I am just a hobbyist and don’t do any tech for work, but I enjoy tinkering. I have a Nextcloud that I like to use to keep files between my phone and a few computers in sync. That does include my media. For my phone I have been liking an app Power Ampache 2 as it lets me stream and save music locally (I don’t have unlimited data so somethings I do want to keep).
Part of the motivation is just because and just to host more things makes me feel more pro. I am a bit curious about what otherset ups people in the community might have settled for and why?
Navidrome on PC + Symfonium (one time payment, worth it) as my mobile interface so I can listen on my phone easily.
Literally watched the YouTube video from click and switch that goes over replacing Spotify with this. Getting my server ready!
Same
Like others, I run both. Jellyfin for music was alright, but I didn’t love how it handled some metadata and my collection now is around 28,000 songs (without bootlegs) and I wanted something dedicated to music.
Absolutely love Navidrome. When I’m at my PC, I’ll open it, hit the “Random” option under Albums and select something from the first page. This way I’m always surfacing things I would normally ignore and engaging more with my collection.
Then, again as others have mentioned, I have Symfonium on Android. There’s a “Track Mix” option that shuffles your entire library, or you can create dynamic playlists. The one I use gives me 50 random tracks, but filters out classical and tracks shorter than 45 seconds. Same idea though, listening to parts of my collection that would never be my first choice.
When I’m at my PC, I’ll open it, hit the “Random” option under Albums and select something from the first page. This way I’m always surfacing things I would normally ignore and engaging more with my collection.
Random is the only way I listen. BAM! First thing in the morning so music is with me all day. I do have structured playlists, my favorite being my Blues, Jazz, Soul, R&B, Funk playlist. When I purchase music, I usually buy the artist’s entire, official release catalog. Their top ten songs are cool and all, but I find more enjoyment listening to the B sides, and stuff that never made radio play, peppered with their top hits here and there. Those deep cuts to me are gold. I’ve been collecting for many, many decades now from Opera to Death Metal and anything in between. I even ran a fairly successful, licensed, internet radio station back in the late 90’s. To say I was a fan of music would be an understatement. It is my most expensive hobby.
Until about a year ago, I was just using Jellyfin for all of my media. For music I was using the phone app FinAmp.
I set up Navidrome when I ran into a bug that made music playback unreliable. Jellyfin fixed the bug and it’s back to being rock solid, but I still mostly use Navidrome for music.
Honestly I think the only reason why I stuck with Navidrome is that it has better playlist support. Building playlists still sucks but it sucks a little less in Navidrom as it can actually import playlists made elsewhere. Other than that, Navidrome has a better web interface for music.
Both are fine if they fit the layout of your media collection: Where Jellyfin requires you to have a certain file naming scheme and folder structure (and will cause absolute chaos on the metadata front if you haven’t), Navidrome doesn’t care about either and relies on ID3 tags instead. Also, Navidrome is a lot more light-weight than JF. I like to use it combined with the FOSS Tempus app (the latest in a long line of forks, and currently actively developed).
I’ll second that
Jellyfin can function as a music server, but it’s definitely a video server first. All the other media (music, books, podcasts, etc) are basically still treated like TV shows when it comes to how they need to be rigidly organized.
Navidrome on the other hand, can just take a pile of mp3s and sort everything out based on tags. Navidrome can also handle additional artists, so it can understand that “Eminem feat Elton John” isn’t a single artist. That was ultimately what made me switch from Jellyfin.
Today I learned that Jellyfin does music. Had Jellyfin and Navidrome both for years, never even tried sticking my music library into Jellyfin. I use Substreamer on my Androids.
checks if I made this comment while drunk
No, not me… Unless my drunk self has an alt I’m not aware of.
Exactly the same situation here on every part of your comment.
Out of those two, I would go with Navidrome. Jellyfin is more monolithic of an app, and navidrome (more specifically, subsonic clients) is more Unix-like (or modular). You can’t edit the tags as easily as with Jellyfin, but beets works really well for tagging and embedding everything from album art to synced lyrics. Beets has great plugins to do all this, including a web app plugin and an auto update plugin.
Edit: I forgot to mention all the frontend choices. Many frontends work for both apps, but I believe subsonic clients have more options.
Welcome home
Thank you :)
JF is for all of my media, I do have navidrome for music in addition to JF though (they sit side by side and share access to the same music media directories), in part because I have some other stuff I put together to work with navidrome a while ago, and I don’t feel like changing it. Otherwise you can pretty much just use JF.
I was planning on having them run side by side. I feel that would give me more options on clients for mobile and desktop, but I am still searching the idea and execution.
So what I’ll recommend first is to pick a naming strategy, and manage your files. You can do this in a few ways, what I’ll recommend is beets.
You want to do this first so youre scanning a library that won’t undergo massive changes.
Both JF and Navidrome are just playing back in this scenario, so once they are clean and in the right directory structure, you can just map the library there for both.
Thats really about it. What do you need help on with the execution?
What do you need help on with the execution?
I guess I am still in a bit of a research phase. I figured it would be fun to talk with the community about my current set up, I am always open to critiques, and see what other non-navidrome solutions come up as I might like them more.
I am planning to go with docker to install them, as that is also how the rest of my set up is done, so I don’t think I will find too many issues getting that running.
Should be pretty straightforward!
I think you’ll find a lot of folks here do JF and/or Navidrome, they play nicely together
If you want to see some neat options, you may want to check out Funkwhale and see if its up your alley
I’ve used Funkwhale, and I really enjoy it for what it can offer (multiple radios, playlists, and libraries for different types of users) but if you’re not really willing to share your music in the Fediverse, I’d go with JF or Navidrome.
If you don’t really care about an all-in-one media player with a GUI, you could serve your music on gonic and then pick the frontend of your choice. It handles podcast subs, online radio, scrobbling, etc. it also plays well with subsonic clients and beets plugins.
I’ll definitely take a look.
Navidrome for easy UPnP. Symphonium on Android. Foobar2000 on windows. Deadbeef on Linux.
I have a bunch of WiiM Mini devices and this setup works well for multi room playback.
WiiM Mini
For a moment i thought this was a version of the Nintendo console and was like omg
🤣 I always think of Weeeeeeeeeeen
Can’t help with Jellyfin, tho there are many here who use it, so maybe someone will chime in. I do use Navidrome, and it checks all my boxes. It’s a pretty comprehensive package, and recently they have introduced a plug in environment. I have not got into the plug ins yet. If your music collection is rather haphazard, I’d recommend Beets. Turn it loose on your music collection and let it do it’s thing.
If your music collection is rather haphazard, I’d recommend Beets. Turn it loose on your music collection and let it do it’s thing.
Good to know. I used to have a rather disorganized collection. I like to use Strawberry Music Player on my laptop and it can fetch album covers and metadata.
Dude, there are multiple replies for Symfonium. $5, and 100% worth every penny.
Requiring Google Play and Google account to download and is proprietary, I’ll pass.
They are starting to support F-Droid
I haven’t tried navidrome, but my only gripe with jellyfin for music is that I can’t find any non-subscription apps that work with android auto (if someone wants to point at one, let me know!)
I know jellyfin itself at least used to have android auto compatibility, but it was absolute shit and didn’t have even some of the basic music controls when I tried, and I am unsure if any version of the app still has that even.
Musicolet?
Since when could you link jellyfin to it?
use finamp. it works fantastic!
I am, it doesn’t have android auto.
i literally just got out of my car where i was playing music using finamp in amdroid auto. IIRC there is a major rewrite going on but the builds are stable. look in the repo for instructions to use the rewrite and not the basic play store version
Have you checked out Symfonium? Love that for music streamed from Jellyfin, and it has Android Auto listed in the settings, although I haven’t used that yet.
Yes, it is good, but i will not spend money on the play store.
I understand the Big Tech revulsion, I’m a hardcore, privacy-first self-hoster 10 years deep, but the app was like 5 bucks one time and it’s been my daily driver for about 3 years now. It tops every other android *sonic app. It has multiple backend sources so if you change your media server down the line, Symfonium will connect to it. TOTALLY WORTH THE MONEY!
I honestly dont listen to music enough for it to be worth it to me, but it definitely looked clean and worked well when I tried it.
I just wish it wasnt the only worthwhile option.
Whichever you go with, I highly recommend looking into https://github.com/NeptuneHub/AudioMuse-AI, which does analysis on your music so you can generate playlists/mixes from a specific song or from moods/genres
The making of playlists sounds interesting. Typically I never make any. I just have a all songs and random all and let the skitzo dice roll.
I’m not a playlist person either. I mainly use it to let whatever player I’m using add relevant songs after my queue is drained.
this is new to me, thanks.
Very yes. Wholeheartedly agree. Takes a bit of time to set up, and to do the initial analysis. But is is definitely worth it for Smart Queue (in Symfonium) and Auto DJ (in Feishin).
I was using just jellyfin for a while but navidrome got around some issues I was having, or rather the primary user of the music library was having with various things being wrong such as duplicate artists, incorrect album art, albums split into duplicates with opposite missing tracks. Once things went wrong in jellyfin it was a pain to figure out what the cause and fix were. Navidrome seems to base everything off the embedded tags and using lidarr to rewrite the tags, and for some albums rename the files, made everything show up correctly, then a delete missing files in navidrome cleans up the evidence and everyone is happy. The playlists are stored on the server too so if you don’t like a particular client app you don’t have to remake them if you try another, or just having them persist between mobile and desktop.
