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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by v4ld1z@lemmy.zip to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

Edit: Also please tell me if a meme is even allowed as the thumbnail for the post in this community - just feels like it gets some of my current desperation across :D

Since the last time I posted here sharing my new home server, I've gotten a little more acquainted with the services I'm using. After getting acquisition of shows and movies sorted, I ventured into music (streaming).

As many here, I'm used to using streaming services for music, ie. Spotify or YouTube Music. Naturally, I tried a similar approach by setting up my Arr stack to feed its music into Jellyfin where the music is picked up by Symfonium. I tried it out for a couple days and liked it quite a bit since it keeps my phone clean of "unnecessary" data but I still retain access to music. Unfortunately, the way I acquire my music limits my selection quite a bit unless I venture into torrenting, which I'd prefer not to. So unless I figure out a safe way to torrent on my server, I'm stuck with getting access to a very limited selection of artists and albums.

In addition to that limitation, there's also the files formats of the music. Most of the music I've downloaded was only available in FLAC, which is awesome if you've got the bandwidth and data plan for playback, but for me it means that I spend 3GB of data for a day of streaming music which is just not sustainable.

In comparison, I can set up a Revanced version of Spotify in addition to my Revanced YT Music to get access to all the music I could want. Unfortunately, that comes with the caveat of still being tied to the companies I'm trying to get rid of - albeit not financially anymore, but I'm still sharing my data.

Ultimately, I'm not sure what to do. What I love about self-hosting is the independence from all the companies we're being fucked over by in all kinds of imaginable ways. But if it's free, outside my sharing data with them, can I really compete?

I'd be interested in hearing your opinions and thoughts on this. How did you solve music streaming with your build?

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[-] Gonzako@lemmy.world 10 points 6 days ago

Por qué no los dos?

[-] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 2 points 4 days ago

Personally, I just have the local files saved on my devices and listen to them locally. No usage of the network, no need to set up Navidrome or anything like that, it works really well! I don't really change the music I listen to that much, but if I did need to sync between devices, I could simply use Syncthing!

One slight gripe is that, when listening to music on my phone, I get notification pings interrupting my music. When I get the time, I want to get a dedicated MP3 player to avoid this issue, probably some iPod or a clone that supports Rockbox.

[-] SethTaylor@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I use Tidal and Bandcamp

I'm hearing great things about Quobuz

Bandcamp and Quobuz allow you to buy and download music

And I have to mention, as I do in any thread like this: If you self-host music you bought you're a friend to me. If you pirate from billionaires, I don't care. If you pirate from small bands, stop it.

[-] blinfabian@feddit.nl 4 points 6 days ago

i selfhost the music collection i own on LPs, to replace spotify/yt music i use Archivetune

[-] BigJohnnyHines@lemmy.ca 4 points 6 days ago

Self host, takes less time then you think after the initial library build. Easy to do in a weekend. If you have some money to spend on music then buy music from the artists you love. Can all be in one place, none of this exclusive garbage, quality as high as you want, can rip music that’s never been released digitally, and I think most importantly - access to your music library without an algorithm telling you what to listen to. You’ll be surprised how your listening habits change and how well you know your music after jumping off the engagement treadmill.

[-] Krauerking@lemy.lol 3 points 6 days ago

By the way if you want a really cheap and easy setup for the time being while you figure out jellyfin/navidrome and docker and all that.

Symfonium app can run from a google drive that you can spin up for free and throw some music into. And then if you end up self hosting you can just point it to your server.

[-] v4ld1z@lemmy.zip 3 points 6 days ago

I've got a server set up already and am using Symfonium but thanks for the suggestion regardless :)

[-] modus@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

Can you just point it at a shared network directory too?

[-] Krauerking@lemy.lol 2 points 6 days ago

It says it supports network shared folders or NAS that use SMB or webdav.... So yeah should.

[-] modus@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

Good to know. Could be helpful setting up basic, low-maintenance servers for family members.

[-] Krauerking@lemy.lol 1 points 6 days ago

Yeah it has become my go to for recommending to people with struggles with Spotify.

Plus if they ever purchased albums through amazon they have all the MP3 files anyways available to download and I have them throw the files in a drive.

[-] modus@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

Does it display album art? I thought that came from the server software. Or can symphounium source that?

[-] Krauerking@lemy.lol 1 points 5 days ago

I mean most of my album art is stored as part of the file. So I dont mess with it much but a quick look at the FAQ suggested it looks up data that matches artist name and albums and you can add your own images on your phone that dont save to the server but stay consistent apparently to the song or artist.

So yeah. Still just a BAMF of a software.

[-] modus@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago

Cool. Thanks. I must have missed that. I only saw options for content providers.

[-] Krauerking@lemy.lol 1 points 5 days ago

Be warned I dont know how well it works cause I dont use it that way, and I saw someone complain it didnt pull album art for AC/DC and the developer said that it would never would work because the "/" acts as a delimiter for tags and would look for bands AC and DC. So the auto search tool is maybe not amazing.

[-] modus@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

No worries man. I appreciate the help. Trial and error is how I do it. Lots and lots of error.

[-] Hiro8811@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago

I've mostly gone with pirating. I've built a massive library of flac songs, as for when I'm outside I can't stream cause I'm stuck with ADSL, but I usually keep some albums I'm into on my phone and I also use Grayjay to discover new music.

[-] osanna@lemmy.vg 2 points 5 days ago
[-] Hiro8811@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

Yeah, country's infrastructure is kinda stuck with it since running new wires costs to much, but they do run them when they're redoing the streets

[-] RickyRigatoni@piefed.zip 111 points 1 week ago

Leeching off corporations' infrastructures for free is a noble endeavor and everyone should do it.

[-] morto@piefed.social 63 points 1 week ago

Network traffic, unique accesses, etc are metrics used by investors and media to measure their success, so we're still contributing to it, and also, we're preventing alternatives from gaining more fame, so getting rid of corporations should always be the preferred path

[-] verrymay@lemmy.world 60 points 1 week ago

spotify and google will figure out a way to block modded apps eventually.

nobody can take your home server and its content away from you

[-] Sisyphe@lemmy.world 32 points 1 week ago

Bum music off of Spotify and save up for a home server in the meantime, got it.

[-] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 8 points 1 week ago

Today servers can be nothing more than a $50 nuc from eBay with a larger drive in it, or an external one.

My server today is an old Small Form Factor Dell. It has no problem running VMWare ESXi, with multiple Windows and Linux VMs, ripping DVDs, converting videos and streaming, all at the same time.

[-] NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago

The issue now is storage is getting pretty damn expensive

Yeah, I got 4 used 2TB hard drives on Amazon back in early 2024 with a $100 gift card and still had a few bucks left over, and now I see that you basically can't find a single 2TB drive lower than $70...

I wish I started my homelab sooner...

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[-] morto@piefed.social 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

In a dystopic future, somewhere...

Chilling out listening to some music
BANG!
"Put your hands up! No sudden moves!"
"But, but..."
"We tracked down self-hosting activities, and we're confiscating everything and taking you to jail"

[-] enkille@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago

i also only download flac files, and i keep them in my ~/music/lossless directory. i use picard to organize that, and wrote a bash script to keep a synchronized opus format copy in ~/music/lossy. on my phone i use termux/ssh to rsync the lossy files to my phone and avoid streaming altogether. for reference, my lossless directory is 221gb, and lossy is 19gb.

[-] mpramann@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

If you use something like Navidrome to host your own streaming service you can set up automatic transcoding and enable it on your phones streaming client (I use Symfonium). This way I can always access my whole library at any point with it not using too much of my mobile data. But my flac collection is quite big and even if transcoded completely I could not fit all of it on my phones internal storage.

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[-] HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago

Soulseek has far more music on it than you can typically find on free public torrent sites.

Just a heads up.

[-] duckshuffgoose@piefed.social 8 points 1 week ago

i started with lidarr and very, very quickly stripped that our for just slskd

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[-] desmosthenes@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago

why not both?

[-] JayGray91@piefed.social 22 points 1 week ago

Don't use revanced. The backbone of the dev team moved to morphs now, and so do other modders that used to dev using revanced.

https://morphe.software/

There was a bunch of drama that's worthy for Lemmy but stuck in reddit that I don't care to bring here.

It got easier to patch things in some ways, but having known how to do it "the complex way" with vanced and revanced before I feel like some is lost in translation.

But overall it's a lot better with morphe, the patches against megacorps efforts to block access comes quicker than revanced, and the YouTube minimum app requirement now moved up

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[-] domi@lemmy.secnd.me 15 points 1 week ago

I wrote an application which runs on my server and monitors my favorites on Tidal/Deezer/Qobuz. It downloads them in bulk whenever I have a premium account with one of them. Usually I purchase a month of premium every few months, at which point I get nice clean FLACs for local use.

The FLACs are moved to Jellyfin and I stream them using Finamp, which also supports transcoding, so I keep 128 kbps Opus files for offline playback and stream the raw FLAC files when bandwidth is no concern.

I have amassed a huge music library over the last decades, so even if all streaming websites go under tomorrow, I have enough music locally to last me a lifetime.

[-] ThePantser@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 days ago

If anyone doesn't want to write their own software, Lidarr has auto import from lists. You can add your playlists from Spotify and last.FM and it will watch them and automatically download the songs from the lists. There is no Tidal, or Deezer option though which feels like a ball drop by the Lidarr devs.

Bought a home server, threw at it an HDD and installed jellyfin. Now I buy my music from bandcamp or rip my own cds (yup, I'm buying cd's back too) and haven't logged to spotify ever since.

Can't be happier.

[-] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

Mp3 collections never stopped being cool, you just have to invest some time into it

[-] cecilkorik@piefed.ca 12 points 1 week ago

The only problem with something like Revanced is that it can go away at literally any time. It could be shut down tomorrow and you'd lose access to everything it provides. That's fine, or at least tolerable, if you ALSO have something self-hosted you can rely on in case that happens. If you don't have downloaded music self-hosted, then you're totally relying on Revanced permanently and you lose everything if it goes away. Maybe for something like music that's an acceptable risk, but you have to consider it and decide where it is an acceptable risk. What are you going to do if those services you're relying on go away?

Self-hosting, like you said, is about the independence, and the knowledge that once it's up and running on your own hardware, it won't just go away on its own, and it can't just get "shut down" unless you choose to. You might not need that for every service you rely on, but there are probably at least some you would struggle without, and those are things you should consider self-hosting. The more you think about it, and the more comfortable you get with it, the more likely you'll decide other things are important enough to self-host after all.

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[-] fozid@feddit.uk 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Ive been trying to get rid of YouTube for over a year now, but haven't found a solution im happy with so still sticking with revanced YouTube.

Got rid of Spotify 2 years ago and self host navidrome and it's perfect for me. I use dsub2000 on my android and feishin on my Linux desktop pc.

I'm UK based, so fairly strict internet laws and I torrent to supplement my owned media. I don't use flac, I'm sure if I tried I could hear the difference from 192kbit MP3, but honestly I don't care. 192kbit or similar mp3's are more than good enough for me.

Self hosting costs money. Hardware setup initially is expensive, both in money and time and effort. It's only a solution if you believe there is a problem that needs fixing.

For me it's well worth it for music. Video not so much, not yet anyway. I listen to the same songs 100s of times, but videos only once or maybe twice at most.

[-] slazer2au@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

Use the left to find content, use the right to consume the content.

[-] non_burglar@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

I do both.

The music I like is in my collection. I pay for it where I can, but I'll be honest some of it is pirated because I just can't buy it anywhere.

I also use Opentune to listen to YouTube music without logging in to stream stuff like "lofi chillhop beats".

I recently saw around here a music discovery service (self-hosted) I might try. Can't remember the name...

[-] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Either way, just remember to support artists when you can. Bandcamp Friday is one of the best ways I know of to fund artists in exchange for FLACs that you can legally listen to however you want to.

But I was a broke student in the heydays of torrenting, so I'm not judging using any means necessary to listen to music.

[-] markz@suppo.fi 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

You can always transcode flac to another format to save bandwidth. I haven't used jellyfin for music, but shouldn't it support transcoding that too on the fly?

[-] zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 week ago

You're in the selfhosted community, surely you know what sort of answer you're going to get. If you just need to hear it, selfhost!

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this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
348 points (97.8% liked)

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