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Recently I gave up on Apple Music. The clients had gotten so bad from a UX perspective that I found it frustrating to use. Especially on desktop. There is also no easy way to cache your _entire_ library to disk. Other services+clients are heaps of Electron that I'd rather avoid.

It took some effort and pain but I have a pretty solid self-hosted system now that requires no futzing around:

0. epoupon's Lightweight Music Server (LMS) [0] is an awesome, barebones Subsonic client written in C. It's really good and deserves to be more well-known.

1. wrtag [1] is a less-fully-featured beets written in Go that handles tagging.

2. amperfy [2] is an excellent Subsonic client that runs on iOS. It's configured to automatically cache anything and everything on LMS.

3. Syncthing [3] syncs music files. Needs no introduction. Rock solid.

4. Swinsian [4] a macOS music player that is very reminiscent of old iTunes, but much better. The information density is so incredibly refreshing after using Apple Music.

5. Everything talks to each other seamlessly over Tailscale [5].

All together, an entire open-source stack maintained by volunteers that easily outdoes Apple's own UX in the music department.

[0] https://github.com/epoupon/lms

[1] https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag

[2] https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy

[3] https://syncthing.net

[4] https://swinsian.com

[5] https://tailscale.com

So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? What is fair compensation for writing a song?

In the old days, artists would join a label and put out an album. The artist would earn about 10% of sales or so (varies of course, but on average). So a $15 CD would earn an artist $1.50.

The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005. So it would take about 300 streams of a song to earn the same amount as selling a CD used to make.

I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen? There are many albums I own that I have listened to way more than 30 times, which is what it would take for a 10 song album to get 300 song 'streams'

Is that a fair compensation? Why or why not?

I think artists should be able to earn money from creating music, but I don't know how we decide how much they actually deserve if we aren't just going based on the price the market sets.

I'm always glad to see people move away from Spotify's model and towards options that better support artists directly, and I definitely don't mean this to take anything away from the article despite how it sounds, but just seeing the system diagram reminds me that it's amazing the lengths that systems-minded people will go to to create their own Rube Goldberg-esque systems to 'optimise' the experience.

I counted thirteen separate components. If it works for the author then more power to them, but I personally want to spend less time futzing with technology when it comes to this kind of thing and more time actually just actively listening to new music.

I buy from Bandcamp or Apple, sync locally, and I'm done. Bandcamp's iOS app is better than Apple's Music at this point (though not a hard bar to reach). And I find new music organically from listener-supported streaming public radio.

I haven't mentioned analysis or recommendations, but honestly I so rarely seem to find anything through the typical algorithms and recommendation-type mechanisms that I genuinely like, and stumbling across something new just from having public radio on in the background still feels magical, organic, and overall such a good way to broaden your musical horizons.

Still, a good starting point for people wanting their own similar setup.

My own self hosted audio journey ended with Lyrion Music Server[0], formerly Logitech Music Server. It is now open source and run by the community.

There are plugins for Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify, local radio, song lyrics, and more. It also does great multi-room audio syncing via DLNA, Airplay, and Squeezelite. I recently setup transcoded streaming so I can listen to my library remotely on Apple Carplay at a reduced bitrate.

It's certainly not perfect, but more perfect than any other open or commercial platform I've trialed. Can't recommend it enough!

[0]https://lyrion.org

Just added my old music collection to my private Jellyfin server on my home network. The UI for music is not as polished as some focused alternatives like Navidrome or FunkWhale, but it's good enough... And I like having both fewer apps installed on my devices and fewer discrete services running on my homelab.

It was fun to go back through the collection of music I've been accumulating since high school and moving from hard drive to hard drive: mostly ripped off CDs from the library or purchased in used bookstores, later purchased from iTunes, Amazon, and BandCamp once DRM-free downloads became the norm. Updating album art and re-curating the collection has been a walk down memory lane --- I'd (back then) embedded most of it at 200x200 to fit on a tiny Sony MP3 player, and then an iPod, without wasting space. The music library holds up better than either my old DVDs or the rips I made of them... Even lossy MP3s don't sound as rough as 480p looks on a large display today.

If you're looking to update the metadata in your own music collection, I can happily recommend:

* https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ for searching for album art.

* https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ for editing music metadata in files.

If you're wanting to replace Spotify or other music subscription services on the go (i.e. from a phone) with something like Jellyfin, Funkwhale, or Navidrome running at home, I've tried and had some success with both tailscale and netbird (though these both require some networking knowledge).

I really want to do this but like any hobby it takes too much time. My biggest frustration as a youtube music user is that the app doesn't appreciate that it might not always have a good internet connection and takes forever to fallback to your downloads when loading the library.

If I used an open source app or my own app I could fix this stupid bug but I don't have any control. :(

I have over 400 CDs and SACDs in my collection, from the 80s to the oughts. Have ripped them to my Roon server connect to a Qnap NAS with now over 30 TB storage, as Flac or DSF files. For those CDs that have over the years degraded and can't be ripped, I wrote a scrapping agent for an (in)famous Russian Music Archive site and have > 1M magnet links stored on a MariaDB instance running on the Qnap. I only download albums/tracks as backups, for those I have paid for, via Put.IO

My Marantz Amp is Roon Ready and the Roon App (both the desktop and the iPhone version) is pretty good and sound quality is amazing as the App streams the files bit perfect without any downmixing, via ethernet.

Roon unfortunately doesn't handle DVD-A and DTS formats properly. I use Plex server and Infuse running on the Apple TV for those, and they work well. (Yes, I know I can convert .dts files to multi-channel FLACs using ffmpeg, but too many files, and I have not gotten around building an automated conversion workflow)

Ha, this is the guy that got absolutely butchered in his Reddit post [1] about the same link. OP has extensive history in the piracy subreddits and believes piracy is not theft.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1n87xho/why_i_d...

> Always ensure you're obtaining music through legal channels

> My setup uses sabnzbd integrated with Lidarr for handling downloads of content I've purchased.

Sure. I believe you.

I don't understand.

At the start of the article the author says this is why Spotify is good.

"For years, I relied on Spotify like millions of others. The convenience was undeniable stream anything, anywhere, discover new music through algorithms, and share playlists with friends."

How does one discover new music through algorithms or share playlists with friends on this proposes self-hosted stack?

He claims it tiges him everything Spotify offered plus more.

"Here's how I built my own self-hosted music streaming setup that gives me everything Spotify offered and more."

But I don't see how it does those things, and those are the main reasons I use Spotify. 80% of the time I listen to automatic playlists based on my music tastes and hear new and old (but new to me) music constantly. If I don't like it I skip the track to the next as much as I want. How on earth am I supposed to do that if I have to buy and curate every new album into my collection?

Been rebuilding my music library from my sailing the high seas days when I did not have money. CDs sound really good. Some much better than streaming Spotify.

Glad I own the media. A buddy was listening to an Audiobook on Spotify, paused it and came back to it no longer being on Spotify. Between stuff like that and no toggle to disable AI generated music, I don't think I'll be going back.

_grabs minidisc player and goes for a walk_

I did the same as the OP except I use Amperfy on iOS and Tempo on Android. Navidrome is super simple to setup and finds new music immediately. Never breaks. It's not exposed to the Internet directly but via a Cloudflare tunnel (like the OP) and an obscure url that I'm the only one to use.

I also wrote a little Python script to transform Spotify playlists into Youtube lists of urls. Shazam can add songs to a Spotify playlist so it's a way to discover new music.

It's annoying how the author mentions "artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream" along with buying from Bandcamp but doesn't describe how they integrate music from Bandcamp into their collection, instead linking to programs that seem designed exclusively for downloading from torrents and usenet.

I also have a Navidrome setup that is my main music streaming method which I've used for a few years now. I buy from bandcamp quite often and downloading and importing music from bandcamp (and managing metadata generally) is the most tedious part. I use beets[1] and if I buy, say, a mix of 10 tracks and albums, I then get 10 URLs and I have to download and run `beet imp` on each mp3/zip file. I do this over SSH with a bunch of copy-pasting since I haven't convinced myself it's worth the time[2] to change my method. It looks like there's some way to scrape bandcamp and automate this process based on the existence of this tool, bandcamp-dl[3]. If anyone has their own method to suggest I'd appreciate it.

[1]: https://beets.io/

[2]: https://xkcd.com/1205/

[3]: https://github.com/Evolution0/bandcamp-dl

Only components I would swap out here is Cloudflare Tunnels and use of docker.

I have my own tailnet with a self hosted head coordinator (headscale). No need to expose music server to public internet or tie your setup to a service that can easily go down or suddenly find yourself paying for it. Access service from within tailnet

While docker is great for development purposes. I have found for self hosting it adds a bit of overhead (particularly memory and cpu) and complexity to installations (port forwarding between container and host, firewalling, ip discovery, cpu/gpu passthrough). Sure containerization is great if you have the funds/hardware/time and need to scale across thousands of instances/servers. But becomes overkill for these types of use cases.

I would replace with deploying on top of nixOS and manage remotely with nixos-anywhere with declarative configuration.

Going to bookmark this since I have been putting off setting up my own media server. OP tailors to music but also want to make my collection of Blu-ray, and photos accessible.

really the biggest service spotify has for me is its music recommendation engine... and so the big question with all this setup is: is listenbrainz's recommendation engine better than spotify?

Wow, that’s a lot. Just install any offline music player on your phone and transfer songs to it…?

I've been thinking about doing the same thing as the OP for a while, but haven't really gotten around to it. I've started scrobbling to last.fm in order to see if their recommendation algorithm can be a replacement for Spotify. The jury is still out on that.

As my financial situation has gone from a place where I felt I could not really care and still save a healthy amount per month, to a place where I feel it is more necessary for me to try to keep up with my finances I've gone from really liking Spotify to a realization that I've probably spent enough money on spotify over the last 15-ish years to buy a cheap car or quite a sizeable music collection, had I just spent that money on music directly.

I have gotten my money's worth from Spotify for sure, I listen to it a lot and have probably gotten to hear magnitudes more music than if I merely bought an album or something every month instead, but at this point I can't get over the fact that if/when I unsubscribe to Spotify, I will have nothing and will have to spend a lot to get access to the music I actually care about again.

In a sense, I wish there was an audible style subscription for music. Give me the ability to sample music as a replacement for spotify radio, or/and some playlists like discover weekly and a few personalized ones, and a credit to pick something to buy permanently.

I ditched Spotify for Montreal’s own CKUT and its best known (to me) program, WEFUNK Radio. No problems for over 20 years now. Oh yeah, none of these have ads! Listener supported radio and streaming is where it’s at.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CKUT-FM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEFUNK_Radio

https://www.wefunkradio.com/

DJ Static and Professor Groove are too legit to quit. They’re the second DJs to ever podcast, apparently, as they’ve been on air since 1996 and streaming online since 1999.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SomaFM

https://somafm.com/

If you don’t know about SomaFM, now you know. A true SF original.

https://www.bagelradio.com/

Also a special shout-out to BAGeL Radio, formerly rebroadcast by SomaFM. A one-man project that is amazing and unique, also from San Francisco. If you like indie stuff, it’s as good as Indie Pop Rocks of SomaFM, with a bit wider range in genres played.

I just use Plex hosted on a Raspberry Pi, and Plex Amp. I download mp3s from Bandcamp/wherever, and use beets [0] to auto-tag.

EDIT: FWIW, I don't recommend most people host their own music. Spotify/YouTube music is easy to use and has most music people want to listen to. I only self-host because I'm the type of person who has built a collection of mp3s since 2005, and the few times I tried switching to Spotify, I would commonly not be able to find specific things I wanted to listen to.

[0] https://beets.io/

The table comparing the authors solution to Spotify is missing the biggest benefit of streaming services, which is the cost.

It would cost way more than $11 a month to buy all of the music I listen to.

The bonus here is that the artists you like will get a much better share versus spotify's very low pay out rates, especially if you're into more obscure acts which fall under spotify's "no payouts under the 1000 plays/year threshold", which conveniently works out to be around 2/3rd of the entire platform.

https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/track-monetiz...

Worth noting that lidarr is broken right now. It relies on a metadata server provided by the lidarr org (like that's not going to blow up in our faces) and that metadata server is currently down. It's been like that for I think 6 months?

https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/issues/5498

>If you're starting a NEW lidarr library, you should wait. It's not ready for that.

I’ve never been on the Spotify train, but with an all-Apple household, including HomePod Minis in multiple rooms, I’ve been stuck in iTunes/Apple Music land. We own our music, which is nice. And I dutifully pay the $24.99 per year for iTunes Match so that I can tell Siri what to play on HomePods, but I will be 0% surprised when they deprecate that service.

Anyone have a good non-Apple way of getting Siri to play songs from a personal music collection on HomePods? My kids use it most.

It's interesting, but the author's motivations are a little muddled:

> several issues became impossible to ignore: artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream

and later:

> My setup uses sabnzbd

I never really understand all these very complex setups. I have a Music folder on my (Synology) NAS that I can browse and play with any mediaplayer (VLC, Foobar), without transcoding anything, with a Wireguard VPN connection to reach outside home network. I tag metadata with an editor, and construct subfolders within the parent directory itself. Or am I missing something?

I refuse to use streaming services since they exist. Pay per month to listen to everything? No thanks. These days, I buy everything I like on BandCamp. I have a "mirror script" for BandCamp sites I find interesting, to be able to listen into the stuff, and decide if it is worth buying.

I use a MPD based setup on a rpi at home. Built a small web interface to control the thing (MPD clients are plenty but rarely sufficiently accessible). Even wrote my own AI based presenter[1], which will make a description of the cover art part of its moderation. Nice for me, since I am blind. A simple feature (took me a few hours to write) that a proprietary vendor will actually never offer. In this particular case, if I don't scratch my itch, nobody else ever will.

When I am mobile, I use the "Shuffle All" button in the BandCamp app to play through the things I've hand-selected over the past 10 years.

[1] https://github.com/mlang/llm-mpd

I've gone back and forth on this.

I recently signed up for a streaming services again (Apple Music), but I'm being very intentional about how I use it. I'm currently going through the 500 greatest albums ever made, according to Rolling Stone. I don't necessary agree with their rankings, but it's giving me exposure to things I normally wouldn't listen to, gets me out of the algorithms, and feels much better than having it play a bunch of random stuff no one has ever heard of, just to fill the void.

I'm treating the online catalog more like a store, only listening to albums I've added to my library, and deleting ones I don' think I'll listen to again. This has helped avoid falling into the algorithms when overwhelmed from near infinite choice.

It is likely some of the albums I run across in venture will be purchased and added to my local library so I have them and am not only renting. I do want to support things like the iTunes Music Store, because I don't want to end up in a future where the only options for music are streaming and piracy. Since it's DRM free, I don't have an issue buying from there, but I like that I can sample full albums for extended periods of time (as long as I keep paying) via streaming.

From my attempts with YouTube Music and Spotify, the library wasn't really setup well to do what I'm doing, and if I were to get these albums through other means, like the poster who I can only assume is pirating everything now, I wouldn't ever want to delete anything, and my library would be full of junk I'd never listen to.

The most seems to also really glaze over the cost of the setup and storage. I have a NAS at home, and not even counting the initial investment in the hardware, the cloud backup alone costs me $30/month. Assuming a person wants backups, having your own library may not be the money saver it sounds like, depending on the setup.

It misses the only feature why I'm using Spotify: the vast music catalogue instantly available.

Coming from foobar2000 I think of all the other features of Spotify as being mostly annoying or unneccessary.

Spotify is definitely one of those tools that has some ethical issues, but that is so damn convenient it's hard to imagine giving up.

I could do something like what the article describes, but it'd definitely be a lot of work.

So instead, to support artists, I decided to set a budget and start collecting vinyl. It feels right. I still get all the benefits of Spotify for discovery and convenience, I support artists, and I appreciate having a tangible artifact representing my enjoyment.

Plus, album art is way cooler at full size.

I've been so happy with my iPod, iTunes, and CDs. It's very simple to manage, works without internet, and I already had a decently sized collection of music on there. Listening to new music is so much more intentional. And it works with my Sennheisers and AirPods Max using the headphone jack! I've been buying complete albums to listen through.

My three favorite recent purchases have been Paul McCartney's Ram, Jack Johnson's In Between Dreams, and John Mayer's Paradise Valley.

I wish I had a way of just bulk buying everything thats “in my library” on Apple Music.

I know its not Spotify, so maybe not related, but I have a much better experience with PlexAmp and would love to be able to buy my way out. Even if its €1,500 or something.

It should be noted that I actively fought against Apple Music as a subscription service, but buying music became (very rapidly) a third tier experience once they started pushing in that direction.

I had my music stack way before Spotify because this was the only way (and completely illegal at that time)

One thing I _really_ want to point out is:

>One-time server setup + storage

This is a fairy tale. No, you will have to support this stack, things will break as they always do and hardware is not free either.

And this works more or less well for techy people. (only a small portion of them).

Spotify because a thing because most people do not want to do all that. Or store hundreds of CDs.

>My self-hosted setup is about controlling my listening experience and owning what I pay for, not avoiding fair compensation to artists.

It's ironic to say in an article about illegaly streaming music. It's possible to both buy a CD and legally stream music and the artist will get money from both actions. By illegally streaming the music the artist is missing out on money they would otherwise earn.

I myself started collecting music on Bandcamp and recently set up a server with navidrome to have my full collection of music (mostly game soundtracks as of now).

It's a bit of a struggle to get access to "common music", because virtually no one offers mp3 downloads anymore, but a lot of the music I used to listen to is already over on my own server, for the low low price of 4€ a month.

Going through the trouble of maintaining a home server is not worth it for me. I wish dropbox offered some extra service for music/video.

I never used Spotify, still buying CDs and MP3.

And if I had place for it, I would be getting vynils as well.

Additionally I buy many of those directly from bands, on smaller venue concerts, where they sell their stuff and even get to talk with us directly.

It is already enough music to consume in my lifetime, more people should focus on controlling the feeling of FOMO against the industry, be it music, movies or games.

In the meantime, Spotify still cannot handle two different artists using the same name. It's almost 2026, and they still haven't fixed the issue with recommending songs from irrelevant "artists" who "borrowed" their stage names from more popular ones.

> and the fact that despite paying monthly, I never actually owned anything.

FYI, when you purchase digital music through iTunes/Amazon/etc, you still don't actually own anything. You are purchasing a license for personal use, which can be revoked for various reasons.

This is nice, but the real thing that's needed is an easy way to buy music and dump it into that stack (and preferably keep a copy so I can redownload it). A shop front that lets me log into other shop fronts, or something?

It seems to me music streaming is the most widely developed self hosting stack. There are literally dozens if not 100+ platforms, servers and clients - so it's very easy to find what you need, even if it's much different than what OP got.

CTRL+F for "lidarr"

Close tab

Lidarr is not in any way a solution for music collection.

This sounds really interesting. Can you handle connected devices i.e. play on Sonos, Bluesound devices, Denon HEOS?

The genius of streaming was being more convenient than piracy. With streaming prices hiking up, recommendations getting worse and their libraries becoming plagued by one-song-releases and AI Slop, piracy is becoming a thing again. The same is happening for video, apparently, as people get tired of having to pay for half a dozen streaming services more than they used to pay for 300 cable channels.

Apple actually used to have a platform that was decent at providing legitimate music at reasonable pricing and convenient means to play it with iTunes. I wonder if Apple Music can become that again.

I'm interested in the general direction, but for different reasons. IDGAF about AI artists and industry financials - but Helsing killer robots...

I also recognised different features I would miss. After an initial bump, the discoverability benefits declined to negligible. What I did greatly value was the unified interface. For that reason, the winner for me is to use plex as the media server, giving plexamp for all clients.

Vanced ftw. Blocks all youtube ads and plays with the screen off.

This does sound like a fun service to roll out actually

its all been down hill since rdio shut down

See also https://subvert.fm/

Good for you.

But for me, personally, I went with the lazy route. I just downloaded the songs I like and saved them to a USB stick, plugged it into my speakers and called it a day.

Honestly, I don't really know much about audio quality other than higher kbps = higher quality (I might be wrong on that though).

My library consists of ~120 .m4a files, 128kbps, most (if not all) downloaded from YouTube.

I setup Plex recently and can access it on the go from an Android phone over cellular. I can also use "Alexa, ask plex to play <whatever>" to stream to the Echo Dot. It's quite amazing to not have to bugger about anymore.

Is there a way to do this for Mobile?