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.
Nice! For an Android music player free and compatible with your setup you can try Tempo on FDroid
To contribute a bit to this response, this fork has been releasing new versions based on the pending PRs of GitHub.
Is this your personal blog ?
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.
If you’re not trying to cultivate your own tastes then you’re just letting a corporate blackbox drive your interests and aesthetics.
Like radio then?
Also that always happens. You don’t always discover the best band but you are more likely to discover the ones that spend more on marketing
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?
You can connect navidrome and many other music players to listenbrainz.org. Like Spotify it creates an end of the year report and it also does recommendations like the weekly spotify 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?
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!
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.
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.
“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.
Very wrong
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!
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.
Thanks for putting this together! This is an excellent write up and is super informative! I’m already using Navidrome + Tempo with Lidarr for my music library, but since the database issues with Lidarr popped up a few months ago I haven’t bothered adding new stuff.
I had no idea Explo was a thing, it’s just what I’ve been hoping existed. I’m going to try and get it integrated into my set up.
Spotify has a feature where if it is playing on another device, you can control it with any other device logged into the account, is there any good way to replicate this with a linux desktop and an android phone?
If your use case is only desktop and phone, KDE Connect can do it independently from your music service. Works in both directions as well.
interesting, thank you.
That’s something I’ve struggled to find so far unfortunately. Maybe something exists but I haven’t found an answer yet.
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).
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.
Couple of questions about the directory structure: why separate library folders? Can’t they play off a central library and wouldn’t something like Overseer take care of requests?
At least from my understanding (specifically for Navidrome here), there’s no way to differentiate which user owns which track/album if they’re in the same location. Navidrome’s multilibrary configuration is basically just telling it “hey this folder is this library, that folder is that library”. A combined single folder is perfectly fine if users are fine with that, but in my use case my wife and I have dramatically different tastes so it makes more sense to separate it all out.
Okay, that’s the answer. I don’t have a problem with having an eclectic library.
