Selfhosted @lemmy.world Starfarer @lemmy.today 1 yr. ago

Replace Spotify

Hi Selfhosted,

I am looking for the best solution to replace spotify for at home and out of the house music.

I already have a large music library and run moOde for multiroom audio and use spotify connect to cast to it.

Is my best option to set up an MPD server and wireguard vpn to use it on the go? Are there other options? What would you recommend?

56 comments

Plex w/ plexamp Jellyfin w/finamp

Thats what I would go with but theres tons of options here as well

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#media-streaming---audio-streaming
- Very gold alternative for plexamp is symphonium
  
  I agree. The client fills the gaps of the server side recommendations and filters, but the lack of desktop equivalent is why I don't use it full time
- I have a jellyfin server running already so I will give that a go. Thanks
  
  There are some great designs ready for redesign of Finamp to make it much more modern, but development is fairly slow with limited resources. I think it’s currently in closed testing though.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters

DNS Domain Name Service/System

NAS Network-Attached Storage

Plex Brand of media server package

VPN Virtual Private Network

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

[Thread #221 for this sub, first seen 17th Oct 2023, 08:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
- I love you
- Good bot
My entire media library is sitting on a NAS, fed to me through a Plex instance in docker. Works great
- Plexamp is pretty great. Plex was functional when it came to music but plexamp's features and ui really makes it feel like my own spotify
  
  I tried it very briefly, when it still brand new, because the regular client didn't support replaygain. Found the UI/UX quite complicated, because of the super minified controls. Has anything changed in terms of that?
  
  Love plexamp, hate the way plex forces album-centric metadata.
- Same but Jellyfin. I don't keep anything outside of shit that's not easily streamable on demand.
  
  Yeah, it's mostly videogame music and J-metal.
People will recommend Navidrome- but if you're like me then your music collection is organized by folders and not metadata. Navidrome does not and will never (developer said as much) support folder-based browsing.

I recommend using Gonic https://github.com/sentriz/gonic and then a compatible Subsonic client. Gonic has been the simplest and smoothest out-of-house music streaming experience for me.
- I've not heard of gonic before. Why choose it over, say, Airsonic or one of the other Subsonic forks?
  
  It's "just" as server, doesn't rely on Java and has seen a release this decade.
- I might actually swap to that from Navidrome. Dealing with Metadata has been such a pain and it rarely works properly lol
  
  Dealing with Metadata has been such a pain and it rarely works properly lol
  
  Try out beets if you ever want to fix it. It's a pain to setup the first time (make backups for sure) but once you do, it's easy to maintain.
  
  Yeah. Navidrome fucks up your experience. If your id tags are not 100℅ that is.
  
  Folder based music server is the way to go.
  
  Gonic is really too bareboned and really is for low power devices. The better alternative would be Polaris which has a better web interface.
  
  If you have modern hardware (celeron +), Airsonic is the best IMO.
- I use gonic with sonixd on my laptops, but probably might move to supersonic from sonixd.
  
  On my phone, Tempo is really awesome!
- It's "just" as server, doesn't rely on Java and has seen a release this decade.
I think you're on the right track with Wireguard.

I'm also running Jellyfin, but mostly Navidrome for music. I've been pretty satisfied with the latter.

Consuming music outside the house has been a significant issue. I mostly tried to go the offline route: download some music to play while you're out of the house ... and on Android the experience has been overall very poor. My least worst experience was with Substreamer as a client, but still not anywhere near good.

Where I'm at today is with always-on VPN through Wireguard and the experience is significantly better than any other solution I've tried before.

It's been years I haven't played with mpd, so I can't comment on that.
- +1 for navidrome.
  
  I'm also using that and have it exposed to the web using a cloudflare tunnel. What I didn't like in the beginning but really appreciate now is that the service itself doesn't have a lot of permissions and cannot delete files or change their metadata. I'm hosting it in a docker container and everything except the config file is mounted read-only.
  
  I'm not sure how relevant that is but it gives me more peace of mind exposing it publicly.
  
  Thay sounds potentially better than having to vpn in to use it.
  
  How are you liking navidrome?
- Navidrome with Substreamer on mobile for auto-generated recommendations based on already played music works great for me.
- Navidrome sounds interesting, I haven't heard over of it before.
  
  Wouodbyou recmkend it over jellyfin?
- It is also very resource efficient. I am running it on a Raspberry Pi 2 and it works flawlessly.
Plex server streaming to Plexamp here. Currently handling around 50k tracks all stored on my NAS no problem. Soundiiz supports Plex, so converting Spotify playlists over to Plex is pretty straight forward, provided you have the songs.

Plex pulls down it's own metadata, so if you're a tagging freak like me, you'll have to check the "Prefer local metadata" on your Plex server.

Smart playlists are a little cumbersome. They're actually saved filtered searches. Not intuitive at all.

No HiRes - if that's your thing. (on iOS, not sure about Android)

Plexamp has a separate EQ for each bluetooth device on iOS, but it can't differentiate between wired headphones using an adapter.

It does save music or playlists to the device for offline playback, but they're captured within Plexamp. You can't play those offline tracks in any other app (might be possible in Andorid, but the filenames will be random and idk about metadata). I have not run into an offline download limit, like in the old days.
- I use plexamp too with a large library so I can comment on the android side (I didn't know some of these differences existed)
  
  the app has settings for audio quality dependent on connection type, including not converting hires audio
  
  as far as I can tell the EQ in plexamp is global across devices, though it has presets for specific devices -same on Android I don't think you can manually listen to downloaded songs outside of the app
  
  I'll also comment that I sort all my music by folder and Plex does ok with this Not great, but it works
- The best part is the TIDAL integration IMO. You can have both local tracks and streamed tracks without having to deal with downloads. Best of both worlds.
  
  I forgot about TIDAL integration, since I'm not a subscriber. I only subscribe to Spotify for the family account. My three teenagers and my wife would all mutiny if I stopped paying for Spotify. I just now convinced them that Plex is stable enough to use for video. Small victories.
Dont know about the multiroom thing but Navidrome is pretty solid
It definitely has to be Jellyfin (server) + Finamp (client) + tailscale (mesh VPN)
- Symphonium is another good mobile client.
I currently use Jellyfin to stream my music collection. It's all stored on my NAS and I can give access to whomever I like. Downside is that the iOS music client, FinAmp, is... not pretty. It's functional, but not great. I understand the player situation to be a bit better on the Android side.
- On iOS there’s also Fintunes & Manet Music.
  
  A little prettier but not as feature rich.
- I'm using S2 on Android to use Jellyfin as media source. Really great player. I've bought the full version, definitely worth it.
Been using Plexamp for a little over a month by myself only complaint is meta data is sometimes not the best but that might be my choice of music as well. Also still missing some features I would like to see.
I'm running roon. It's expensive but self hosted, and has an excellent set of features around a library that seamlessly blends locally stored content with cloud content from either qobuz or tidal. It is great for discovery because I can click into the performers/composers of a track/album and see their other work. Or view a composition itself and see other artists who have performed it.

I wouldn't say it's for everyone but it's been a good fit for me.
- Oof, you weren't kidding about the price. Seems like a pretty solid piece of software though.
I was using Plexamp for a while but now I've mostly converted my library to OPUS so I can fit it all on my phone. I have a script to automatically copy the directory structure/artwork and convert from my main FLAC library, and keep it in sync with my phone using syncthing. I use Musicolet for playback. If your library is bigger or you don't have much free space then this is of course not an option, but it works for me.
Anyone here experiment with Funkwhale? Wondering if it's a practical choice to make a personal library available in a personal cloud.
Navidrome over wireguard, and music library in folders and proper tagging trough beets and picard. using subsonic as a client for it. tried plex and plexamp but I'm moving away from them.
Another very fast and folder based system would be mStream: https://mstream.io/

It works very well, also good mobile apps (Android + iOS)
- Thank you, I've not heard of that one. Time to have a read...
I run nextcloud which has a music plugin. The plugin exposes an ampache and subsonic api. All you need now is a client. I use ultrasonic on android. This is for out of home streaming. In home both plex and jellyfin offer dlna for pretty much any networked device made in the past 15 years. That's how I listen on an AVR. On a PC I could use that or just browse to the nextcloud music plugin and listen in browser.
If I could move with all my Spotify favorites and playlists to other services, I probably could replace spotify.
- If I could figure out how to move all my favorites and playlists AND continue discovering obscure music from around the world with ease, I would replace Spotify.
  
  I can't think of another way for me to discover something like Indian Metal, all female Cuban acapella group, or power ambient deep in the middle of nowhere farmland NY. It's not like those are going to be played on the radio. But I can type a random combo of letters and numbers into Spotify and start a radio based on the first band I don't recognize. Let the discovery commence.