play::sub for
       | ios. Have about 300gb of music hosted and 4 daily users :)
       | 
       | Recommended for those wanting to ditch spotify. Redirect the
       | subscription fee to buying an album or two each month. Get a few
       | friends to do the same. The artists get much more royalties and
       | you have a more personal collection.
        
         | pavel_lishin wrote:
         | Is there an android app that works well with this? Youtube
         | Music has killed most of the usefulness that Google Play Music
         | had (e.g., no way to edit id3 metadata, no way to browse by
         | genre, and a thousand other tiny papercuts) and I'm really
         | looking to stop using it.
        
           | jchw wrote:
           | They show a screenshot of it running on Android right on the
           | frontpage, so apparently yes. There's a list of clients over
           | here:
           | 
           | https://funkwhale.audio/en_US/apps
        
         | sho_nuff wrote:
         | What are you using to host the server? VPS? Machine from your
         | home network?
        
           | casi wrote:
           | vps(https://contabo.com/) about $5 a month or so. I think
           | Funkwhale can be hosted on a server with the library on
           | amazon s3 if you want a lot of cheap storage. but ive been
           | fine on my vps for now.
        
         | bobajeff wrote:
         | I wonder what the feasibility is of doing something like this
         | for movies and tv shows?
        
           | JustSomeNobody wrote:
           | I don't do it because I don't want to expose my network, but
           | /r/plex would have more info.
        
             | jjice wrote:
             | You could always set up a VPN and make the Plex server only
             | available on the VPN's interface. But then you have to be
             | on the VPN on whatever device you want to watch on, so it
             | can be a bit of a hassle if you're not on your own devices.
        
               | depingus wrote:
               | That's not the way to do it. If anyone can break out of
               | Plex they are on your local network.
               | 
               | Besides, if you're going through all that networking
               | hassle, you're better off doing things right. Get a real
               | firewall like pfSense, then setup a separate network just
               | for outside facing services. To access those services
               | locally create firewall rules that allow traffic 1 way:
               | from your trusted network to your outside facing network.
               | While you're at it, consider making separate networks for
               | IoT devices, and maybe even another for untrusted guest
               | devices. You can use VLANs or physical interfaces if your
               | firewall has enough ports.
        
               | generalizations wrote:
               | Seems like running separate wires for each of those
               | networks would be a huge pain.
        
           | fsflover wrote:
           | https://joinpeertube.org
        
           | ltrls23 wrote:
           | I can't recommend Jellyfin enough. It works remarkably well!
           | 
           | https://jellyfin.org
        
             | kilroy123 wrote:
             | What's the difference between this and Plex?
        
               | robotbikes wrote:
               | Jellyfin is free and open source software for one. I
               | don't know the exact difference in the feature set but I
               | have heard people complaining that Plex is focusing more
               | on surveiling it's users to push ads. I just got Jellyfin
               | working with linuxserver.io docker image on my rpi4 and
               | it is pretty nice.
        
               | ValentineC wrote:
               | Adding a random Jellyfin anecdote: Jellyfin stable
               | (10.6.2) is buggy and somewhat unusable for me -- videos
               | wouldn't play because of some browser compatibility
               | issue.
               | 
               | This seems to have been fixed in the 10.7.0 RCs, and
               | they've been quite wonderful.
               | 
               | The only feature I find lacking is being able to use
               | Jellyfin on a Chromecast, via their iOS app. It seems to
               | be blocked by the lack of upstream SDK support:
               | https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-expo/issues/16
        
               | RealStickman_ wrote:
               | You have to pay for hardware transcoding with plex. Plex
               | (and also Emby for that matter) have more client apps and
               | platforms supported than Jellyfin though, so you might
               | want to check that before settling for one.
        
               | vvatermelone wrote:
               | Jellyfin is fully open-source and doesn't require any
               | third party authentication. It's not quite feature
               | complete versus Plex but it is very close, and has never
               | been a issue for me or my users.
        
           | conceptualspace wrote:
           | plex?
           | 
           | btw im the author of enhanceotron for plex, which is an open
           | source extension that gives u a few goodies (random sorting,
           | trailers, ultrawide support) when accessing plex via browser:
           | 
           | https://github.com/enhance-o-tron-for-plex
        
       | number6 wrote:
       | Is this peer2peer? I am thinking about a tool for Podcast that
       | federates and is p2p like e.g. peertube only with all the Podcast
       | rss Features + listeners can choose a ratio how many copys of the
       | Podcast they want to distribute
        
       | oever wrote:
       | It would be great if it would link the music to a graph of
       | information about the songs, bands, individual performers,
       | composers, recordings etc.
       | 
       | There's a project that makes this data available as linked data:
       | https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/LinkedBrainz
        
       | perfmode wrote:
       | is sonos supported?
        
       | asmr wrote:
       | Is this federated or p2p? It would be amazing to have something
       | like SoulSeek but in a music player (Spotify) format. I have
       | rather eclectic taste when it comes to music and Spotify is
       | missing a lot of good stuff.
        
         | stryan wrote:
         | It's federated over ActivityPub. You can follow other user's
         | libraries on other instances.
        
       | jjice wrote:
       | I personally use Jellyfin's music integration of my selfhosted
       | music streaming. It works fine, but still has a few kinks to work
       | out. FunkWhale seems like the way to go if you're just looking
       | for music streaming.
        
       | jjice wrote:
       | I noticed they call their groups "pods" and I thought that was
       | poor naming because that's what Kubernetes calls their groups.
       | Then it hit me and I looked up what a gathering of whales is
       | called, and sure enough, it's a "pod". It gave me a little
       | chuckle.
        
         | verdverm wrote:
         | Kubernetes is Greek for the "helmsman" of a ship. The seafaring
         | theme runs deep in the ecosystem
        
       | Lammy wrote:
       | Funkwhale seems to focus on the social aspect of sharing music
       | among a group, and that's cool if you're into that, but for
       | hosting my personal music library just for myself I like
       | Airsonic: https://airsonic.github.io/
        
       | tomaszs wrote:
       | The project is lovely and exactly what I'd need. If only it was
       | possible to buy a raspberry Pi with everything configured and 32
       | GB of memory for music...
        
       | cush wrote:
       | And this is getting shut down in 3... 2... 1...
        
         | breakfastduck wrote:
         | For what reason?
        
       | Kaze404 wrote:
       | Funkwhale is incredible. I comment every time it's posted here
       | because it's truly one of my favorite technologies out there. I
       | ran a personal pod for around a year, and lately I've been
       | thinking of running one for my home.
       | 
       | The project is also looking for maintainers, as the lead
       | developer might not be able to contribute for much longer. If you
       | have the inclination to do so, definitely reach out to them :)
        
       | etcet wrote:
       | I really miss the act of browsing someones music collection like
       | you could do with Napster and Soulseek around the turn of the
       | century. Definitely going to check this out!
        
         | reaktivo wrote:
         | Soulseek is still going strong, I recently discovered.
        
           | _joel wrote:
           | This is a decent client https://nicotine-
           | plus.github.io/nicotine-plus/
        
       | vlmutolo wrote:
       | How does this not run into major copyright issues?
        
         | X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
         | It's a federated model so it would be up to each instance to
         | police it's self.
        
         | cecja wrote:
         | Because you are hosting your own legally owned music library on
         | your server.
        
           | tastyfreeze wrote:
           | I don't expect that will be good enough for the RIAA. There
           | are enough similarities to being a radio station or paid
           | streaming service that RIAA would still want to strip the
           | flesh from the bones.
        
             | rglullis wrote:
             | Then it's up to the RIAA to (1) come and find every single
             | instance out there, (2) get access to the instance, (3)
             | find copyrighted content and (4) demonstrate that is beyond
             | fair-use.
        
               | tastyfreeze wrote:
               | Yes, it is. That hasn't stopped them from copyright
               | abusing shenanigans before.
        
               | unicornporn wrote:
               | I know it's mind-boggling, but there are also a few other
               | countries outside US and A. :)
               | 
               | In Sweden as an example, it's OK to share with a _small_
               | group of friends[1].
               | 
               | [1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&
               | u=https...
        
         | erikschoster wrote:
         | Most instances I've seen are used to host music uploaded by the
         | original authors, or collections of CC-licensed music, etc. I
         | actually have yet to see anyone using funkwhale to share music
         | publicly they didn't create themselves or have permission to
         | share. It does have a private mode for that, so you could
         | upload your music collection and share it with just a few
         | friends or something.
         | 
         | (Edit: I tried funkwhale out as a way to privately share a
         | small online radio station's music library with its DJs. It
         | didn't suit our needs ultimately -- I felt the UI & search /
         | filtering affordances were lacking for our use case -- but you
         | could use it in a hybrid public/private way like that if you
         | want. Libraries have some access control features.)
        
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       (page generated 2021-01-21 23:01 UTC)