Full disclosure, I’m pretty new to selfhosting myself, and I haven’t written a guide like this before, but hopefully this scatterbrained writeup is enough for someone out there lmao
This is just what works for me and how I set it up. Always open to ideas for improvement as well.
Thank you for writing and making content.
In this era, I feel like I’m in the Good Place: it’s impossible to make “good” ethical choices while engaging with modern world. Every day, some platform or artist is found supporting blood money, genocide, unfair labor, treats other artist/collaborators like shit, exploitation… Then we all have to pivot to some obscure alternative with its own issues, lest we be immoral internet users.
I’m so tired of all this shit… /rant
Y e p. It’s a nightmare tbh. No ethical consumption under capitalism etc etc
That saying too often gets used as an excuse to not even try moving away from patronizing a harmful business, as though it isn’t worth any inconvenience since we’re screwed no matter what.
Bit off topic, but I noticed this post has quite more comments than on reddit (currently 59 to 38) and more votes as well. /r/selfhosted is quite crowded usually, kinda impressive there’s more discussion happening here.
It’s the type of crowd that self hosting brings. We’re very much more Lemmings than Redditors by trade, so it does make sense the community here is better.
That, and fuck reddit.
Self-hosters are probably the type of people who are interested in getting away from “big tech” corporate solutions for everything, so it makes sense that they would prefer Fediverse versions
I’ve honestly never understood people who feel the need to “replace” Spotify. I just download the music I like to my device and listen to it via VLC. If I want to discover new music in genres I like, I’ll go and listen either to a terrestrial radio station, Soma.FM, or Pandora (which has many of Spotify’s issues for me, but serves more as a platform for discovery of obscure music). The rare times I listen to music, I’m usually going somewhere on mass transit, or I’m on foot. And during those times, my phone is either fully turned off (so I’ll use an MP3 player), or it’s in Airplane Mode. Spotify has never made sense for my use-case.
I wrote something similar about returning to traditional music formats on my own blog https://audiovalentine.com/2025/01/death-to-spotify-a-survey-of-alternatives/
Fantastsic post!
FWIW I suspect Jellyfin is the better choice for libraries with both music and movies. That said, we live in a world where multiple FOSS options exist to serve these roles. That should be appreciated and noticed by waaaay more people.
“Replacing TV and movie streaming services is pretty trivial, and typically one of the first projects for any new self-hoster, but music streaming services are a whole different beast.”
both cases you just gather up media files, and you play them. follow me instead for more life hacks.
What am I missing? Whats wrong with Spotify?
- Closed non-federated streaming platform; requires an Internet connection.
- Requires a subscription for a lot of basic functionality.
- Even though it requires a subscription, they barely pay artists - the only ongoing benefit to using a non-pirate setup.
- The increasing amount of “Perfect Fit Content” & LLM-generated music in playlists to avoid said payments.
- They provide a guaranteed platform to political podcasts.
- Audio quality is not only dependent on the subscription, but even the top-tier is generally subpar and can vary based on how they throttle you that day.
- As a platform for mass appeal, discoverability is, loosely speaking, crud.
Pick any of those you like.
Complain about paying artists yet the article is about how they automate piracy lol
Should put a note on your blog that Lidarr’s Metadata database is being rebuilt, currently the Lidarr APi spits a bunch of 5xx errors when searching for artists/albums/etc.
https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/issues/5498
If you currently have a library on the stable build the Lidarr team could use some help building the cache, they made this tool:
https://github.com/DeviantEng/lidarr-cache-warmer
It’ll search every artist in your Lidarr library so that the new database has a cache to quickly call upon.
Yeah and it’s been proper fucked for months. I set up anew server on my Mac mini M4 months ago and every now and then I spin up lidarr again to see if it is fixed and nope, won’t recognise a single album in my entire collection and can’t even manually add an artist.
Headphones is pretty terrible and slow, but it has the benefit of working.
You can pretty easily point Lidarr to an alternate cache server. Either use the docker images they provide (link below) or of you already have Lidarr with plugins setup, you can do it that way (also explained in the link below)
https://github.com/blampe/hearring-aid?tab=readme-ov-file#-docker-images
Would any of these apps allow for monitoring your listening activity? Similar to Spotify’s annual wrapped playlist?
You can connect navidrome and many other music players to listenbrainz.org. Like Spotify it creates an end of the year report and it also does recommendations like the weekly spotify playlist.
One of the main advantages of Spotify for me is the AI. I could host the music myself just fine. But having an AI come up custom playlists is another thing entirely.
If you’re not trying to cultivate your own tastes then you’re just letting a corporate blackbox drive your interests and aesthetics.
Like radio then?
Also that always happens. You don’t always discover the best band but you are more likely to discover the ones that spend more on marketing
Is symfonium foss? Been looking for a good navifrome frontend for android.
It is not free or open source but is software. FWIW I use it and like it. It’s a one time fee and not a subscription service. The fee is under 10 USD. The program requires minimal permissions and doesn’t even ask for (I.e. opt-in) for much more than it really needs to run. I find it relatively intuitive and it works with android auto which is something I really want in a media player/library at the moment.
I know the self hosted communities are very pro open source, with which I largely agree, but PlexAmp is such a good player it makes sense to at least try it.
My hangup with self-hosting is due to the fact that I have a family for whom managing their entire library would be a full-time job. It’s unfortunately worth the $15/month for me to not have to constantly take requests for new music, add that to the server, troubleshoot when things don’t work, etc.
You don’t have to host your whole family’s library though. You can start with whatever you want and be on the road to improving your setup.
This is how I feel with just my spouse. Spotify absorbs so much ADD energy and immediate new music whiplash that I can’t help but be OK with it.
The alternative is to be up at 4:00am on Oct 13 ripping T-Swizzle MP3s from YT.
I had my partner put in the addresses of my *arr stack into their phone and showed them how to add things they wanted. They never close any tabs so all I need to say is what weird-ass unrelated name handles whatever media they want and I’m done.
