Selfhosted

Navidrome for music, jellyfin for video based media. Audiobookshelf for podcasts and audiobooks.

Get the best of each one, much better.

When I set up Navidrome I had no idea jellyfin could do music too. Pretty happy with them separate though. Not for any particular reason, they both do their jobs really well.

Jellyfin works nicely for music, as long as you use a good client. The native jellyfin mobile app is not optimized for music. I use symphonium for android listening and am very pleased with it. More settings than Id ever need, different options for downloading/caching songs on device, support for subtitles and all.

Jellyfin kinda sucks as a music player, it takes so many clicks to navigate and it often sorts music incorrectly, so that's one reason to use something else.

One major reason why I have Ampache as a separate server is that they support smart playlist, which wasn't well supported on Jellyfin. Navidrome also supports smart playlist, but you couldn't edit on the web.

Clients often are better suited for music, specially for mobile. For example with Subsonic clients (Navidrome, Gonic, etc), the client aggressively caches the queued songs, which is super helpful when there are hiccups in the network while traveling. A few clients allow me to configure the cache size, allow me to mark some titles are always cached, allow me to browse the cache (case I don't have network at all). It's just way better suited for music.

And on the desktop clients are way lighter weight.

I've used Plex's music before. It works well. They have a dedicated Plexamp app for it. Works well with audiobooks too.

Do One Thing Well: Each program should focus on a single task and perform it effectively.

At the moment im not hosting a music server, but used to use Navidrome, it worked fine and used a small footprint.

Having all in one it's more issues to solve, if something breaks, everything breaks.
Having all on Jellyfin is more convenient.

But adding hundreds or thousands of songs along with movies and episodes will create a huge database, more resources used, slower searches

Makes zero sense to use a dedicated music server if you also have other media to serve. Plex and Plexamp for me, haven't seen anything better on the market.

I tried using Jellyfin for music but I found that it doesn't really handle featured artists that well. Navidrome organizes music much better so I prefer using that.

I use AIO approach with jellyfin but I'm thinking about changing it.

I like how jellyfin handles music, but the search feature is unusable with so many files.

Each time I search for a movie it search through thousands of music files and music people. And jellyfin search feature is bad as it is. I'm waiting for them to fix ot but it doesn't seem like it.

So maybe taking music out would make that feature usable again.

I use Plex for music just because they currently have the best app (Plexamp). My Plex server is mostly just music, and TV shows I record off an antenna using HDHomeRun.

I don't think you’re really limited to one or the other. You can pool all your media in the same place and then point different services at it. I don't listen to my crusty old downloaded music much these days, but, for example, I used to have Plex and Emby running side by side for years to watch movies/TV without issue. These services don't consume that many resources so you can try multiple options until you find something you like and then remove the rest.

Airsonic (fork of Subsonic) has worked well for me for a few years. Used Subsonic for many years prior. I mainly use play:Sub on IOS for playback, local/offline caching, etc.

Not for me, I prefer AIO, less maintenance.

I am using syncthing to directionally sync my music from my server to my phone. I like having the local copy on both devices so I don't worry about losing cell service/internet.

I think that the little extra work to have separate services is a small price to pay to have the kind of top notch user experience that you can only get with a dedicated tool.

Besides, it's cool to have a load of different services. Most self-hosters seem to be constantly on the lookout for the next thing to install.

Holy shit I was googling about this yesterday and was only finding useless reddit threads

i am enjoying navidrome and mopidy together! mopidy for in house, Tempo or subtracks for on the go.

works with home assistant quite well if the MPD extension is installed on Mopidy.

I've been using Jellyfin for several years and couldn't be happier. Tbe beta update of the Finamp music player for Jellyfin is a UI overhaul that makes it nearly perfect for playing music on both my phone and my computers, gapless playback, support for downloading songs for offline playback, Spotify-like seperate Now Playing & Next Up queues. Makes it hard to want anything else tbh

i tried jellyfin for my music, but honestly, i just ended up putting all my flac files on an sd card on my phone. XD

it goes with me, no streaming needed. if i need to stream it to a particular device, i use a BT connection to the phone.

First of all, only jellyfin has any overhead worth mentioning. Video is big and takes big hardware if you're doing anything except the bare minimum. Audio support is basically free in comparison.

I actually tried the jellyfin audio streaming before I switched to navidrome. It worked, but all the apps for it were complete shit, or incredibly feature poor. Also, it had terrible album identification support for my library.

Jellyfin has no five star rating for music. Navidrome has it. As simple as that.

I setup navidrome but never got around to using it much personally. It seems like a good option for a private collection, but im more about sharing mine these days.

I setup jellyfin with feishin and use finamp on mobile for music.

Im also running the latest alpha of funkwhale which i recommend checking out the stable version for a better impression but the alpha is functional if a bit ugly at the moment. My public service for funkwhale has the most users out of anything else i run so people def seem to like it.

I discovered mstream fairly recently and really like its simplicity.

I have MPD setup to stream as a radio on my homepage.

Overall i mainly just use jellyfin out of convenience because i already use it for shows and movies. But ive tried lots of dedicated music options and every subsonic fork still in existence, i keep coming back to jellyfin though.

I think if you already have jellyfin working navidrome isnt really as useful unless you dont like the way jellyfin handles music (wich objectively jellyfin isnt the best interface for music). Its not really that much extra overhead though tbh so you shouldnt hesitate to give it a try if you want to. Really anything thats just focused on audio streaming isnt going to add much overhead.

I'm hosting my music on Jellyfin. I generally use Symfonium on Android to listen. When I was on iOS I was using this app called Manet, but it was a little buggy. No complaints here though, it fulfills my needs.

I used jellyfin for music before but i dont like finamp that much, the UI a bit stuttery. Plus, im trying to cut down which services is exposed. I went with navidrome after that but i dread of exposing another service to the internet.

Now, im using nextcloud music with tempo since im already exposing NC, just a single service for all my needs. I dont have many music so it fit my need at the moment.