The ads urge listeners to “join the mission to protect America” by becoming U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, but users of the music streaming giant have taken to social media and Spotify’s website to complain, and announce their withdrawal from the audio platform.
Okay, post your selfhosted and open-source/non-corporate alternatives here!
I have personal experience with FunkWhale . You upload music and it lets you stream or download. Simple, functional, nice. But missing fun features out of the box like sharing, scrobbling, and recommendations.
I’ve heard good things about Navidrome and Airsonic.
Considering setting up Jellyfin.
I just use Jellyfin, with Finamp for playing on my phone.
I am considering Jellyfin on a VPS host so securing it is a concern (though not a major one; I basically grok reverse proxies/nginx etc)
Interested in your observations as a user and admin
Different person but it’s really not a big deal. I’ve created a username for my friends, and they for me on theirs. Easy as pie.
I keep a local backup just in case something happens, just setup vps again and go. I use nginx to force https, and go. I’ve also limited to US, Canadian, and U.K. ips only so pretty much never see unusual activity trying to access it (if I ever share with someone elsewhere I’ll whitelist their specific IP).
I’m also running full IPv6 which just worked.
Edited to add: I only share with trusted friends who I know won’t two and delete the database or something. Just use basic security and you’re good.
oooh why didn’t I think of that? Imma do the same for some of my selfhost VPS (such as the abovementioned Funkwhale). I have friends in US/UK/Canada but as it turns out none in, eg China or Russia, which is like 85%+ of malicious connection attempts
I was hosting behind nginx for a while, however recently switched to tailscale VPN. The reasoning was less to do with security (though that’s a fine bonus), and more to do with the fact that I couldn’t get split DNS resolution working very well. As in, use one address while on LAN but a different address when I’m away from home, mostly relevant on my phone. I was getting frustrated with that and Tailscale just works really well once it’s set up.
Try radiooooo for a fairly wide selection of tracks from 1900 to the current year. There are featured playlists compiled by the site itself, but no user generated ‘channels/playlists’. Virtually every country is represented (although understandably you may not find any/much content from Azerbaijan in the 1920’s or Tunisia in the 40’s). Content is not divided by genre, instead by country of origin, decade and “Slow, Fast, Weird”.
Navidrome is what you’re looking for. Jellyfin does music but it’s better for TV, Movie, YouTube and books.
Client like symfonium can do some of the recommendations
I’ll start with I have not researched alternatives to Spotify with my comments here. Reason I have always had Spotify is that it’s just so easy to see options to listen to and BAM I’ve got hours of playlists and podcasts right there. Reason I never tried to do any self hosted media (I have an Unraid server and access to music) is because I don’t know how to get the above item without having to go out and find artists, download music, setup playlist, etc etc. Any thoughts on my laziness?
*arr stack my friend. I use docker-compose files for pretty much everything. Jellyfin as a media server for pretty much everything, many choices are available for a front end, but my symphonium purchase has paid for itself many times over.
This is pretty close to what I set up, but not exactly.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/26287096
Get friends who also value keeping their music. Everyone uploads; everyone benefits
Navidrome’s alright, Jellyfin has, in my opinion, a bit of a better UI, but not by a huge amount, and it’s handled my metadata a bit better.
TY. super appreciate comments like this from people who’ve already done the work and tried stuff out
Plex or Plex amp.
For those that don’t know: host on home computer, stream, or download to phone (think download needs paid.)
Plex is freemium and only partly open source correct?
That makes me very nervous.
What parts/features are walled off?
If downloading requires $$, then I guarantee it’s just a matter of time before you lose access to “your” music.
Is there a pure open fork?
Plex is freemium in the sense that the software walls off certain features. But the content is always hosted by you; Plex doesn’t actually control any of your media. You’re not hosting it on Plex’s servers. So there’s no way for them to realistically take your media away from you.
Jellyfin is the FOSS alternative, but isn’t quite mature enough to overcome the “friends and family factor” in many peoples’ setups. Basically, Plex makes remote access easy, by proxying the initial connection. The same way DDNS turns a dynamic IP address into a static URL. You host the media server, it tells Plex “hey, I’m located at this address”, and then your various devices simply ask Plex what your server address is. So in that sense, connecting with plex “just works” much easier.
Plex also handles all of the signup and onboarding stuff; Sharing your media libraries is as simple as having them create a Plex account, sending each other friend requests, then granting access to your server. Plex handles all of the backend authentication stuff, and they made their own account, so you’re not bogged down by managing a ton of different accounts.
With Jellyfin, all of that DDNS and account management stuff needs to be set up by you. The Jellyfin devs don’t host any centralized servers, so there’s no way for an app to ask what your server’s address is. And since they’re signing in directly to your server, (because again, no centralized service to handle that), it means you as the server owner are managing accounts for all of your friends and family. So if grandma forgot her password for the fifth time this month, you’re the one resetting her password.
There are other ancillary services that help smooth a lot of that out, but setting them up is a fairly obtuse process if you’ve never done anything like it before. And it also means that you’re setting up six or seven different containers, just to emulate what Plex does right out of the box. The demographics here tend to skew towards system admins and IT professionals, so all of the inevitable “psh, setting it up is easy. I did it in 15 minutes” comments are built upon a lot of external knowledge and experience. Of course, there is a relevant xkcd for that:
On the bright side, you can run both in parallel, and see which one you prefer. They’re just providing access to existing media folders (and indexing that media to grab metadata, album art, etc,) so they’re perfectly fine to run side-by-side. Many people (myself included) do so.
Thank you this was a really useful comment.
I happen to be an IT guy (but not much of a Networking guy) so between Claude and Stackoverflow I can probably set up “ancillary services”, esp if there are general guides somewhere.
I’m definitely willing to spend more of my own time and money if at the end I have something I truly own. Bonus if I wind up understanding a little more tech in the process.
Also worth noting that Jellyfin has several known vulnerabilities. Nothing catastrophic, but there are a few “people who already know your library’s naming scheme can access media without authentication” types of things. If you follow the recommended guides exactly, it means you’ll end up with the exact same library layout as lots of other users. It can largely be solved by simply using slightly different folder names, but it’s still worth mentioning in case you want to avoid some random bot being able to access your library. And the Jellyfin devs have openly stated that they have no intentions of fixing them, because it would require a complete code rewrite.
Most people will say that it’s best to avoid exposing it to your WAN, and simply use a VPN to connect to your LAN instead. But that completely blows the aforementioned “friends and family factor” out of the water, because now you’re requiring them to figure out a VPN before they can even begin to access your server. And it also means that they can only watch on devices that will actually be able to run a VPN connection. So your grandma’s shiny new smart TV will be completely unable to connect (unless you feel like being the family IT support, and setting the VPN up on her router).
And while we’re on the topic of smart TVs, some of the most popular ones don’t have a native Jellyfin app. You can sideload on most of them, but (again) we’re considering that friends and family factor. If your grandma has to sideload the app before she can even access it, it’s a non-starter for many people.
On the other side of the same coin, Plex recently disclosed a password breach. Hackers got emails and password hashes. So there are benefits and drawbacks to both systems. Of course this is largely solved by not reusing passwords and simply resetting your password to something new, but that burden is on the individual users.
When I deployed FunkWhale, I set people up with sub:Sonic on their phones. That is working well (except for the complaint that FunkWhale is “boring” and doesn’t have “features”)
A plus is that FunkWhale has a default web-based player, so as long as the device (eg Smart TV) has a browser, it can stream. Kludgey, but usable.
I had Plex for a long time, but switched to Jellyfin as they’ve been pushing more paid products even to lifetime-pass users. Very easy to switch, haven’t looked back.
Music Assistant with Lidarr
Interesting, I hadn’t heard of Lidarr.
The github is active, lots of features, cross-platform support,
This gives me pause. My user base includes non-technical family members. And the model I am looking for is for us to upload our own music to share (like old-time mixtapes) vs straight-up pirating
Lidarr is to fill your collection with. Music Assistant is for playing. It creates a web interface that you can play to any smart speakers or just devices running the browser window will allow you to send songs to it. They are working on an app and hopefully it will be released soon