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.
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.
It’s not even AI, music players have been doing this for ages. It’s tagging and labeling of the songs
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 👍
Yes! For Spotify I’ve been using stats.fm (app/site). Iirc it’s paid (one time in app, but cheap). And they walk you through emailing Spotify support to get ALL of your listening history from day 1 to import into the app. After that it will just continue via connection to your Spotify.
Would any of these apps allow for monitoring your listening activity? Similar to Spotify’s annual wrapped playlist?
@oldmansbeard @nfreak If the device you’re playing them on can run www.last.fm app then that would give you that kind of insight to the data it uploads on your listening habits
Last.fm still exists??
Do you know of anything that works locally on mobile devices?
Pano Scrobbler
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/
You go!! I’ll keep all my cds, tapes, and records as long as we have players for them!
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.
Is symfonium foss? Been looking for a good navifrome frontend for android.
Dsub2000 and Tempo are active FOSS alternatives.
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.
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.
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
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.
One reason could be that the audience on lemmy has a left-ish bias and there’s a political component to the Spotify exodus.
Edit: don’t get me wrong, I love seeing content and engagement on here.
Yesterday I got into a “funny image” post showing someone who couldn’t use the correct date format online and quickly found a comment, with tailors, about the most efficient way of searching through a date-time format. I stopped and just thought that was the most "Reddit"moment I’ve had so far here and it felt nice
“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.
I agree, but only up to a point. If you like to discover loads of music because you listen to tracks all day at work for example (which can make you get bored of tracks/albums quickly when you play them a hundred times in one day), its much harder to do so when you have to use a different service for recommendations & listening.
Not so much that I haven’t done that myself, but it is more time consuming.
So tl;dr its the discovery part thats a pain, at least for me.
(Speaking from experience)
Edit: i just clicked on the post and it covers discovery, ima have to read that later.
I mean for work listening passively I’ve moved to icecast on vlc. There’s a shit ton of internet radio out there and I’ve discovered stuff I never would have otherwise. There’s also the archive. And bandcamp. There’s soooo many ways besides Spotify. Pandora also still exists and I used to like it but I think there’s a lot of ads now
It would be cool if there was open source software to link your library to your friends so you would still get new things you didn’t have coming into your list.
It could probably even use one of these fun new protocols too!
Very wrong
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?
I’ve been working on the same and ran into the same issue. If not Bandcamp, I’ve had success on Qobuz. Their streaming payments to artists, last I checked, are substantially higher than anywhere else I’ve looked. I’m hoping the same is true of their music sales but I’m sure half of that is dependent on the labels, which likely have something to do with their not being on Bandcamp… or maybe that’s just my cynicism. I know little about how things work in the industry I just want to pay artists for their amazing work.
Bandcamp is where I do most of my shopping. Not sure where you are located. In Europe, for alternatives I use Qobuz and have used Bleep.
I tend to use it for more “commercial” albums.I really need to get into a better habit of waiting for their friday events lmao, but yeah that’s where I get most of mine from as well. Otherwise, sometimes a physical record comes with a download slip or w/e, or I’ll just go find a download for something I already physically own. But for purchasing digital, Bandcamp is king right now, and I’m definitely interested in other options that are out there too.
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
i just wanted a place i can hang out with real people without corporations mediating it. also no brainwashing by advertising.
seems like i found it for now.
Y e p. It’s a nightmare tbh. No ethical consumption under capitalism etc etc
The only way to be a truly moral person on this planet is to not participate in society and go completely 100% off grid. Even then the Good Place did a great episode on that, and they’re right, you’re not really living then either. It’s all just about what you’re willing to put up with
You have to draw your own lines. For me I dont focus on all the bad choices, I pick something im interested in and then look at the options and try pick the choice I like the most. One thing at a time and before you know it you’ve made major choices in several areas of daily life.
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.
This is a bit over my own head as I’ve only been dabbling with it recently, but so far from what I’ve found that seems to be the case.
You can get creative with the Rules, but that’s always accepting a level of risk. Like to get Beszel and Komodo Periphery working on my VPS, I technically expose some services, but I keep Pangolin’s auth enabled and use the rules to restrict it to certain paths and only my own public IP to bypass auth (1. Allow: my IP, 2. Always deny 0.0.0.0/0).
I see nobody mentioning airsonic, the open source fork of subsonic. I tried navidrome but there you can’t browse through folders or start a ‘radio mode’ (i.e. play related stuff in your library).
Another problem I found with navidrome are duplicate files in your library: since it is not folder but tag based, you’ll end up with every track double, and there is no nice quick way to just play an album each track played once.
Is there a reason why people prefer navidrome over airsonic? Since I switched I feel so much more in control what I want to play.
Many don’t run into dir structure issues because they have already organised their libraries with beets or an equivalent. I don’t personally have any issues with playing albums either. Some of the issues you are talking about seem to be client side, are you only testing the web interfaces?
This setup is very similar to mine
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
.ndignorefile 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.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.
I think I made a note about that, but you’re right I should make it more apparent. I did use the blampe/hearring-aid build here which solves the issue for the short term, but I’ll add a clearer note to futureproof it for when the main builds are fixed.
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 petty 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
