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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
Y e p. It’s a nightmare tbh. No ethical consumption under capitalism etc etc
That saying too often gets used as an excuse to not even try moving away from patronizing a harmful business, as though it isn’t worth any inconvenience since we’re screwed no matter what.
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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
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
Do you know of anything that works locally on mobile devices?
Pano Scrobbler
Last.fm still exists??
Yup. I joined in 2006 and use it nearly every week.
“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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
Nice! For an Android music player free and compatible with your setup you can try Tempo on FDroid
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.
Annoyance: Can’t scan your music library from the PlexAmp app, can’t scan it from the Plex app either. Super frustrating when music as added and you have to struggle with pop-up navigation on the Plex desktop site on mobile.
Game breaker: maybe it’s just really hard to find and undocumented, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to use profiles with PlexAmp, either to have individual play history and playlists, or to age restrict some music content.
Bought a 200€ lifetime abonnement and my daughter have to pay to use Plex on her phone even when using my 200€ paid Plex server. They lost me when they asked the user of a paid subscritpion pay. Fuck it.
Must be a misunderstanding. Paid server; users do not need a subscription.
Ho they need it when using the application on android even if you have a lifetime server subscription. They may have reverted, but I was contacted by all my familly one week. They were asking why I wanted to make them pay to access my mediacenter and some told me to ask them directly if I needed money for some components.
Some even paid thinking the money went to me and I needed it for something.
I had an hard time understand the trouble since it was mentioned now where on the website of Plex that now user have to pay the application to access my paid server.
I took this as first signs of enshitification and left.
Plex joined google on my black list now.
Based on your comments, it sounds like maybe English isn’t your first language (no shade; your English is miles better than my any-other-language). But that, coupled with a Plex announcement that could’ve been written more clearly, it almost most certainly was a misunderstanding.
To be clear, when Plex removed their fully-free model, the only thing required was at least one paid subscription in the chain. Your lifetime paid server qualified, and no one else would’ve needed to pay. They haven’t reverted to this, this was how it was when they removed the fully-free model. I agree, Plex does carry some responsibility in making sure it was crystal clear. I wonder if they would’ve refunded your users that paid unnecessarily if you’d asked?
That Plex has continued to enshittify is without question. I just don’t think their paid model is the most egregious example of it.
Ha, thanks for the explanation, this explain that. It was a shit storm and on android when you opened the app ypu would be greeted by a popup asking to subscribe.
I seen that on the tablet and went full open source without looking back.
Yeah that not my first language, thanks for the understanding.
It was a bit of a shitstorm even in the English world. Plex definitely could’ve written the requirements more clearly.
I’m glad a full open-source stack works for you; I wish I could. There’s a few of my Plex users who just couldn’t make the jump to something like Jellyfin (and I’m unwilling to be their tech support), and honestly for me PlexAmp is so good as to make the problems of Plex overall be worth it.
Take care, friend.
I just rolled some of this out on my setup. I already had lidarr running, but didn’t know about the metadata issue.
Beets is running excruciatingly slow importing my music collection. Anyone have any insight on this? I’m running the Linuxserver.io docker container with a very basic config.
Soulseek is new to me and I set that up with a vpn.
Thank you for writing this. The past month I spent some time trying to look for a way to import listenbrainz playlists to jellyfin/navidrome but I was not finding anything. Explo is awesome!
Another tool I discovered yesterday is sptnr, which leverages the spotify API and converts Spotify’s popularity to Navidrome star ratings. This allows me to go to an artist and sort by rating descending, which actually becomes popularity descending.
Now I’m using jellyfin mainly because the listenbrainz plugin allows scrobbling favorites, while navidrome does not support this. If anyone knows a way to scrobble favorites from navidrome to listenbrainz I would really appreciate it.
Love my Navidrome server, though I use Substreamer on Android since it’s “free” and free.
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?
Didnt touch Jellyfin for ~2 years (except tweaking hardware acceleration) besides updating it.
Worked fine for me.
At worst you will get security problems from unpatched bugs or loose compatibility from external services, e.g. the musicbrainz API connection in lidarr.
