Selfhosted

Nice! For an Android music player free and compatible with your setup you can try Tempo on FDroid

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.

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/

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

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.

Quickly read through the writeup, excellent work. I've been meaning to do something similar to this but haven't been able to properly commit the time to do the research required to make it all play nice.

I'll be doing this sometime soon 👍

Would any of these apps allow for monitoring your listening activity? Similar to Spotify’s annual wrapped playlist?

"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.

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.

On bandcamp Friday in 2 days I am going to buy a whole bunch of music to have locally and there are some artists which are not on bandcamp that I still want to have, I know I can buy their CDs or records and save them as files myself but I'd rather just buy and download a high quality digital version and not all of them have digital copies available to download fr the artists...so does anyone have any recommendations for website to buy digital music from that just have a lot of different artists regardless of where they are on platforms?

Is symfonium foss? Been looking for a good navifrome frontend for android.

Love my Navidrome server, though I use Substreamer on Android since it's "free" and free.

I already use Navidrome, but I discovered Explo through your post, so thanks! It seems to work well in that it brings in the tracks that it should, but I don't think I can keep using it because it pollutes my 'Recently Added' list in Navidrome with 50 new albums, each with a single track. If I could somehow prevent that, I think I'd keep using it. I tried using an .ndignore file but that didn't work - it stops them showing up in Recents, but also prevents the tracks from working in the playlist that Explo generates.

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.

This is a nice resource. For someone like me this would be a big project. I'm curious, it sounds like a lot of moving parts. Assuming it was running ok and I didn't really touch it for two years, five years; what is the likelihood it would still be working?

This is a dumb question but I've really wanted to use Pangolin and I have trouble finding it clearly explained whether or not it works, with authentication, for applications that are not browser based. For example, if I wanted to connect to my self hosted home git server from VSC via ssh would that be possible through Pangolin? Obviously I could use it to log in to the web interface but what about apps/applications that I need to punch into my home network? The authentication is browser-based so in my mind it would not.