[HN Gopher] Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative
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Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative
Author : coppolaemilio
Score : 393 points
Date : 2025-04-17 00:10 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (coppolaemilio.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (coppolaemilio.com)
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Can't get the page to load but agree with the sentiment ;)
| RajT88 wrote:
| Love JellyFin!
|
| I do not mind the jankiness, since I can work around a lot of it
| with the API.
|
| I do not even mind too much the Love Exposure bug:
|
| https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/10494
| detaro wrote:
| Anyone have opinions on Jellyfin vs music-specific servers like
| Navidrome?
| sodality2 wrote:
| Personally I switched Navidrome since I found the clients to be
| better and the scanner to be lighter, but there's a few things
| I miss: casting was nice, as well as centralizing my media on
| one everything-app.
| JLO64 wrote:
| I use Navidrome with Amperfy on MacOS/iOS and love it.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| For me Navidrome actually could run on my raspberry pi with my
| library.
| Touche wrote:
| I use Jellyfin in this way. You can also use it with music apps
| like Symfonium for Android, and you can play on a Sonos via DLNA.
| panopticon wrote:
| I embarked on a similar journey last year after YouTube Music
| took down some albums I listened to religiously.
|
| I settled on Plex + Plexamp instead. I'm mostly satisfied, but
| there are some rough edges like Chromecast and web playback.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| Plexamp is awesome and i miss it a bit as a Jellyfin user...
| But i don't trust the plex codebase. My suspicions were firmed
| up when Lastpass got hacked literally through Plex.
| knowknow wrote:
| What's wrong with Spotify?
| temp0826 wrote:
| Afaik it's not terribly good to the artists. One of my favorite
| bands left the platform; I'm not there yet but if it happens en
| masse (or at least enough to effect me noticeably) then I'm out
| too.
| thebluelad wrote:
| If you listen on high-end equipment the audio quality is
| noticeably worse than many other solutions and depending on
| your music taste, Spotify often removes content or doesn't have
| it in the first place.
| chillfox wrote:
| Music disappearing is really annoying.
| tomrod wrote:
| "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_ha...
| hyperbovine wrote:
| For $15 a month I get access to (as far as my tastes are
| concerned) all the music ever recorded, instantly accessible
| from anywhere in the world on any device I own.
|
| I recall a commercial from the 90s that sort of poked fun at
| this exact idea, as being laughably farfetched and "sci-fi".
|
| You're damn right I'm happy.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| Meh, the two ideologies are a tradeoff decision.
|
| If you own, you don't pay subscription and can use that
| money to buy. And in tenuous circumstances you have
| control.
|
| If you subscribe, you don't pay money to buy _massive_
| library. But in tenuous circumstances you don 't have
| control.
|
| Everybody rates the risk of tenuous circumstances
| differently and so that affects the decision outcome.
| lucsky wrote:
| +1000
|
| There's absolutely no way in hell I'm going back to
| hoarding stupid ass CDs or MP3/FLAC files when I can
| legally have immediate access to tens of millions of
| titles. I have absolutely zero interest in the "owning"
| part but I understand some people would prefer it.
| sidrag22 wrote:
| ive often thought about a happy middle ground product
| that would make me consider coming back to spotify... a
| version of the subscription model, somewhat similar to
| ebook stuff, where if you are subscribed you can choose X
| amount of songs that month to "own" forever.
|
| so if you decide you cant pay their monthly fee, you
| still have full access to your library of songs that you
| chose to own over the years, and are not subjected to the
| feeling of being a prisoner to their subscription model
| if you decide you cant afford it for x amount of time.
|
| this feeling of being a prisoner is the absolute main
| driver of why i prefer non spotify solutions. i love the
| actual product otherwise. if i had not experienced the
| non subscribed version of what my account feels like, i
| think i would still happily be paying for spotify today.
| tomrod wrote:
| 100% agree. I'll note that the more one gets jaded with
| individual systems, they like to reach for easy systems
| that give them more control.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I've never understood the conspiratorial use of that slogan
| because it's unironically correct. Ownership is economically
| a cost and a risk and you're generally better off if you can
| utilize something without owning it or distribute ownership.
|
| I'm much better off using free software than having copies of
| proprietary software on my shelf and the train is much
| cheaper than the car insurance.
| tomrod wrote:
| It's not conspiratorial. It's an accurate and widely
| broadcasted business model by several companies. Why do you
| feel something that is present and real should be
| denigrated as conspiratorial?
| chillfox wrote:
| I got a smartwatch with a cell connection, some good earbuds
| and started going to the gym, then I learned that their watch
| app is complete garbage. It refuses to play the music I want,
| either playing something else or nothing at all. It will play
| it out loud on my phones speaker in the locker instead of
| through my earbuds. It refuses to download the playlists I
| want. It refuses to stream the music.
|
| None of that is a problem with the Apple Music app, so it's
| 100% a Spotify problem.
|
| Also, Music sometimes disappears from my playlists.
| bni wrote:
| It's a shit company that I don't want to support.
| dhosek wrote:
| My strategy for syncing my music library with my phone is that I
| have four smart playlists:
|
| - songs rated 5 stars which I haven't listened to for at least 8
| months1
|
| - songs rated 4 stars which I haven't listened to for at least 16
| months
|
| - songs rated 3 stars which I haven't listened to for at least 32
| months
|
| - the 20GB of least-played music
|
| (there are some other strictures as well, like eliminating
| Christmas music and some music files I have in my library more
| for archival purposes than anything else, but this is a decent
| approximation).
|
| This gives me a reasonably fresh selection of music and at least
| at the moment, with my daily sync habit, when I listen to a song
| it goes out of rotation for a while which could be anywhere from
| a week to years.
|
| [?]
|
| 1. This was originally 6/12/24 months, but I ended up boosting
| that time frame as storage grew tight on my phone.
| joshuaturner wrote:
| This reminds me of my smart playlist on Apple Music.
|
| It's called "long time no see" and it includes any songs I've
| listened to more than 10 times but haven't listened to in the
| last year. I've been using the same music library for nearly
| two decades now, so it works really well for me. It's like a
| constantly rotating nostalgia playlist.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| Love that you've got archival stuff and Christmas music
| filtered out - feels like everyone with a big library has a few
| odd folders that shouldn't be in regular rotation
| gigel82 wrote:
| I have Navidrome with the "play:Sub" app on iOS (because it works
| with carplay) for a few obscure albums and it works ok, but I
| still pay for Spotify because it's convenient and it has most of
| the music I want.
|
| When we start getting the same splintering that we have with
| video (too many subscriptions to count), I'll dust off my old
| eyepatch and start sailing the seven seas... :(
| xanadu132 wrote:
| yes yes yes
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| I self host Navidrome. Works pretty well.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Do you use a local client that accepts caching/offline playback
| of the content ?
|
| I'm looking through the android clients and none seem to fully
| embrace keeping the most played tracks on device ("offline
| mode"). Tempo[0] has in on the wip list, while StreamMusic
| straight removed in it the latest update[1], so as of now it
| looks like a pretty tough feature to get.
|
| Listening to music in remote places is nice, and that was the
| main reason for paying for Spotify for me.
|
| [0] https://github.com/CappielloAntonio/tempo#readme [1]
| https://music.aqzscn.cn/docs/versions/latest/
| thebluelad wrote:
| Symfonium has been great in my experience and does offline
| and caching. Check it out: https://symfonium.app/
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Every couple of years, I buy a used Sansa Clip+ from ebay to
| replace the previous one that suffered physical damage. I
| transfer over the 128GB/256GB sd card. Voila - entire music
| collection in the size of a box of matches, no need for data
| connections, or a working phone, or fumbling with a screen
| when I'm working out.
| c64d81744074dfa wrote:
| SHHHHHH!!!! Don't tell people that or pretty soon we won't
| be able to find them any more! ;)
|
| Seriously though, seconded, but also install Rockbox:
| https://www.rockbox.org/
| ishanjain28 wrote:
| I wish more artists would sell their music on Bandcamp. I use
| jellyfin for music but acquiring music is difficult.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| If you can't find a place to pay for it, then just do what
| Spotify did when they launched. I recommend Nuclear[0] for that
|
| [0] https://nuclearplayer.com/
| iamdamian wrote:
| Why is acquiring music difficult? If it's DRM you're worried
| about, the iTunes Store is all (or at least primarily) DRM-
| free.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I really want to use Jellyfin for music, but unfortunately it
| separates albums based on directories and not by reading the
| metadata, so if you have an album separated into "Disc 1", "Disc
| 2", etc, each disc shows up as a separate album.
|
| I really don't want to restructure my library just for Jellyfin,
| so I basically can't use it.
| meonkeys wrote:
| Pretty sure it does use metadata and folder/filename as
| fallback.
|
| Musicbrainz Picard is great for normalizing metadata for music
| files/albums, maybe give that a shot.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| It does read metadata, but splits albums by directory
| regardless. And my metadata is already correct.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| My problem stays the same -- finding all my music that is on
| Spotify from elsewhere. It costs a lot to buy those music files
| and that too if they are available (which isn't always the case)
| and even after I buy I am not sure what were the T&C from that
| particular place I bought - whether I really own it, I don't, a
| bit but not fully - etc. Finding from Linux ISO sites is a
| nightmare and an extra bad nightmare if we are talking about some
| 2K - 0.6K songs (because I have 600 from before I started
| streaming). I wish there was an easy way for this - plug and play
| kinda.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| This is a vendor lock-in more than anything. As someone who
| listens to mostly dubstep and EDM and built my playlist off of
| Spotify, I can't move to Spotify because they don't have half
| my playlists
| bhaney wrote:
| > I wish there was an easy way for this - plug and play kinda
|
| I can click a button in Lidarr to auth with Spotify and
| automatically search usenet for every album of every artist I
| follow on spotify, download them all, and make them available
| in Jellyfin. It'll even monitor the spotify account and import
| new additions. Getting the whole stack set up is pretty much
| the exact opposite of plug and play, but once you have it all
| installed it's amazing how much becomes smooth sailing. 2K
| songs is nothing for this kind of stack.
| afavour wrote:
| I'm going to assume OP isn't interested in piracy given they
| were talking about buying...
| bhaney wrote:
| They said "finding from Linux ISO sites is a nightmare" and
| I took that to be a euphemism for piracy sites. They just
| find navigating and using those sites to be annoying, which
| is totally fair if you don't have software doing it for
| you.
| sailfast wrote:
| Sure, but that's piracy. Kinda like saying Winamp is
| alternative to Spotify. The music is kinda the most important
| thing.
| bhaney wrote:
| > Sure, but that's piracy
|
| You got me there
|
| > Kinda like saying Winamp is alternative to Spotify
|
| No, it's really not like saying that. I was responding to a
| post lamenting the difficulty of acquiring the files for
| the music they've already discovered on Spotify, and I
| brought up a music file acquisition system that pulls from
| what they've discovered on Spotify. That's different than
| comparing a local player to a discovery system.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is really just unauthorized copying. No boats were
| boarded, nobody was murdered.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| That's the premise of this whole thread. Nobody is going to
| buy albums on itunes to self host them. The ergonomics and
| economics just don't work out.
| npodbielski wrote:
| I try to do that. Sadly this is sometimes very hard. I
| often fine myself in situation when I can't buy album I
| like. It is nowhere to be found. Sometimes I can't even
| pirate it because this so niche.
| sussmannbaka wrote:
| If you feel bad, buy a single song of each artist
| afterwards and you have given them vastly more money than
| listening to them on Spotify will ever generate.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I ran my own seedbox for close to 12 years on a VPS. My
| choice was either never upgrading the OS (which was always an
| Ubuntu server) or setting up everything all over again. There
| were few more things like a VPN, a note app at one point, 2fa
| setup and so on. Finally I stopped and this Nov the VPN will
| expire and I am planning to let it go really.
|
| I see where you are coming from but all that experience
| really tired me out. People say once you do it, it's forever
| but is it? I appreciate it that some people can do it -- no I
| really do -- but maybe it's not for everybody.
|
| Then there are managed solutions -- oh, I am sure there would
| be, there were and are for seedboxes as well but the good
| managed seedboxes sometimes would cost as much or half of my
| annual VPS cost in a month, yes 1:12 or so. Now I believe
| there's nothing wrong with pricing a managed solution high
| but not all can afford it or are willing to afford it.
|
| I really appreciate it though. Would you mind sharing a
| tutorial if you've saved one somewhere and what disk, CPU,
| and memory I am looking at for this? That would be very kind.
| bhaney wrote:
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it sounds like your
| problems with your VPS and VPN come from having someone
| else hosting those services for you and restricting how you
| can use them instead of just doing them yourself. Things
| are indeed much more permanent (at least as much as you
| want them to be) when you actually do them yourself.
|
| > Would you mind sharing a tutorial if you've saved one
| somewhere
|
| I would if I had one, but I mostly just googled the
| official installation instructions for any random component
| I wanted. No overall tutorials. Service-wise, I'm using
| Jellyseerr to discover content and take requests from
| friends/family, Radarr for sourcing movies, Sonarr for
| sourcing TV shows, Lidarr for sourcing music, Prowlarr for
| centralizing the configuration of the other *arrs, Sabnzbd
| as a usenet download client, rtorrent as a bittorrent
| client, and Jellyfin for consuming my library. You probably
| don't need all of those depending on what you're after, but
| you can just look up the instructions for only the
| components you want. And if you want to get content from
| usenet or private torrent trackers, you'll need the
| relevant accounts.
|
| > what disk, CPU, and memory I am looking at for this?
|
| Whatever you want honestly. You can run most of this on a
| toaster so long as you don't have unrealistic performance
| expectations for it. Obviously if you're planning to
| download 10TB worth of content, you're going to need at
| least that much disk space, and if you're planning to
| download it faster than HDDs can spin, you might need some
| SSDs. But most of these things are just downloaders and
| file managers and don't really need much more than network
| bandwidth to source the content and disk IO to put the
| content somewhere. Maybe 8GB of memory for some of the more
| bloated services (my whole server idles at ~5GB used, and
| it runs a lot of other junk) and to do really large indexer
| merges when searching for content, and however much
| hardware you need to meet your transcoding requirements if
| you're playing through Jellyfin or similar. You can stream
| source material without transcoding and consume basically
| no CPU from it, or you can enable transcoding with a decent
| enough CPU or pretty much any supported GPU. All up to you
| and your needs.
|
| I'd recommend starting with pretty minimal hardware and
| adding more as you need it. My storage has quadrupled since
| I started doing this and at some point I tossed in an old
| GPU for transcoding.
| jjulius wrote:
| >It costs a lot to buy those music files...
|
| And the artists and everyone who worked on it thank you very
| much for paying for an album/song instead of just paying a
| streaming subscription fee.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| And like you said, even when you do buy tracks, the T&C are
| murky. Some platforms basically treat it like a long-term lease
| rather than true ownership. Honestly, what we need is a modern,
| ethical "one-click" export + purchase system that lets you grab
| your current library in lossless format and actually own it.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > It costs a lot to buy those music files and that too if they
| are available (which isn't always the case)
|
| Virtually all music, particularly modern music, is made
| available for free on YouTube. You can download it and it's
| yours.
|
| For example, here's the official release of Taylor Swift's
| album "Evermore" for YouTube ("Provided to YouTube by Universal
| Music Group"):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxrMpCMdYwk&list=OLAK5uy_m-v...
| . You should be able to pass the playlist to yt-dlp and
| automatically extract all the audio tracks.
|
| I don't really want wholesale quantities of music, so I do this
| manually, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's tooling around
| for it.
| chillfox wrote:
| Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills.
|
| I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many
| subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions. The
| subscriptions really had gotten out of hand, it had gotten to
| about $200 (AUD) a month.
|
| Quick napkin math is that I have cancelled about ~$150 a month
| worth of subscriptions so far. The $500 office desktop I got for
| a home server is struggling at this point, but it's already paid
| for itself, so I will likely upgrade it to something much better
| later this year.
|
| Currently I am in the process of replacing all the movie
| streaming services with Emby.
|
| Spotify and Adobe lightroom is still on the todo list.
|
| I will likely end up with Youtube, Fastmail and Borgbase being my
| remaining subscriptions once I am done.
| Inviz wrote:
| What do we do about Lightroom? Capture one? How about sharing
| galleries?
| presto8 wrote:
| I like darktable as a Lightroom alternative.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Rawtherapee has a better UX than Lightroom in my opinion and
| I've never felt limited by it.
| anthropodie wrote:
| >Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills.
|
| >I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as
| many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions.
|
| I have been doing the same for quite some time now but it's
| only recently I realized all these subscriptions services are
| just making rich richer. We should encourage self hosting as
| much as possible. I mean why should we pay huge corporations
| more money just for storage?
| flessner wrote:
| For "content subscriptions" (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix) keep
| in mind that a part of the revenue goes towards the content
| creators.
|
| For anything else, I can also highly recommend using local or
| self-hosted software. Plenty of open source software has even
| exceeded proprietary alternatives in the last couple years.
| itissid wrote:
| You know if we could this open source self hosted stuff
| with a layer of Patreon on top people would pay something
| to all the people. If one could make it non-intrusive it
| could become a decent alternative to paying all these
| artists. I think Kanopy.com comes pretty close, its funded
| by tax payer dollars and is available via your local
| library.
| pdntspa wrote:
| It is an incredibly, and almost criminally, small portion
| of the pie
| chappi42 wrote:
| Better than nothing...
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| At this point you might just order a tshirt from an indie
| band once a year to help out artists more than with a
| Spotify subscription.
| pdntspa wrote:
| Is it though? If it were nothing artists might be in a
| better negotiating position to demand something. But now
| instead of demanding payment, they are asking for a raise
| instead.
| chillfox wrote:
| Sure, but they also got a cut from all of those dvds I
| bought before streaming services was a thing or the new
| dvds/blu-rays I am picking up now.
|
| I mostly watch movies I have already seen before, but with
| the fragmentation and constant moving around that's
| happening with steaming services I would frequently end up
| using 3+ different ones every month. The constant
| cancel/renew cycle was a real hassle and very error prone,
| I would often forget one or two.
|
| I only watch about 20 new movies a year, so even without
| hunting for bargains I will easily save a lot of money. But
| I will be looking for bargains, because why not.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| I suspect that buying an album through bandcamp results in
| the artist receiving way more money than what a
| subscription will ever pay them.
| flessner wrote:
| Absolutely, this was more of an appeal towards the
| "torrent crowd" that often doesn't even think about
| compensating the artists.
| layoric wrote:
| This reflects a lot of what I've been through as well. My
| subscriptions exploded when AU got a lot of different streaming
| platforms, and I think when paramount+ came out and took Star
| Trek off of another one I drew the line. I realised I still
| owned all the physical media, so time to make backups. Previous
| to that I moved off Gmail, that was by far the hardest, and
| still somewhat ongoing after 8+ years.
|
| The hardest to kick for me now is YouTube Premium.. And in AU
| it's like $33/month AUD, but I just can't stand ads.
|
| Now I self host:
|
| - Own Mastodon instance - Photos (Synology) - Videos (Synology)
| - Audio (Synology) - Storage (Minio) - Code/Build (Forejo) -
| Security (Synology)
|
| My NAS is blocked from the internet, while web facing stuff is
| on a separate server (old dell workstation). And now have added
| a PI hole to another older dell box. My partner's laptop will
| be moving to Linux and will also be a Windows free household. I
| used Windows since 3.1, I liked it up until around Windows 7.
| I'm glad I've moved to Linux, but disappointed to see what has
| happened to Windows in general.
|
| I want to self host more services for family, but the
| experience isn't there yet without quite a lot of work.
|
| The tags #homelab and #selfhost are pretty decent to follow on
| Mastodon btw!
| Root_Denied wrote:
| >The hardest to kick for me now is YouTube Premium.. And in
| AU it's like $33/month AUD, but I just can't stand ads.
|
| Any reason you're not just running network level AdGuard and
| Firefox with Ublock Origin to block all ads on your home
| network? Even just FF+UBO would block YouTube ads.
|
| The selfhosted subreddit is also a really good resource to
| use for interesting things to run.
| kassner wrote:
| If you use Android. On iOS, even Pihole with isn't enough.
| godelski wrote:
| DNS blockers aren't good enough to block all ads.
| Especially YouTube. Plus, many browsers will ignore DNS
| without configuration and same for phone apps. While this
| can be fine for me it's not for everyone else in my family
| nor guests. And that's before we talk about Apple...
|
| If anyone has a solution I'd love to learn.
| volteret4 wrote:
| I use Invidious whitout a a hassle, and firefox with
| ublock when I can not.
|
| For android there is New Pipe and some forks.
|
| I prefer to pay my yt loved channels than ser a fucking
| add
| godelski wrote:
| You misunderstand the goal. > to block
| all ads on your home network?
|
| That. That is the problem we're looking at.
|
| I already use Firefox on /my computer/. We were talking
| about a pihole or some /network/ solution. How do I block
| ads on my friends computer when they get into my network
| without touching their computer? How do I block ads on my
| TV? You'd have to do something like deep packet
| inspection. Devices I fully control I can trivially solve
| this but there are plenty of devices I don't, including
| ones I own.
|
| And for Android, you know you can use revanced, right?
| You can recompile the app and others to get more control
| steine65 wrote:
| If you have a tv with WebOS there is an ad-removed
| youtube app you can load. Doesn't solve your friend's
| problem but might solve part of the problem.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Ublock Origin is sufficient to block all ads on youtube.
| godelski wrote:
| You're misunderstanding the problem.
|
| We were talking DNS blockers. The context matters. I
| already use ublock but I can't do ublock on my pihole. I
| can't do it on an iPhone (I can use orion browser but
| YouTube quality is low). I can't do it on my TV. I can't
| do it on my friends computer that visits my house. And so
| on. I appreciate you trying to help but you're
| misunderstanding the problem and honestly I don't know
| how someone could be on HN and not know about ublock.
| godelski wrote:
| I've been on this mission but unfortunately also trying to
| defend my PhD in a month. But I do have a lot more Linux
| experience. Here's stuff that I think will really help.
|
| yt-dlp: a video downloaded. Originally designed for YouTube
| but supports a lot of sites. I suggest heavily aliasing this
| with options like sleep intervals, aria2, and make sure you
| download the user agent switcher. For YouTube you probably
| need to import cookies from a browser. But you'll be able to
| watch the videos without the ads.
|
| Btrfs: it's a file system, like ext4 or ntfs. Has a lot of
| useful things like being able to create subvolumes, raid,
| cache drives (or volumes), quotas, snapshots, etc. Think
| anything that you'd do with zfs but it's been easier to use
| and it has a copy on write system that helps dedupe. You can
| also compress the file system! I use duperemover. If it finds
| dupes it replaces one file with a link (which btrfs natively
| supports). It'll hash the files so run it early and then set
| up a job (use a systemd timer)
|
| Tailscale: take your network anywhere. God, tailscale is so
| fucking useful. You can even put it on a raspberry pi or your
| phones. It's nice to have it on an old phone which you can
| throw termux on and have a little server. I've used these to
| jump to another machine that has had issues where it could
| connect locally but not outside. You can also set up exit
| nodes so you can do things like push all your traffic through
| a vpn, make all your traffic use pihole, or just make it
| appear like you're somewhere else. You could use this to even
| make it effectively impossible for streaming services to know
| you're sharing an account. The data is going through
| whoever's house pays. If you get fancy you can set up rules
| to port specific traffic through specific locations but this
| is still a bit above my head. I just know it's possible.
| Unfortunately with iPhones you have less control. They can
| even break out of all this and you don't have full control. I
| need to get someone to explain more networking to me.
|
| Systemd: it's annoying at first but damn there's so much to
| it that is helpful. Use systemctl edit to edit your service
| files. The ones that come with services like jellyfin aren't
| nearly as locked down as they should be (I intend to push to
| them in a few months). You should also use systemd mount for
| your drives. You need a companion automount file but your
| drives will go offline when not being used. This will really
| help with reducing energy costs. Be sure to note that there's
| even configs for you gpus. It also lets you control a systems
| resources. There's also nspawn and vmspawn. I wish these were
| a bit more popular because they can do everything docker can
| and more. Nspawn is a suped up chroot so you can really
| containerize things and even run different Linux flavors
| (I've even been play around with running an arm container on
| my x86 machine). Using machinectl you can enable these as
| services and even create triggers to spin up or down. There's
| also importctl so if you create an image (or someone else
| does) you can just pull that! Which kinda makes it easier
| than docker in many cases other than the fact that not many
| people have made images (or publicly available). Docker's big
| win is popularity but systemd has felt nicer in every other
| way (documentation sucks). There's so much more to systemd
| and that's why it's loved and hated. There's a reason it
| stuck, it just is too damn useful (don't forget to check out
| homectl too)
|
| Ffmpeg: you probably know this one but it's also worth
| spending some time to learn it more and write some scripts.
| If you care more about storage I encode most stuff to av1
| with nvenc. It's not archival but honestly I'm often getting
| 50% storage reductions and I can't tell the difference. Your
| source file probably wasn't archival grade anyways. Good
| enough for me. Hevc is also giving me good success.
|
| There's a bunch of other little tools that help. For example,
| I have my main computer sitting behind my TV. If I'm working
| on it I'm in it via ssh. Otherwise games and movies are on
| the TV. I use ydotool as a keyboard and just made a shortcut
| on my iPhone and a trivial script on my Android so I can push
| commands that way and use a wireless mouse. There's kconnect
| but it's been more a hassle than help ime. I did the same for
| backing up photos on from my phones (they wake the drives
| first). Android can rsync but for iPhone I can't find a good
| free solution other than writing the hackiest shortcut you've
| seen (ssh in, check if file exists, if not then write. You
| can't rsync, the fucking thing will timeout and despite there
| being terminal emulators for iPhone you can't access your
| photos from them. I've found zero ways to link them and I'm
| upset). Check out things like fail2ban to jail users that do
| too many logins. You can also use nspawn to containerize
| these services, spin up and down, and between btrfs, homectl,
| and pam it is really easy to containerize users. You can
| mount their volumes on demand and get their accounts syncing
| across your intranet. It's kinda crazy what you can do.
|
| My goal is to get some images so many of these things can
| start becoming plug and play. I'm getting close but obviously
| bigger priorities right now. I'd love help if anyone is
| interested. I'm not an expert in these domains so I'm sure
| I'm doing some things wrong but I'm learning a ton
| steine65 wrote:
| This is great. If you ever wrote about your entire setup
| I'd love to read it. Got a few new ideas from your post. To
| anyone reading, the most helpful tool for setting up my
| homelab is the community helper-scripts (formerly tteck,
| RIP). Those have saved me soooo much time, and showed me
| best practices in setup, and the list of scripts give you a
| good idea of tools that are commonly used.
| fabatka wrote:
| What about backups? My greatest fear is self-hosting valuable
| stuff (like family photos) only for my NAS to fail one day
| and lose potentially everything.
| switch007 wrote:
| There are good options. Borg, rsync.net with zfs send/recv.
| Storage boxes from Hetzner
|
| Hard to make a particular recommendation as backing up to
| the cloud is a popular option but depends on your upload
| speed and rate of data change. And depends how much you're
| willing to spend for what tradeoff
| yard2010 wrote:
| Storage box from hetzner is great. Hetzner is a good
| company, I'm glad that I'm doing business with them. The
| service is good, cheap, reliable, and... Un-american
| which means it would probably stay good and won't
| enshitify.
|
| Use Hetzner! I'm not affiliated just a happy customer.
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| Once a year I sync all media from my laptop to a USB disk.
| Once in a while I buy a new disk. This is more than enough
| backup for me.
| chillfox wrote:
| I keep important data on a zpool that's mirrored across 2
| drives, I snapshot it nightly, zfs send/receive the
| snapshot a drive on a different machine, and run a
| borgmatic/borg backup to borgbase 3 times a week. I also
| run a scrub on it quarterly.
|
| So I effectively have multiple layers of backups.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A
| quick math will show that it's not insignificant
| SECProto wrote:
| > Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A
| quick math will show that it's not insignificant
|
| If you run it 24/7 on a dedicated desktop with decent idle
| (i.e. no high power video card, low power CPU), it likely
| uses ~ 50W average. That gives an estimate of 0.05kW _24hr_
| 30 = 36kWh, which would be in the range of $12/month at
| current australian electricity prices. If you have bad idle
| power usage (or somehow mostly active not idle), maybe you'd
| be looking at twice that. But for OP who was spending
| $xxx/month on subscriptions, it's a pretty negligible cost.
| If you really want to save this too, raspPi can do a lot of
| home server needs nowadays
| ninjinxo wrote:
| An N100 minipc or second-hand Dell Optiplex doesn't cost
| too much more than a rasp-Pi ($100-200), has a lot more
| power, and will only pull about 10W idle.
|
| My optiplex shows as 8.191 kwh last month -> 11w average.
| 01100011 wrote:
| And while it heats your home in the winter, it also puts more
| strain on your A/C in the summer.
|
| There are also noise and light pollution issues if it's near
| a bedroom.
| bane wrote:
| Unraid makes a lot of the home lab stuff pretty easy. There's a
| very active community, good docs, frequent updates. It costs a
| little, but it's one time and worth it, and can grow as you
| have time and money to add stuff to it.
| udev4096 wrote:
| You have to be extremely dumb to even think of using unraid.
| It introduces a hard dependency on whatever you do and is
| nothing more than a glorious wrapper for managing docker
| services
| bane wrote:
| What dependency is that?
|
| Unraid is mostly used for storage management, the docker
| and vm parts are definitely side bits to the system.
| udev4096 wrote:
| Yes, mostly storage. But why? Storage == ZFS. ZFS cli is
| well documented and works extremely well. Don't use
| unraid or truenas or any other fancy UI. I know the
| appeal from the beginners but it's not worth it
| bane wrote:
| You might be amazed to discover there's a an entire world
| of storage outside of ZFS.
| smj-edison wrote:
| What do you do for backups? I'm just setting up an Emby
| instance with a 4 TB hard drive attached, but I'm worried it'll
| fail and take everything with it.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Not OP, but I use a PI with attached SSD as a backup server,
| and then save that stuff to Backblaze B2 as additional cloud
| backup.
| nickspacek wrote:
| Look into Backblaze B2. Use rclone, or another backup tool
| that has S3 compatibility (though B2 API has some additional
| bells and whistles).
|
| With rclone, you can also have a step to seamlessly encrypt
| the contents on the client side before sending to an external
| provider like B2.
|
| I chose B2 because it is the most affordable option, but
| rclone supports many backends.
| switch007 wrote:
| Rclone is a great tool but it is not really a complete
| backup tool. Ie no snapshots.
|
| You can use it to sync local snapshots or to a destination
| that does snapshots for example
|
| Borg/restic are more complete solutions
| dharmab wrote:
| Amazon S3 Deep Archive and rclone for < 4-5TB. Backblaze in a
| Windows VM or container for 5TB+.
| Beijinger wrote:
| How much is this a month? Opendrive.com is 100 USD a year
| for 10 TB
| dharmab wrote:
| You can look at their pricing (it depends on region).
|
| With my usage I'm paying about $25 annually using S3. But
| if I ever need to full restore I'll be paying around $100
| in data transfer fees.
| russelg wrote:
| Is there really a point in backing up media? Unless you've
| ripped it yourself, I'm sure anything you have is easily
| obtainable again.
| al_borland wrote:
| Some things are popular in the moment and very hard to come
| by 10-20 years later if they aren't pretty popular. TV
| shows especially.
|
| I've been considering buying some of those giant DVD lots
| that come up on Craigslist from time to time, or checking
| out flea markets for good deals.
|
| With the way things are heading, one of my fears is I will
| get old and lose access to some of the shows are movies I
| loved in my youth. Licensing with streaming services are so
| fickle, and some others are removed or edited if they
| around found to be politically incorrect a decade or two
| after being made. I want to make sure I still have access
| to the original versions.
|
| I do often wish I was one of those people who didn't care,
| and could be happy with an iPad as my main computer, but
| it's not in the cards for me.
| chillfox wrote:
| This, if you have some favorites or just movies that
| remind you of your youth, don't wait, go get them on dvd
| now. It gets harder and more expensive the longer you
| wait.
|
| I have been hunting down the movies that I was watching
| when growing up and it's been a real mission, especially
| the really old ones that were made before I was born.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| It's the other way around if anything. If you ripped it
| yourself, you still have the original media and can rip it
| again. If you sailed the seven seas, it may or may not be
| around if you go to look for it in the future.
| dharmab wrote:
| Another one I realized - content is often edited in later
| versions. Two examples in my collection are the theatrical
| vs current versions of the Star Wars trilogy, and Top Gear,
| which had the original licensed music replaced by worse
| generic music in newer releases.
| chillfox wrote:
| In general I use Borg/Borgmatic with borgbase for backup, but
| movies are a little big, so for now I am just using zfs
| send/receive to keep a copy on a usb drive updated. Once I am
| done getting the encoding pipeline scripted (av1/opus/vtt)
| and the size goes down I will likely start sending it to
| borgbase as well, or maybe store a copy at my mums place.
|
| I would prefer to use a cloud backup solution that supports
| zfs send/receive, but they are a bit pricy. zfs.rent seems
| like a nice solution, but not sure using a US location is a
| great idea.
| russelg wrote:
| Is there a reason you went with Emby over Jellyfin (forked from
| Emby)?
| chillfox wrote:
| Emby just felt more polished and focused while Jellyfin felt
| like it was on the path towards feature bloat. Also, I had
| more confidence in Emby supporting future devices I might get
| than Jellyfin.
|
| When it comes to supporting multiple media types
| (video/audiobooks/music/etc..) I prefer using a seperate
| solution for each that is focused on that use case instead of
| an all-in-one solution.
|
| I am using audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts, so I
| really don't need that from my video solution.
|
| I have configured Emby to keep the metadata in nfo files next
| to the videos, so I should be able to easily switch to
| something else if things change in the future.
| Ziggy_Zaggy wrote:
| With all the SWE in the mix, why not just roll your own media
| player...? It's not THAT hard. Same for movie player btw (and
| one solution can do both ofc).
|
| HTML spec for media is pretty amazing these days, no real
| excuses outside of time.
| chillfox wrote:
| Time is pretty much the reason.
| nadnad wrote:
| Would love to hear more details about your setup.
| chillfox wrote:
| It's a pretty simple setup. I run Alpine Linux with ZFS, all
| apps are in docker containers managed with docker-compose,
| Caddy for reverse proxy, borgmatic/borg for backup, and some
| scripts managing zfs snapshots.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| > The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling
| at this point
|
| I have a ~10 years old desktop as my server (intel skylake and
| 24GB of RAM). I host about 20 services and the server is not
| loaded at all.
|
| The services are the usual ones, nothing heavy such as LLMs,
| though
| chillfox wrote:
| I have got 26 docker containers running on it. Looking at
| current utilization, it's 6% of cpu, 10GB ram out of 16gb.
| The issue is disk access. The thing has total shit bandwidth
| to storage, this was a surprise to me and a bit of a learning
| experience. It has an nvme ssd and a 3.5 hdd, but in the end
| usb drives attached to the usb 2 ports are much faster than
| either. It's a Lenovo, so I guess they cut costs somewhere
| and the usb 2 ports should have been a giveaway, but I was
| tricked by the nvme.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| $150/month shaved off is no joke. It's funny how these
| subscriptions creep up until you're basically running a second
| rent in background services.
| bambax wrote:
| Self hosting is absolutely awesome.
|
| I upgraded my NAS to a recent Asustor a year ago and it changed
| my life. JellyFin for video works perfectly everywhere in my
| home, on any device, and it can also be accessed remotely,
| securely, with Tailscale, so if I'm in a hotel somewhere with
| my iPad it still works.
|
| And my library is curated by me; it has classic movies and
| other movies I like, and zero fluff or random shows that I
| would never watch in a million years.
|
| But self hosting doesn't stop here. Using Docker (via
| Portainer) I can publish any app in minutes, on either Apache
| or Nginx, securely with a Cloudflare tunnel (free) without ever
| exposing my home IP to the world.
|
| This of course isn't as resilient as a proper server with a
| proper provider, but it's so much simpler and so much cheaper
| that for hobby projects it's largely good enough.
| zaphodias wrote:
| I'm doing the same, I have family plans with my friends for
| pretty much anything so I don't think I ever reached such high
| monthly costs though.
|
| I started my home server for self hosting Immich, not only for
| the cost but because I like to have my images close to me.
|
| I also recently replaced Lightroom with ON1, it's definitely
| not the same quality but, as hobbyist, it didn't make much
| sense to pay that much for me anymore. It was by far the most
| expensive subscription I had.
| lhamil64 wrote:
| Where do you get media from? Piracy is an option, but if you
| want to do it semi-legally I guess you'd need to rip blu-rays,
| but that seems like it'd be more expensive than streaming
| services, and you'd have to wait for everything to be released
| on blu-ray (if it even does)
| chillfox wrote:
| I have a large dvd collection from before streaming was
| really a thing, but yeah I just get blu-rays of the movies I
| really like. Most of the movies I watch is ones I have
| already watched. I was really only watching 1-2 movies a
| month that were new to me with streaming, and few of them
| were actually new releases.
| etra0 wrote:
| I recently bought a mini pc too and gave the self-host
| shenanigans a roll. It was _definitely_ worth it.
|
| Using traefik + tailscale + dns challenge with CloudFlare, I was
| able to self-host and make my services available only through the
| vpn without loosing HTTPS on all the subdomains. It's lovely!
| someonehere wrote:
| If you haven't been keeping up with Plex, self-hosters like
| myself and others are up in arms over the client rewrite. It
| feels like the Sonos update for us. Broken features. Useful
| functionality removed. UI that's more streaming focused than
| self-hosting like it used to be.
|
| If you haven't gone down the Plex path yet, don't right now as
| the community and developers sort out their roadmap. Plex seems
| to be open to feedback, but a lot of us feel betrayed. They had
| open user testing for the new apps but they didn't implement or
| fix any of the reported issues.
| al_borland wrote:
| I've been using Plex since it was a Mac only XBMC fork. While
| it's drastically different than where it started, I haven't
| noticed any recent changes. I do 99% of my viewing via the
| AppleTV app and it hasn't changed. I removed all the shortcuts
| for their streaming stuff long ago.
|
| I'm running the server in Docker and pretty lazy about updating
| it. Is that the side that changed? It looks like I'm running
| 1.27 and 1.41 is out now. Should I be sticking with what I
| have?
| INTPenis wrote:
| The good thing about docker is that you can just spin up 1.41
| in another container and check it out.
| DarkCrusader2 wrote:
| I moved away from Plex when they started shoving free B/C
| movies with lewd posters on my home page and made is very hard
| and confusing to remove (if removing it completely was even an
| option, I still don't know).
|
| The whole reason I host plex is that I want an offline
| experience that I curate myself. The requirement for internet
| to authenticate and shoveling crapware in my face pushed me
| towards trying Jellyfin. The Jellyfin UI on TV and mobile is
| not as flashy and polished as Plex, but it is extremely
| functional and respects users choices.
|
| Been a happy Jellyfin customer for years now though I only use
| it to organize and browse my library now. Actual playback is
| either MPV on PC or Kodi over NFS on TV. After trying many many
| players, these were the two I found best for respective
| platforms, nothing else even comes close.
| anthonypz wrote:
| What about their plexamp app for streaming music? It looks
| pretty nice and seems like a good deal if you purchase the
| lifetime plan for 50% off during Black Friday.
| npodbielski wrote:
| I never really understood what is the point od running
| something locally and then registering on .com domain. Like if
| I will loose internet connection I cant listem my own music?
| Seemed radicoulous. But I guess it does nit require much
| knowledge and people keep using it.
| wallstprog wrote:
| On another note, Jellyfin can look inside .iso files, which
| afaict Plex is not able to. Very handy with my collection of
| ripped dvd's.
| dankwizard wrote:
| This article fails to mention the absolute butchering of features
| that takes place moving from a typical music streaming
| subscription to a self hosted Jellyfin library.
|
| A large part of my listening on YouTube Music is going to a
| particular song or band I like and clicking "Radio", which
| generates a playlist of similar sounding songs. You can then fine
| tune it with a filter i.e "Popular songs, deep cuts" or specific
| elements of the song "More emo", "Slow paced" etc. This exposes
| me to a lot of new music and keeps it fresh and if I'm lucky I'll
| discover a new artist or song to add to my rotations.
|
| You lose that.
|
| A lot of these services overtime build mixes which takes your
| listening habits and tries to categorize them into specific mixes
| made up of your existing library & new music.
|
| I don't browse any music forums and so apart from my favourite
| bands, I have no idea on when artists I like release new albums
| and would not encounter them on a self hosted solution, etc.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > I have no idea on when artists I like release new albums and
| would not encounter them on a self hosted solution, etc.
|
| Depending on what you like, bandcamp makes it easy. You can
| follow any artist (which is also offered whenever you buy), and
| from then on get release notifications. But of course, what's
| available differs by genre. For metal, most bands are on BC,
| except most Japanese artists and major label stuff.
|
| I buy, download, and put the flacs on my Jellyfin server.
|
| There are, of course, also piracy solutions for that, pretty
| sure the *arr stuff has automatic downloading per artist.
| closewith wrote:
| A slower speed on the hedonic treadmill is a feature of self-
| hosting, not a bug.
| jjulius wrote:
| It's a "YMMV" situation, because...
|
| I don't want that. At all. It's algorithmic and there's nothing
| stopping artists and labels paying for placement in there. I
| don't want that.
|
| I am a musician, and a DJ, and I've been digging deep through
| artist and label catalogues on my own for decades. The process
| of discovery via my preexisting routes is far more fruitful,
| enjoyable and rewarding than lazily letting an algorithm do the
| work.
|
| But I like doing that. This works for me, not for others.
| wormius wrote:
| I miss last.fm and audioscrobbler so much. Yeah it's still
| there, but it's not like the old days, which was far better
| for feeling like I was in touch with other users, finding
| tons of new music, and not hearing yet another Home Depot ad.
|
| I half wonder if Spotify US is one of those harbingers of
| doom for the old web in the same way I think of Twitter and
| iPhone/SPAs/The Stream UI.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Fun fact since I already ranted about last.fm being the
| bees knees when it integrated with Spotify - my wife looked
| up on lastfm music compatibility after we first met and her
| and a Russian lady are the only 3 above like 75% similar
| taste in music. Small world but also wild that it's not so
| small.
|
| Big streamers cater to most people's interests of music and
| are probably satisfactory for them but for us weirdos in
| music last.fm and it's music genome thing were amazing.
| _-_-__-_-_- wrote:
| ListenBrainz has filled that void for me. My profile here,
| https://listenbrainz.org/user/iPodSmypod/ Blog post on the
| topic: https://theonlyblogever.com/blog/2025/scrobbling-
| libre.html
| armSixtyFour wrote:
| I would have agreed with you 3 years ago. But now not so much.
|
| Spotify "Radio" feature just tends to want to give me music
| I've already listened to over new music. Whatever algorithm
| they are using has waaaay overfit to what I have already liked.
|
| There used to be curated playlists done by humans, now almost
| everything is "made for you by Spotify" playlists which, have
| the exact same issue as the radio stations, suddenly it's all
| the same music you've already been listening to, very little
| new music. If you want new music, you need to find a playlist
| made by a user instead.
| lolive wrote:
| Spotify << radio >> is the best reason to listen to real
| radios ! [honestly the DJs on most of the radios I listen to
| are insanely skilled !]
|
| Btw, is there somewhere a search engine to know when a given
| [set of] track was played where, in the internet radio world?
| grepexdev wrote:
| This! I recently ditched Spotify and rediscovered radio in
| the past few weeks. There are so many great songs I've come
| across from bands I enjoy that I had never heard of
| because, as someone else said, Spotify's algorithm is way
| overfit.
| 10729287 wrote:
| It's also great sometimes to discover great music from
| genre you usually don't like, or... just be exposed to
| songs you don't like. This is what helps building a
| musical culture.
|
| Please allow me to recommend FIP, as a human (it's a
| classic here but there's no such thing as recommending
| too much FIP) : https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip
| conradfr wrote:
| Radio Paradise is a great alternative to FIP.
|
| https://radioparadise.com
| lolive wrote:
| Both are classics. I like SomaFM-GrooveSalad too. Oh and
| BBC6, or course. [The podcast of Guy Garvey is an absolut
| must, in my sunday schedule]
| easyKL wrote:
| France Inter Paris (FIP) it's awesome!
|
| And remember you can always get the audio steam through
| HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), on its M3U format, or others
| with better quality. There are many Android apps like
| Transistor to enjoy the stream, and even VLC can open
| these, in order to avoid using a web browser.
|
| Likewise, I prefer online radios than big tech algorithms
| that craft my music experience.
| j_french wrote:
| FIP and NTS are my goto's. The discovery features for
| shows on NTS and the "in focus" specials are great, so
| many good opportunities there for serendipitous
| listening. Will def check out radio paradise
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Have you tried searching other user's playlists instead?
| At least for me, that's how I have been using Spotify's
| to discover new music.
| dv_dt wrote:
| I don't know if its the best at this, but I've been
| listening to radio from around the world at
| https://radio.garden/
| LMSolar wrote:
| For a certain range of indie pop, KCRW's Eclectic24 is
| great: https://www.kcrw.com/music/shows/eclectic24
| Affric wrote:
| 100%
|
| No algorithm has been able to be able to be as weird but
| consistent as a community radio DJ.
|
| The radio can still surprise and delight like little else.
| All the tech companies have been able to replicate is the
| disappointment.
|
| Not to say never but people's great advantage here is that
| they're people.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| I respectfully disagree. If you're into classic rock
| those stations are pivoting around here to 90s and 2000s
| rock since that's "classic" now. Then you're left with
| ButtRock stations that play mostly the same thing every
| day at the same times in the same order. The best radio
| we had in our area was a college station that has an hour
| or two of stuff I'm interested in or as close to a legal
| pirate radio you can get (100w tower) that shut down -
| THAT was amazing. Had a ton of DJs who played things they
| liked.
|
| Outside of rock you're left with automated pop and
| country stations who have computerized playlists.
|
| note - I'm in the Midwest US.
| skyyler wrote:
| Community radio DJ. Community being the important part.
|
| Most of the radio stations here in Columbus, Ohio are
| what you described, the clearchannel / IHeartMedia
| stations.
|
| However, there is an independent radio station and it's
| so great. They play Democracy Now! during the daytime and
| they have a rotating list of shows for the evening. I've
| heard some really great music during the evening shows.
|
| https://www.wcrsfm.org/
|
| If you're in Columbus, tune in to 98.3 or 92.7 FM!
| Affric wrote:
| Thanks for putting it so well.
|
| Commercial radio is the devil.
|
| Classic rock exists to sell lawn mowers to middle aged
| men
| jonesjohnson wrote:
| reminds me that i should donate to somafm again :-)
| cess11 wrote:
| Good idea.
|
| To those who aren't in the know already, it's this:
|
| https://somafm.com/player/
|
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dgmltn.
| rad...
| conradfr wrote:
| https://onlineradiobox.com has the data but doesn't search
| on it it seems.
|
| Disclaimer I make https://www.radio-addict.com but only
| retrieve the played song data on demand (never tried to
| probe all 80k+ radio streams at the same time on my small
| server, could be fun), but searching on it could be a new
| feature (it's stored in Elixir genservers :D)
| lolive wrote:
| Wasn't TuneIn providing this search feature before?
| lolive wrote:
| "Listen to a random radio" is the summum of serendipity,
| man ! #kudos
| panstromek wrote:
| YouTube is much better than Spotify for this in my
| experience.
| timeon wrote:
| My experience with YouTube is that I start with an obscure
| song/artist and it will gradually bring me to the
| mainstream. Maybe that is just me... I feel like ideal
| algorithms died with last.fm era.
| benfortuna wrote:
| Does noone use the Spotify "daylist" playlist, that cycles
| between genres you have listened to previously?
|
| This regular plays music I have never heard (both old and
| new).
| ruszki wrote:
| Do you mean daily mix playlists? From the first 20 songs 17
| are something which I added to my library, or listen them
| regularly. The rest of the 3 songs? 2 of them are from
| artists whom I listen to regularly. 1 clearly new song.
|
| I have very similar rate with "daytime mix".
|
| So which one do you mean? "Discover weekly" and "release
| radar" have new songs, yeah. But "radios" are like the
| previously mentioned playlists.
| benfortuna wrote:
| No none of those. Is a special dynamic playlist, starting
| to wonder if its not a standard playlist everyone has..
|
| sort of like the DJ mix without the annoying voice.
| https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1EP6YuccBxUcC1
| amelius wrote:
| Not available for everybody.
|
| > As of today, daylist is available to both Free and
| Premium users across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia,
| New Zealand, and Ireland at spotify.com/daylist.
|
| https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-09-12/ever-changing-
| playli...
|
| (note: old post, but still accurate?)
| lawgimenez wrote:
| I'm in Southeast Asia, daylist has been around for years
| in my side of the world.
| friendzis wrote:
| > suddenly it's all the same music you've already been
| listening to, very little new music.
|
| However, if you expose the gods of the algorithm to a new
| artist, suddenly all the auto-generated feeds will try to
| include that band regardless of fit. Weird how these "social
| graph" systems tend to form and perpetuate bubbles.
|
| On top of that, there are some weird shenanigans with meta-
| data. Listening to "foreign" bands may very easily taint the
| weekly mix with songs in a language you don't even understand
| and probably don't care about. An anecdata of course, I just
| looked at my "daily mix x", which appears to be in my local
| language, but with styles all over the place. Another mix
| contains mostly correctly turn of the century romantic pop.
|
| I suspect the algorithm biases heavily on metadata so that it
| could be easily fed "albums/artists that publisher x paid to
| promote".
| amelius wrote:
| Spotify radio regularly makes me angry, and makes me want to
| press a "dislike" button really hard. But of course, that
| button is missing ...
| djfergus wrote:
| This.
|
| My guess/conspiracy theory is that Spotify has cut deals with
| record companies that pay less on subsequent listens to a
| track so the repetitive radio algorithms are more profitable.
| jjice wrote:
| Anecdata incoming, but to offer an alternative view, I would
| really love to not use Spotify anymore since they change
| things constantly in ways I don't like, but their music
| recommendations are fantastic for me.
|
| Their generated playlists are great, and they do a good job
| recommending playlists I'd like from other users as well. And
| while I hate the format, their music shorts actually give me
| consistently good music. I just hate that it's in the TikTok
| swipe style.
| madmountaingoat wrote:
| Spotify has not viewed itself as a music company for longer
| than that. It's a platform for audio. And, while there are
| still music first people at the company, they are not in the
| power positions that they used to be.
|
| The transition didn't start when they laid off Glenn
| MacDonald, but that sort of cemented it. They had already
| gutted curation before that and by this time you were far
| more likely to find people talking about AI in the halls than
| music. If you've never heard of Glenn, check out his book:
| "You Have Not Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes
| Music." Or his old online projects at
| https://everynoise.com/.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| I've discovered so many niche bands and subgenres since I got
| Spotify.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| Plexamp is really good for this.
|
| The styles information that Plexamp has works really well and
| in my experience, as long as your library is large enough,
| works better than modern Spotify.
|
| It was Spotify's degradation of their radio service and
| terrible "AI DJ" that finally got me off Spotify. Punishing
| them for platforming Joe Rogan was just icing.
| urda wrote:
| I find Plexamps Radio features, and DJ's to work great
| against my library. It also helps if you, as an individual,
| have a diverse and large music library to supply for the
| sonic analysis.
| nicoco wrote:
| I'll argue music algorithmic recommendation on these platforms
| is a bad thing anyway.
|
| First, the algorithm is opaque, so it can push stuff to you
| because the platform decide it has to get the spotlights. Maybe
| the label/producer/musician paid for it or whatever you want to
| imagine that is even worse. It is a well-known phenomenon that
| if some music is pushed to your ears, you'll end up appreciate
| it most often than not. This is how hits have been and are
| still made.
|
| But even if the algorithm was not gamed at all, I still think
| it is a bad thing. It is not going to push you out of your
| comfort zone. Listening to new stuff is usually not pleasant at
| first. You will only "discover" things that are very similar to
| what you know and already enjoy.
|
| If these recommendation algorithms were about food, they would
| "reason" like this: "Hey, you've really enjoyed this whole pack
| of M&M's, I'm sure you'll like this Kit-Kat bar now! Oh and
| you've had a glass of wine, what about trying out meth, it's
| pretty good too.". Do we really want our computers to reinforce
| such behavior?
|
| Go to concerts, buy merch, buy albums on bandcamp (it has not
| enshittified too much yet apparently), donate money to artists;
| discover music through your friends and other humans
| recommending it. Recommend what you like to your friends.
| Cancel your Spotify subscription, none of that money is going
| to artists anyway. And use soulseek.
| mon_ wrote:
| What are the musical equivalents to Kit-Kat and meth?
| jszymborski wrote:
| Leaving music streaming services has been a great excuse for me
| to rediscover music blogs like Gorilla vs. Bear and Stereogum,
| or even local culture magazines.
|
| Another great way for discovering music I've found is just
| perusing Bandcamp, which is where I buy most of my music
| anyway. Love finding local artists, so I just put in some genre
| filters and the location filter. Found multiple great bands
| this way.
|
| As for keeping abreast of new releases, Bandcamp is pretty good
| for that too. You can just follow artists and you get emails
| when new releases or merch or tours come around.
| hashhar wrote:
| PlexAmp has DJs which allow you to get the song/playlist based
| radios.
|
| LMS (Logitech now Lyrion) also has something similar in MusicIP
| (not as good as PlexAmp).
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| IMO using a streaming service's recommendations is a way to
| filter out bands that labels aren't promoting. The services
| have to be getting paid for pushing - right?
|
| If everyone is this lazy about music discovery, then music
| suffers. I am not using "lazy" as a pejorative. There are
| people who just couldn't be bothered and that's fine. Music
| just isn't that important to you. But if the people who deeply
| love music are corrupted by the ease and dopamine, it will
| deeply wound music as a whole.
|
| My problem isn't discovering new music, it is "discovering" my
| massive library. I love AM, but the fact that 3 of the five
| large icons taking up precious screen real estate are devoted
| to discovering music that Apple is paid to promote is
| infuriating.
| wiether wrote:
| > IMO using a streaming service's recommendations is a way to
| filter out bands that labels aren't promoting. The services
| have to be getting paid for pushing - right?
|
| I keep hearing this, I also read Mood Machine that says the
| same thing over and over again.
|
| Yet, every week for years, thanks to Spotify I'm discovering
| artists that don't have the means to pay to be promoted in
| any way.
|
| I'm not saying that I'm special or that I hacked the algo or
| that it's false that Spotify promotes artists that are paying
| to be promoted.
|
| I'm just saying that, depending on how you consume (I'm using
| this verb on purpose) music on streaming platforms, you'll be
| more or less targeted by money-making thongs.
|
| If you listen to the main playlists, they are basically 100%
| promotion based. But if you listen to a non-promoted artist's
| radio, you'll have far less promoted content.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Seriously. I've discovered artists with less than 1000
| monthly listens thanks to the algo.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Same, a few just a few hundred monthly as well. And they
| were good hits, ended up going to several concerts based
| on Spotify's random playlist.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| I think for some people the goal shifts from discovery to
| ownership - knowing your library, building it intentionally,
| and not being nudged by what the algorithm thinks you should be
| into
| 4k93n2 wrote:
| its hard to beat the convenience of being able to right
| click/radio to get new recommendations but there has to be
| other options that arent that much more effort either?
|
| i think you can add plugins to jellyfin. maybe there is a
| last.fm plugin? i know of some other last.fm alternatives like
| maloja or libre.fm but i cant comment on how good they are
| dankwizard wrote:
| Sure, but then what - A script to pirate the song? Or would
| your script generate the playlist and automatically buy the
| tracks from bandcamp?
| bcraven wrote:
| I'd like to shoutout PG Vogt (from Reply All podcasting fame)
| for this episode of his new show:
|
| https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/how-am-i-supposed-to-find-new-...
| soraminazuki wrote:
| By moving away from streaming services, you can once again own
| what you bought and paid for. Algorithmic playlists are
| nothing, nothing at all compared to the loss of ability to use
| your own player, edit your files, back them up, or not be
| nickel-and-dimed to get around artificial restrictions. Not to
| mention that with streaming services, music can be taken away
| from you after the purchase.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| One can have both: use the streaming services to discover new
| music, buy physical media of the bands you like most. Not
| everyone has this option, but it is an alternative.
| boudin wrote:
| I've never seen this work. Either it plays the stuff I've
| listened in the past in a loop or shove some random things I
| really dislike (maybe hidden promotional stuff?). Personally
| it's the reason I've cancelled subscriptions each time I've
| tried, I always ended up listening to radio instead as the
| value brought by Spotify etc... was really poor.
| vagab0nd wrote:
| My favorite songs gravitate heavily towards 2 very different
| genres. This seems to confuse the hell out of Spotify. The
| "discover weekly" is comically bad no matter how hard I try to
| prime my library.
| rolisz wrote:
| My experience with Youtube Music is that the recommendations
| are quite poor. So I wouldn't miss that. But it's hard to
| replicate the breadth of coverage of YT music (even though
| sometimes songs just vanish from my playlists). But I have
| started buying a couple of albums every now and then and slowly
| I am building my owned music library.
| benterix wrote:
| It was like this in the past, now it's crappy. The algorithmic
| optimization started eating its own tail. And it's a problem on
| all platforms, from Spotify to YouTube.
|
| Let's take YT. In very simple terms, instead of taking a bold
| move and suggesting a few outliers (similar to differentiating
| the population as it's done in evolutionary algorithms), it
| takes an easy shot and, if I'm identified as male, suggests
| some videos with females with big breasts and other generic
| junk many people just click on autopilot. It works well for
| them because most people click and click and spend their days
| uselessly hooked and feel bad, but in my particular case I lose
| what I had earlier, i.e. suggestions of interesting bands (they
| still do happen but the selection is of much lower quality).
| mvdtnz wrote:
| This hasn't been my experience at all. Not sure why Youtube
| would suggest big breasted female artists when I never, ever,
| ever watch the video when I'm playing music.
| benterix wrote:
| > This hasn't been my experience at all.
|
| No wonder, I'm pretty sure they're doing A/B testing all
| the time.
|
| > Not sure why Youtube would suggest big breasted female
| artists when I never, ever, ever watch the video when I'm
| playing music.
|
| They don't care. I sometimes open YT on new machines and
| it's always the same generic junk.
| nsteel wrote:
| > I don't browse any music forums and so apart from my
| favourite bands, I have no idea on when artists I like release
| new albums and would not encounter them on a self hosted
| solution,
|
| Music Brainz provides this at
| https://test.listenbrainz.org/explore/fresh-releases/
|
| There's also Music Butler: https://www.musicbutler.io/
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| I mean right at the top he says hes just trying to listen to
| his own music. I dont get how this is a downside if you wanna
| discover new shit you can always just go to youtube.
|
| Frankly 99.9 of my music listening is stuff I already know and
| enjoy. But I still like to listen to new stuff often. So this
| kinda thing is perfect for me 99% of the time.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Those features can, and should, be made completely separate
| from the system that hosts the media. In fact, they used to be,
| with great success.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| This is a pretty easy way to spin up Jellyfin, et al if anyone
| doesn't really know where to start. It's more meant for a remote
| server/vps: https://github.com/EdyTheCow/docker-media-center
| rappatic wrote:
| At least in the case of a music player, self-hosting simply isn't
| good enough for me. I'm not willing to accept a single second of
| added latency or buffering or downtime because I don't have
| multimillion dollar server farms. The fact is that the vast
| majority of us don't have the resources to self-host a Jellyfin
| instance that can provide near-instantaneous access anywhere in
| the world to every song ever made at 320kbps. And that's the bar
| for music. I can deal with a little added latency vs. Netflix on
| a Plex server or something. But I'm not willing to compromise
| with music.
|
| This isn't even to mention the numerous features that Spotify has
| which are difficult or impossible to replicate on self-hosting.
| The "radio" feature, song recommendations, the DJ, AI playlists,
| stations, automatic playlist enhancement, social features,
| Canvas... the list goes on. And of course I never have to worry
| about managing a library of mp3 files. When an artist I like
| drops a new album, it'll be on Spotify at 12:00am exactly and
| work perfectly. This isn't possible with self-hosting.
|
| When you look at it this way, the chance to pay 6 bucks a month
| to get all these extra features and ignore the headache of self-
| hosting is a no-brainer.
| jjulius wrote:
| >I'm not willing to accept a single second of added latency or
| buffering or downtime...
|
| >... near-instantaneous access anywhere in the world to every
| song ever...
|
| Nobody needs this. You think you do, but nobody _needs_
| everything everywhere all at once. If being wholly unwilling to
| wait "a single second" isn't sarcasm, then... yeesh.
| rappatic wrote:
| Fair. I was exaggerating a little.
|
| My point is this: I spend over 100,000 minutes per year
| listening to music. Any unnecessary friction in the
| experience is therefore extremely frustrating and has a
| disproportionate effect on my life. In all my experience
| self-hosting, it adds a certain level of friction that just
| isn't worth it considering how much time I spend listening.
|
| I am not hostile to self-hosting in other cases. I am very
| satisfied with my self-hosted Plex server, for example. But I
| don't spend 30% of my waking hours watching TV.
| udev4096 wrote:
| It's no-brainer for people who do not care about freedom or
| file preservation. Spotify can pull the plug on whatever your
| favorite song is and there is NOTHING you can do about it. Then
| again, spotify has hundreds of millions of clueless
| subscribers, such as yourself, who will willfully consume the
| most crappy audio codec and praise them for it
| rappatic wrote:
| > Spotify can pull the plug on whatever your favorite song is
| and there is NOTHING you can do about it
|
| There's plenty I can do about it. If Spotify decides to "pull
| the plug" on a song or artist I like, it's my prerogative to
| switch providers or decide to self-host. I'm not locked into
| a lifetime serfdom with them, and it's not like the files
| will magically vanish from the internet once Spotify decides
| not to host them.
|
| > who will willfully consume the most crappy audio codec
|
| I listen to 99% of my music through Bluetooth on AirPods, so
| 320kbps is perfectly fine for my use case. If I was someone
| who cared deeply about audio quality, I would switch to a
| competing service with HiFi.
|
| > hundreds of millions of clueless subscribers, such as
| yourself
|
| At least _try_ to be respectful.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > The fact is that the vast majority of us don't have the
| resources to self-host a Jellyfin instance that can provide
| near-instantaneous access anywhere in the world to every song
| ever made at 320kbps.
|
| The fact also is that the vast majority of us don't have a
| requirement to be able to access our media from anywhere in the
| world. Most people aren't traveling the world on a regular
| basis, they stay in one area except for _maybe_ an occasional
| vacation.
|
| > And of course I never have to worry about managing a library
| of mp3 files. When an artist I like drops a new album, it'll be
| on Spotify at 12:00am exactly and work perfectly. This isn't
| possible with self-hosting.
|
| If that's important to you, then indeed self-hosting will never
| be able to match it. But for me at least, my music listening
| has been 95% static since about 20 years ago. On occasion I
| hear something new that I add to the collection, but for the
| most part I listen to the same music I did some time ago.
| Paying $6/mo to Spotify just to listen to the same things I
| already have in my collection would be a gross waste of money.
| So for me it's the exact opposite: self hosting is a no-brainer
| because I simply would not get any value for my $6/mo.
| rappatic wrote:
| > the vast majority of us don't have a requirement to be able
| to access our media from anywhere in the world
|
| I don't travel internationally often at all. But when I do,
| access to my music becomes all the more important.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| I'm a bit confused, why would you have problems with latency
| for music? This is not real time sound mixing where you need
| millisecond latencies, the client can just download the whole
| thing and play it. Even high quality audio files are tiny
| (unless you're listening to 4 hour classical operas).
| tastysandwich wrote:
| For music, Navidrome is superior.
|
| It is just crazy how easy it is to set this stuff up nowadays. I
| run both Navidrome and Jellyfin in docker containers. Then I use
| NordVPN Meshnet to securely connect to them outside of the home.
|
| The experience is absolutely flawless. In Navidrome you can host
| an entire FLAC library and then transcode to Opus on the fly.
|
| It's been over a year now and I have pretty much no issues
| whatsoever.
|
| I highly highly recommend it
|
| Edit - Opus not Opal!
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Do you mean Opus?
| tastysandwich wrote:
| Yes my bad
| vander_elst wrote:
| +1 for Navidrome, I self host both jellyfin and Navidrome.
| Navidrome wins hands down for music. With Jellyfin it's harder
| to categorize and then search, Navidrome provides a great
| experience out of the box.
| twilo wrote:
| Is it better than plexamp?
| hypercube33 wrote:
| I use and like plexamp but I also think it's a low bar to
| set; Winamp 2 streaming from a file share is a better UX
| experience and less work than the funky ux Plex and plexamp
| has.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > run both Navidrome and Jellyfin in docker containers
|
| > use NordVPN Meshnet to securely connect to them outside of
| the home
|
| > host an entire FLAC library and then transcode to Opus on the
| fly.
|
| i really have no idea what any of these words mean. Spotify's
| future is secure.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| It has always been clear that people who are scared of
| performing a few google searches wont use these services.
| atoav wrote:
| A docker container is a way to easily install software on a
| server without having to install dependencies yourself.
|
| A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a way of securely
| connecting to your home network without exposing it to the
| world.
|
| FLAC and Opus are audio formats. FLAC uses lossless
| compression and offers the best uncompressed quality while
| not being as huge as a broadcast wave (.wav) file. Opus is
| similar to an mp3, that means it is a lossy compression, but
| it sounds extremely good at small bit rates/with bad
| connections. The transcoding-on-the-fly-bit means the user
| opens up the private Navidrome website running in their home
| from the road and the Audio they play is compressed and sent
| over on the fly as they play it.
|
| Self hosting sounds scary, but it is an essential skill
| nowadays and extremely useful. Things I self-host (besides
| websites) include a partskeeper instance which is essentially
| a stock keeping system for electronics parts, jellyfin as a
| netflix replacement for films and series, my mailserver
| (mailcow), paperless-ngx (hooked up to a scanner, allows
| automatic text-recognition and tagging of invoices, letters,
| etc.) and homeassistant (smart home).
|
| That probably makes it appear like I have to spend all my
| free time on this, but it takes surprisingly little of my
| time to maintain this, with a lot of it running on a single
| Raspberry Pi.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| Self-hosting has its price, one of which is knowing what you
| are doing. Just keep using Spotify, there is nothing wrong
| with that.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| the other is piracy, for video normally
| Teever wrote:
| I'm curious how you came to find your self on Hacker News
| without either a passing knowledge of some of the things
| mentioned above or an innate curiousity to learn about the
| rest.
| bladeee wrote:
| I understand that Navidrome is more specialized for music, but
| what specifically makes it superior to Jellyfin, in your
| opinion?
| liotier wrote:
| Navidrome's killer feature is its simplicity, and not just
| the dead simplicity of setting it up: Jellyfin has everything
| and the kitchen sink, which is nice - especially for video,
| whereas Navidrome offers a well-honed, long matured, music
| search/browse/play standard API, namely Subsonic which opens
| a world of clients for a multitude of platforms and all
| tastes... On that front Jellyfin feels narrow in comparison.
| steine65 wrote:
| Smart Playlists mainly. They let you add logical filters to
| create playlists. Think IF song_name NOT contains "live".
| That's not syntactically correct but that's the idea. Also
| lots of apps can connect to navidrome so you can import
| everything easily. Like Feishen is a desktop music player,
| and
| mfld wrote:
| Can Navidrome/Jellyfish integrate with Sonos? For me, the Sonos
| app still is not able to reliably index/play music from a
| network share.
| dash2 wrote:
| > It is just crazy how easy it is to set this stuff up
| nowadays. I run both Navidrome and Jellyfin in docker
| containers....
|
| Wow, I'll get grandma to do it! Ha ha, just kidding, but I'll
| try it myself. Ha ha, just kidding.
|
| Honestly, I just want to scream "self-hosting isn't going to
| happen, stop trying to make it happen." I absolutely welcome
| the hobbyists doing this fun stuff in their free time, but the
| idea that they will ever win over ordinary users is total
| fantasy. And it's accompanied by reality-denying stuff like how
| "you don't need" feature X or Y. Sure, I long to go back to
| organising my own mp3 files like it's 2002. And because you're
| angry about corporate power, Spotify or whoever definitely
| provide no features of value to anyone! This is all pure mood
| affiliation.
|
| Sorry. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad your setup works for you.
| But I think you are not using the word "easy" in the same way
| as most people.
| bugfix wrote:
| Those aren't competitors of Spotify/Netflix; they're
| alternatives for people who are willing to tolerate small
| inconveniences to have full control over their library.
|
| Of course it's not as easy as signing up for Spotify/Netflix,
| but setting them up _is_ easier than ever (even easier for
| tech people).
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Cheaper too.
| steine65 wrote:
| Yup, the key word for me is control. And over time,
| considering the continual loss of control, more people will
| adopt self hosting, and things will get better and easier.
| For now, i only recommend it to hobbyists or people with
| free time and money. It does take quite a while to get it
| all running smoothly.
| ajyey wrote:
| Disagree. With a little bit of technical knowledge which I'm
| assuming most people browsing hacker news have, these
| services are easy to spin up and use.
|
| If you can read a README you can set up Navidrome and point
| it to your local library in 5 minutes.
| bergon wrote:
| I've never tried NordVPN Meshnet, but just want to add an
| alternative I've fallen in love with: Tailscale. It's amazingly
| simple to set up and use. Today all my devices are connected to
| each other, and my jellyfin service is reachable through my
| chromecast, phone, computer and Ipad. As well as my filehost
| VPS.
|
| I've been self-hosting for quite awhile now, and these days
| it's such a breeze.
| udev4096 wrote:
| Anyone concerned about recommendations might wanna look at
| musicbrainz. You can write a script for fetching the
| recommendations based on your current library every week
| dandersch wrote:
| Can you elaborate? I'm not aware of musicbrainz having any
| recommendations/discovery features.
| udev4096 wrote:
| Sorry, I meant listenbrainz
| dandersch wrote:
| Thanks, I'm checking it out right now and it looks really
| promising. It supports scrobbling (which apparently just
| means syncing your listening data) from various music
| players like navidrome & jellyfin.
| ruuda wrote:
| I wrote my own networked music player,
| https://github.com/ruuda/musium. It's not nearly as fully
| featured as Jellyfin, but it does do what I want in exactly the
| way I want it. A feature I implemented a while ago is to make it
| show me albums I listened to a lot in the past, but not recently,
| and it's been great to rediscover some of those albums.
| sandreas wrote:
| I personally use Jellyfin ONLY for Video stuff.
|
| AudioBookShelf[1] is for audiobooks and podcasts.
|
| For music I use navidrome [2]
|
| The smart playlist feature[5] is awesome. Having 3 services
| instead of one seems overkill, but specialized apps instead of
| one generic one feels different. One interesting aspect of
| navidrome is, that it has implemented the Subsonic API, which
| MANY Apps make use of. My personal favorite is
| Substreamer [3]
|
| but you could also go with DSub[4] or others.
|
| 1: https://www.audiobookshelf.org/
|
| 2: https://www.navidrome.org/
|
| 3: https://substreamerapp.com/
|
| 4: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/github.daneren2005.dsub/
|
| 5: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/smartplaylists/
| hypercube33 wrote:
| The thing I miss and can't find a replacement for is lastfm
| inside of Spotify. It gave two things and did it exceptionally
| well:
|
| 1. Helped me take something I like or am super into at the time
| (band or song) and give me a playlist
|
| 2. actually suggested with a high hit rate something I didn't
| know about and it was available to play right now.
|
| other streaming or stations just loop into what I already have
| which sucks. Side note that I'm into pretty niche non
| mainstream music such as Melodic Death Metal and Industrial so
| self hosting seems interesting but I also spend a good chunk of
| my time looking for more music. (Most of the bands I am really
| into only have sub-20k plays a month on Spotify).
|
| I really miss Napster letting you browse people's music when
| you found someone who was also into things you liked - pure
| gold mine only second to a LAN party where you could dig
| through the file server.
| schrectacular wrote:
| Soulseek provides a similar experience! You browse users'
| files and find folks with great collections of cool stuff.
| sandreas wrote:
| I tend not to overload my personal library with stuff I'd
| never listen to.
|
| However navidrome at least supports lastfm via external
| Integration: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/external-
| integrations/
|
| I never used it so I can't tell if this is what you're
| looking for or at least the right direction.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning audiobookshelf. I'd totally given up on
| using jellyfin for audiobooks. It just absolutely butchers any
| book split into multiple files, which is basically all of them.
|
| I'll give audiobookshelf a look!
| sandreas wrote:
| You're welcome. The Android app is pretty good, but for iOS
| it remains unreleased, so you have to deploy yourself.
| Prologue seems to be the best iOS App.
|
| There are other unofficial Clients (e.g. in flutter), but I
| tend to use audiobookshelf as streaming player paired with
| vlc to play downloaded offline files (the app is not so great
| here)
| magic_hamster wrote:
| For me it was never an alternative because I don't use Spotify at
| all.
|
| For streaming I use Soma FM almost exclusively, everything else I
| curate myself.
|
| I never had a problem discovering more music through good old
| forums and more recently, LLMs. Trying out their recommendations
| is a fun exercise on its own as some songs they recommend will be
| totally obscure, but mostly they are on point.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| I went through a similar phase where I thought, how hard can it
| be to just manage my own music like it's 2008 again? Turns out,
| kind of annoyingly hard. The part about music players being stuck
| in time really hit. Winamp nostalgia aside, most local players
| feel like they haven't evolved in a decade
| INTPenis wrote:
| That's why the author moved beyond that stage and to apps that
| connect to existing music libraries hosted on jellyfin.
| Apparently there are a lot more options out there than I knew
| about.
| Sheeny96 wrote:
| If there were a recommendation algorithm plugin for Jellyfin
| (even if it just calls out to the API of some existing external
| web service), that might pull me over. Until that's the case, the
| recommendations will keep me on Spotify
| nsteel wrote:
| Assuming there's last.fm/listenbrainz reporting plugins for
| Jellyfun, then both those services will provide recommendations
| based on what you have listened to. Maybe not as good as
| Spotify's but it's something.
|
| https://listenbrainz.org/my/recommendations
|
| https://www.last.fm/player/station/user/{username}/recommend...
| sotix wrote:
| I've tried using jellyfin for music, but I'm so much happier than
| jellyfin or Spotify when I'm using my old iPod. There's something
| special about curating a collection. New music is deliberate and
| exciting. And I already had a decently sized library! I just
| picked up a pair of AirPods Max now that they released a USB-C -
| 3.5mm cable, and it's wonderful. The beauty of the headphone jack
| is that the newer tech of the headphones just works. I suppose
| using an iPod for music aligns with why I enjoy using a kobo for
| reading ebooks. It's nice to have a focused device disconnected
| from the internet. Best of all, the iTunes Store is DRM-free, so
| it remains easy to acquire music.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| I don't tend to re-watch or pirate video, so Jellyfin/plex is
| out. I thought to have a navidrome setup just for music, but it's
| redundant since I just listen from my machine, and for other
| places (except the car) I won't subject others to my music.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Jellyfin is pretty good these days. I have it hooked up to
| radarr, etc, and my non-tech husband can pirate and watch
| anything he wants easier and better than Netflix et al.
|
| Honestly that's about 90% of what my homelab does.
| _spduchamp wrote:
| I bought a 4TB external hard drive from a thrift shop and found
| it is loaded with a huge unorganized treasure trove of MP3s that
| stops maybe around 2008. The tags and file names are a bit of a
| mess (looks like bad character encoding for anything with
| accents), and there is no genres or categorization. I'd love to
| use a subset of this archive on Jellyfin or Navidrome.
|
| Any suggestions for a tool that can clean up file names and tags,
| and apply some sort of genre categories? I've tried Picard, but
| the process seems too manual for such a large archive.
| _-_-__-_-_- wrote:
| beets, it's ridiculously good,
| https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/#
| quesera wrote:
| I've used beets to import and tag a huge personal music
| library:
|
| https://beets.io/
| mr_coleman wrote:
| When it comes to self hosting, Jellyfin is really not a Spotify
| replacement. There are better, more purpose driven application. A
| good example is Navidrome. It is a less featureful Spotify clone
| but it has more functionality than Jellyfin.
|
| I respect the author's self hosted journey and encourage everyone
| to go down that path.
| turtledragonfly wrote:
| Just tossing in my own recommendation: I use Lyrion Music Server
| (previously Logitech Media Server (previously Slim
| Devices/Squeezebox))[1]
|
| It's open-source, self-hosted, has various good plugins (eg: I
| have some Pandora stations I listen to, as well as my own music
| collection). You can synchronize music across multiple devices in
| your home (I just have 2).
|
| Even though the physical devices (Squeezebox Touch, etc) are no
| longer sold, it's pretty easy to build one yourself with a
| raspberry pi.
|
| It's one of those cases where a company created something great,
| and strongly-open-sourced it enough that the project can't die
| even though the new owners are not giving it the love it
| deserves.
|
| So, I hope to keep using it for the rest of my days (:
|
| [1] https://lyrion.org/
| jonathantf2 wrote:
| The problem with this is is the same problem I had when I tried
| to switch to Apple Music, the network effect. I can't see my
| friend's playlists, work on collaborative ones, have automatic
| "blends" with friends etc if I have all my music on a JF server.
| latentcall wrote:
| I've been using Roon for a few years. Proprietary but it works
| amazing for me. The big feature is the auto-tag feature so I
| don't have to be anal about music tagging.
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