Edit: Also please tell me if a meme is even allowed as the thumbnail for the post in this community - just feels like it gets some of my current desperation across :D
Since the last time I posted here sharing my new home server, I’ve gotten a little more acquainted with the services I’m using. After getting acquisition of shows and movies sorted, I ventured into music (streaming).
As many here, I’m used to using streaming services for music, ie. Spotify or YouTube Music. Naturally, I tried a similar approach by setting up my Arr stack to feed its music into Jellyfin where the music is picked up by Symfonium. I tried it out for a couple days and liked it quite a bit since it keeps my phone clean of “unnecessary” data but I still retain access to music. Unfortunately, the way I acquire my music limits my selection quite a bit unless I venture into torrenting, which I’d prefer not to. So unless I figure out a safe way to torrent on my server, I’m stuck with getting access to a very limited selection of artists and albums.
In addition to that limitation, there’s also the files formats of the music. Most of the music I’ve downloaded was only available in FLAC, which is awesome if you’ve got the bandwidth and data plan for playback, but for me it means that I spend 3GB of data for a day of streaming music which is just not sustainable.
In comparison, I can set up a Revanced version of Spotify in addition to my Revanced YT Music to get access to all the music I could want. Unfortunately, that comes with the caveat of still being tied to the companies I’m trying to get rid of - albeit not financially anymore, but I’m still sharing my data.
Ultimately, I’m not sure what to do. What I love about self-hosting is the independence from all the companies we’re being fucked over by in all kinds of imaginable ways. But if it’s free, outside my sharing data with them, can I really compete?
I’d be interested in hearing your opinions and thoughts on this. How did you solve music streaming with your build?
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Leeching off corporations’ infrastructures for free is a noble endeavor and everyone should do it.
Network traffic, unique accesses, etc are metrics used by investors and media to measure their success, so we’re still contributing to it, and also, we’re preventing alternatives from gaining more fame, so getting rid of corporations should always be the preferred path
spotify and google will figure out a way to block modded apps eventually.
nobody can take your home server and its content away from you
Bum music off of Spotify and save up for a home server in the meantime, got it.
Today servers can be nothing more than a $50 nuc from eBay with a larger drive in it, or an external one.
My server today is an old Small Form Factor Dell. It has no problem running VMWare ESXi, with multiple Windows and Linux VMs, ripping DVDs, converting videos and streaming, all at the same time.
The issue now is storage is getting pretty damn expensive
In a dystopic future, somewhere…
Chilling out listening to some music
BANG!
“Put your hands up! No sudden moves!”
“But, but…”
“We tracked down self-hosting activities, and we’re confiscating everything and taking you to jail”
why not both?
Por qué no los dos?
By the way if you want a really cheap and easy setup for the time being while you figure out jellyfin/navidrome and docker and all that.
Symfonium app can run from a google drive that you can spin up for free and throw some music into. And then if you end up self hosting you can just point it to your server.
I’ve got a server set up already and am using Symfonium but thanks for the suggestion regardless :)
Can you just point it at a shared network directory too?
It says it supports network shared folders or NAS that use SMB or webdav… So yeah should.
Good to know. Could be helpful setting up basic, low-maintenance servers for family members.
Yeah it has become my go to for recommending to people with struggles with Spotify.
Plus if they ever purchased albums through amazon they have all the MP3 files anyways available to download and I have them throw the files in a drive.
The only problem with something like Revanced is that it can go away at literally any time. It could be shut down tomorrow and you’d lose access to everything it provides. That’s fine, or at least tolerable, if you ALSO have something self-hosted you can rely on in case that happens. If you don’t have downloaded music self-hosted, then you’re totally relying on Revanced permanently and you lose everything if it goes away. Maybe for something like music that’s an acceptable risk, but you have to consider it and decide where it is an acceptable risk. What are you going to do if those services you’re relying on go away?
Self-hosting, like you said, is about the independence, and the knowledge that once it’s up and running on your own hardware, it won’t just go away on its own, and it can’t just get “shut down” unless you choose to. You might not need that for every service you rely on, but there are probably at least some you would struggle without, and those are things you should consider self-hosting. The more you think about it, and the more comfortable you get with it, the more likely you’ll decide other things are important enough to self-host after all.
That’s a neat summary of the entire self-hosting philosophy, I’d say.
there is a hidden button called bandcamp, idk where you can get music to stream maybe api server that use your free ytmusic and spotify solutions)
Soulseek has far more music on it than you can typically find on free public torrent sites.
Just a heads up.
i started with lidarr and very, very quickly stripped that our for just slskd
Same here. Lidarr had trouble finding most of the stuff I was looking for. I wish I had some kind of automation like the are stack for slskd. Maybe I try soularr that promises that, whenever I feel like exploring this part of the sea.
Tubiferry plugin for lidarr.
Came back to say that tubifarry is awesome and easy to set up! Thanks! Now my music flow is fully automated. Lidarr -> slskd -> navidrome
Revanced to discover new music, then selfhost what you liked.
You can always transcode flac to another format to save bandwidth. I haven’t used jellyfin for music, but shouldn’t it support transcoding that too on the fly?
Both. Use YT & Spotify as discovery engines (along with Pandora, Jango, and Soma FM), but download your favorite tracks and self-host.
i selfhost the music collection i own on LPs, to replace spotify/yt music i use Archivetune
I wrote an application which runs on my server and monitors my favorites on Tidal/Deezer/Qobuz. It downloads them in bulk whenever I have a premium account with one of them. Usually I purchase a month of premium every few months, at which point I get nice clean FLACs for local use.
The FLACs are moved to Jellyfin and I stream them using Finamp, which also supports transcoding, so I keep 128 kbps Opus files for offline playback and stream the raw FLAC files when bandwidth is no concern.
I have amassed a huge music library over the last decades, so even if all streaming websites go under tomorrow, I have enough music locally to last me a lifetime.
Poor que no los dos?
I listen to a LOT of music - basically most of the day when I’m not on a call.
I don’t follow the mainstream so never had a spotify account, and am really listening either to radio-browser.info or a few channels on youtube that I sponsor, which link to the artists on bandcamp, where I buy the music I like.
To your point on bandwidth, I try to store music at the highest quality I can get, but then transcode to players.
I did try mp3fs to live transcode files to my phone in the past, but didn’t use it much in the end.
I’ve torrented some music in the past, but TBH, I find it in different places easier nowadays.
I used to find some interesting stuff with Napalm FTP indexer - but be very careful with direct connections to random FTP servers.
