Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative (opens in new tab)

I would have agreed with you 3 years ago. But now not so much.

Spotify "Radio" feature just tends to want to give me music I've already listened to over new music. Whatever algorithm they are using has waaaay overfit to what I have already liked.

There used to be curated playlists done by humans, now almost everything is "made for you by Spotify" playlists which, have the exact same issue as the radio stations, suddenly it's all the same music you've already been listening to, very little new music. If you want new music, you need to find a playlist made by a user instead.

It's a "YMMV" situation, because...

I don't want that. At all. It's algorithmic and there's nothing stopping artists and labels paying for placement in there. I don't want that.

I am a musician, and a DJ, and I've been digging deep through artist and label catalogues on my own for decades. The process of discovery via my preexisting routes is far more fruitful, enjoyable and rewarding than lazily letting an algorithm do the work.

But I like doing that. This works for me, not for others.

A slower speed on the hedonic treadmill is a feature of self-hosting, not a bug.

Leaving music streaming services has been a great excuse for me to rediscover music blogs like Gorilla vs. Bear and Stereogum, or even local culture magazines.

Another great way for discovering music I've found is just perusing Bandcamp, which is where I buy most of my music anyway. Love finding local artists, so I just put in some genre filters and the location filter. Found multiple great bands this way.

As for keeping abreast of new releases, Bandcamp is pretty good for that too. You can just follow artists and you get emails when new releases or merch or tours come around.

I've never seen this work. Either it plays the stuff I've listened in the past in a loop or shove some random things I really dislike (maybe hidden promotional stuff?). Personally it's the reason I've cancelled subscriptions each time I've tried, I always ended up listening to radio instead as the value brought by Spotify etc... was really poor.

Plexamp is really good for this.

The styles information that Plexamp has works really well and in my experience, as long as your library is large enough, works better than modern Spotify.

It was Spotify's degradation of their radio service and terrible "AI DJ" that finally got me off Spotify. Punishing them for platforming Joe Rogan was just icing.

I'll argue music algorithmic recommendation on these platforms is a bad thing anyway.

First, the algorithm is opaque, so it can push stuff to you because the platform decide it has to get the spotlights. Maybe the label/producer/musician paid for it or whatever you want to imagine that is even worse. It is a well-known phenomenon that if some music is pushed to your ears, you'll end up appreciate it most often than not. This is how hits have been and are still made.

But even if the algorithm was not gamed at all, I still think it is a bad thing. It is not going to push you out of your comfort zone. Listening to new stuff is usually not pleasant at first. You will only "discover" things that are very similar to what you know and already enjoy.

If these recommendation algorithms were about food, they would "reason" like this: "Hey, you've really enjoyed this whole pack of M&M's, I'm sure you'll like this Kit-Kat bar now! Oh and you've had a glass of wine, what about trying out meth, it's pretty good too.". Do we really want our computers to reinforce such behavior?

Go to concerts, buy merch, buy albums on bandcamp (it has not enshittified too much yet apparently), donate money to artists; discover music through your friends and other humans recommending it. Recommend what you like to your friends. Cancel your Spotify subscription, none of that money is going to artists anyway. And use soulseek.

It was like this in the past, now it's crappy. The algorithmic optimization started eating its own tail. And it's a problem on all platforms, from Spotify to YouTube.

Let's take YT. In very simple terms, instead of taking a bold move and suggesting a few outliers (similar to differentiating the population as it's done in evolutionary algorithms), it takes an easy shot and, if I'm identified as male, suggests some videos with females with big breasts and other generic junk many people just click on autopilot. It works well for them because most people click and click and spend their days uselessly hooked and feel bad, but in my particular case I lose what I had earlier, i.e. suggestions of interesting bands (they still do happen but the selection is of much lower quality).

My favorite songs gravitate heavily towards 2 very different genres. This seems to confuse the hell out of Spotify. The "discover weekly" is comically bad no matter how hard I try to prime my library.

I've discovered so many niche bands and subgenres since I got Spotify.

> I have no idea on when artists I like release new albums and would not encounter them on a self hosted solution, etc.

Depending on what you like, bandcamp makes it easy. You can follow any artist (which is also offered whenever you buy), and from then on get release notifications. But of course, what’s available differs by genre. For metal, most bands are on BC, except most Japanese artists and major label stuff.

I buy, download, and put the flacs on my Jellyfin server.

There are, of course, also piracy solutions for that, pretty sure the *arr stuff has automatic downloading per artist.

By moving away from streaming services, you can once again own what you bought and paid for. Algorithmic playlists are nothing, nothing at all compared to the loss of ability to use your own player, edit your files, back them up, or not be nickel-and-dimed to get around artificial restrictions. Not to mention that with streaming services, music can be taken away from you after the purchase.

My experience with Youtube Music is that the recommendations are quite poor. So I wouldn't miss that. But it's hard to replicate the breadth of coverage of YT music (even though sometimes songs just vanish from my playlists). But I have started buying a couple of albums every now and then and slowly I am building my owned music library.

I'll admit it, I have a fairly narrow range of music I like so the following works for me on this basis: I don't like Spotify and other music streaming services as they never are consistent with their licensing or good with their recommendations. And the adverts are obnoxious. What I like is radios like Radio Paradise: https://radioparadise.com/player or regular radios available through online streams (such as the French radio FIP: https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip). There is enough to discover on either and they are still mostly in the range of what I would/could listen should they not have existed.

IMO using a streaming service’s recommendations is a way to filter out bands that labels aren’t promoting. The services have to be getting paid for pushing - right?

If everyone is this lazy about music discovery, then music suffers. I am not using “lazy” as a pejorative. There are people who just couldn’t be bothered and that’s fine. Music just isn’t that important to you. But if the people who deeply love music are corrupted by the ease and dopamine, it will deeply wound music as a whole.

My problem isn’t discovering new music, it is “discovering” my massive library. I love AM, but the fact that 3 of the five large icons taking up precious screen real estate are devoted to discovering music that Apple is paid to promote is infuriating.

I love Spotify's algorithm. My wife loves my Spotify algorithm & hates her own so I know it's not universally great but it's still incredibly impressive & I value it a lot.

That said: there's trade-offs. I don't browse music forums but I have in the past (when I had more time) & it's incredibly rewarding. I also get a lot more value from new music discovered through friends than through Spotify - there's something about intentionality that adds to the listening experience. I love when Spotify plays me a great song from an artist I've never heard, but I'm much more likely to seek out that artist on a personal recommendation.

Not everyone has the time, energy or expertise to host Jellyfin, but for those of us that do, there's probably room for both of the above listening experiences in our lives.

This isn't an article about replacing all-knowing streaming service content recommendations, it's about finding a solution for playing local music files you own in a convenient way.

I'd like to shoutout PG Vogt (from Reply All podcasting fame) for this episode of his new show:

https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/how-am-i-supposed-to-find-new-...

> I don't browse any music forums and so apart from my favourite bands, I have no idea on when artists I like release new albums and would not encounter them on a self hosted solution,

Music Brainz provides this at https://test.listenbrainz.org/explore/fresh-releases/

There's also Music Butler: https://www.musicbutler.io/

I think for some people the goal shifts from discovery to ownership - knowing your library, building it intentionally, and not being nudged by what the algorithm thinks you should be into

PlexAmp has DJs which allow you to get the song/playlist based radios.

LMS (Logitech now Lyrion) also has something similar in MusicIP (not as good as PlexAmp).

its hard to beat the convenience of being able to right click/radio to get new recommendations but there has to be other options that arent that much more effort either?

i think you can add plugins to jellyfin. maybe there is a last.fm plugin? i know of some other last.fm alternatives like maloja or libre.fm but i cant comment on how good they are

Are playlists in Jellyfin readable? Could you not create a script(s) that takes your existing playlist and generates new ones for you? LLM's are great at suggestions, I mean it drives Spotify's DJ X.

Those features can, and should, be made completely separate from the system that hosts the media. In fact, they used to be, with great success.

How are LLMs for music recommendation?

Napster / audio galaxy... I mean your own legal burned music with AI generating a radio playlist.

Plexamp has this feature, i use it all the time.

That’s just how you interact with music though.

That was cool 10, 12 years ago. Now that everything has been exploited and enshittified, I want to go back to the pre-infinite-streaming experience. The only issue is cost vs being a pirate...

I mean right at the top he says hes just trying to listen to his own music. I dont get how this is a downside if you wanna discover new shit you can always just go to youtube.

Frankly 99.9 of my music listening is stuff I already know and enjoy. But I still like to listen to new stuff often. So this kinda thing is perfect for me 99% of the time.

The thing I miss and can't find a replacement for is lastfm inside of Spotify. It gave two things and did it exceptionally well:

1. Helped me take something I like or am super into at the time (band or song) and give me a playlist

2. actually suggested with a high hit rate something I didn't know about and it was available to play right now.

other streaming or stations just loop into what I already have which sucks. Side note that I'm into pretty niche non mainstream music such as Melodic Death Metal and Industrial so self hosting seems interesting but I also spend a good chunk of my time looking for more music. (Most of the bands I am really into only have sub-20k plays a month on Spotify).

I really miss Napster letting you browse people's music when you found someone who was also into things you liked - pure gold mine only second to a LAN party where you could dig through the file server.

Thanks for mentioning audiobookshelf. I'd totally given up on using jellyfin for audiobooks. It just absolutely butchers any book split into multiple files, which is basically all of them.

I'll give audiobookshelf a look!

Neat! Can you stream navidrome to a smart TV? I have speakers connected to them and I usually stream to it using airplay on iOS.

+1 for Navidrome, I self host both jellyfin and Navidrome. Navidrome wins hands down for music. With Jellyfin it's harder to categorize and then search, Navidrome provides a great experience out of the box.

I understand that Navidrome is more specialized for music, but what specifically makes it superior to Jellyfin, in your opinion?

And Navidrome you can run on a 1gb Raspberry Pi.

PSA: Amperfy works well with Navidrome if you need CarPlay with offline syncing. It is a bit rough in the edges, though.

That's great to hear, Navidrome is on the top of my list to checkout when I get to music (currently doing movies).

I've never tried NordVPN Meshnet, but just want to add an alternative I've fallen in love with: Tailscale. It's amazingly simple to set up and use. Today all my devices are connected to each other, and my jellyfin service is reachable through my chromecast, phone, computer and Ipad. As well as my filehost VPS.

I've been self-hosting for quite awhile now, and these days it's such a breeze.

Is it better than plexamp?

> run both Navidrome and Jellyfin in docker containers

> use NordVPN Meshnet to securely connect to them outside of the home

> host an entire FLAC library and then transcode to Opus on the fly.

i really have no idea what any of these words mean. Spotify's future is secure.

Do you mean Opus?

Can Navidrome/Jellyfish integrate with Sonos? For me, the Sonos app still is not able to reliably index/play music from a network share.

> It is just crazy how easy it is to set this stuff up nowadays. I run both Navidrome and Jellyfin in docker containers….

Wow, I’ll get grandma to do it! Ha ha, just kidding, but I’ll try it myself. Ha ha, just kidding.

Honestly, I just want to scream “self-hosting isn’t going to happen, stop trying to make it happen.” I absolutely welcome the hobbyists doing this fun stuff in their free time, but the idea that they will ever win over ordinary users is total fantasy. And it’s accompanied by reality-denying stuff like how “you don’t need” feature X or Y. Sure, I long to go back to organising my own mp3 files like it’s 2002. And because you’re angry about corporate power, Spotify or whoever definitely provide no features of value to anyone! This is all pure mood affiliation.

Sorry. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad your setup works for you. But I think you are not using the word “easy” in the same way as most people.

This reflects a lot of what I've been through as well. My subscriptions exploded when AU got a lot of different streaming platforms, and I think when paramount+ came out and took Star Trek off of another one I drew the line. I realised I still owned all the physical media, so time to make backups. Previous to that I moved off Gmail, that was by far the hardest, and still somewhat ongoing after 8+ years.

The hardest to kick for me now is YouTube Premium.. And in AU it's like $33/month AUD, but I just can't stand ads.

Now I self host:

- Own Mastodon instance - Photos (Synology) - Videos (Synology) - Audio (Synology) - Storage (Minio) - Code/Build (Forejo) - Security (Synology)

My NAS is blocked from the internet, while web facing stuff is on a separate server (old dell workstation). And now have added a PI hole to another older dell box. My partner's laptop will be moving to Linux and will also be a Windows free household. I used Windows since 3.1, I liked it up until around Windows 7. I'm glad I've moved to Linux, but disappointed to see what has happened to Windows in general.

I want to self host more services for family, but the experience isn't there yet without quite a lot of work.

The tags #homelab and #selfhost are pretty decent to follow on Mastodon btw!

>Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills.

>I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions.

I have been doing the same for quite some time now but it's only recently I realized all these subscriptions services are just making rich richer. We should encourage self hosting as much as possible. I mean why should we pay huge corporations more money just for storage?

Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A quick math will show that it's not insignificant

Self hosting is absolutely awesome.

I upgraded my NAS to a recent Asustor a year ago and it changed my life. JellyFin for video works perfectly everywhere in my home, on any device, and it can also be accessed remotely, securely, with Tailscale, so if I'm in a hotel somewhere with my iPad it still works.

And my library is curated by me; it has classic movies and other movies I like, and zero fluff or random shows that I would never watch in a million years.

But self hosting doesn't stop here. Using Docker (via Portainer) I can publish any app in minutes, on either Apache or Nginx, securely with a Cloudflare tunnel (free) without ever exposing my home IP to the world.

This of course isn't as resilient as a proper server with a proper provider, but it's so much simpler and so much cheaper that for hobby projects it's largely good enough.

> The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling at this point

I have a ~10 years old desktop as my server (intel skylake and 24GB of RAM). I host about 20 services and the server is not loaded at all.

The services are the usual ones, nothing heavy such as LLMs, though

I'm doing the same, I have family plans with my friends for pretty much anything so I don't think I ever reached such high monthly costs though.

I started my home server for self hosting Immich, not only for the cost but because I like to have my images close to me.

I also recently replaced Lightroom with ON1, it's definitely not the same quality but, as hobbyist, it didn't make much sense to pay that much for me anymore. It was by far the most expensive subscription I had.

$150/month shaved off is no joke. It's funny how these subscriptions creep up until you're basically running a second rent in background services.

With all the SWE in the mix, why not just roll your own media player...? It's not THAT hard. Same for movie player btw (and one solution can do both ofc).

HTML spec for media is pretty amazing these days, no real excuses outside of time.

I have my collection in Dropbox, then sync that onto my home server with rclone once a day, which exposes it to Plex. Then I use the Plexamp app (music-only Plex app) to listen across all my devices

What do you do for backups? I'm just setting up an Emby instance with a 4 TB hard drive attached, but I'm worried it'll fail and take everything with it.

Where do you get media from? Piracy is an option, but if you want to do it semi-legally I guess you’d need to rip blu-rays, but that seems like it'd be more expensive than streaming services, and you’d have to wait for everything to be released on blu-ray (if it even does)

Unraid makes a lot of the home lab stuff pretty easy. There's a very active community, good docs, frequent updates. It costs a little, but it's one time and worth it, and can grow as you have time and money to add stuff to it.

Is there a reason you went with Emby over Jellyfin (forked from Emby)?

Would love to hear more details about your setup.

What do we do about Lightroom? Capture one? How about sharing galleries?

> I wish there was an easy way for this - plug and play kinda

I can click a button in Lidarr to auth with Spotify and automatically search usenet for every album of every artist I follow on spotify, download them all, and make them available in Jellyfin. It'll even monitor the spotify account and import new additions. Getting the whole stack set up is pretty much the exact opposite of plug and play, but once you have it all installed it's amazing how much becomes smooth sailing. 2K songs is nothing for this kind of stack.

>It costs a lot to buy those music files...

And the artists and everyone who worked on it thank you very much for paying for an album/song instead of just paying a streaming subscription fee.

And like you said, even when you do buy tracks, the T&C are murky. Some platforms basically treat it like a long-term lease rather than true ownership. Honestly, what we need is a modern, ethical "one-click" export + purchase system that lets you grab your current library in lossless format and actually own it.

You can rip them from tidal quite easily. Youtube also has lots of music to rip but in shitty quality. That being said, music piracy has declined quite a bit since spotify. I'd suggest getting into a private music tracker if you really want to.

This is a vendor lock-in more than anything. As someone who listens to mostly dubstep and EDM and built my playlist off of Spotify, I can't move to Spotify because they don't have half my playlists

> It costs a lot to buy those music files and that too if they are available (which isn’t always the case)

Virtually all music, particularly modern music, is made available for free on YouTube. You can download it and it's yours.

For example, here's the official release of Taylor Swift's album "Evermore" for YouTube ("Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxrMpCMdYwk&list=OLAK5uy_m-v... . You should be able to pass the playlist to yt-dlp and automatically extract all the audio tracks.

I don't really want wholesale quantities of music, so I do this manually, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's tooling around for it.

My use case is that I sometimes like to use my subscription music on an offline MP3 player. So I keep my YTM subscription and am using https://github.com/ryanprop/ytm-dumper to download its files and put them on my MP3 player.

This might work for your use case too, though if you're just using it to grab content, the artists won't get royalties..., then again that seems to be the same for Linux ISO sites.

This reminds me of my smart playlist on Apple Music.

It's called "long time no see" and it includes any songs I've listened to more than 10 times but haven't listened to in the last year. I've been using the same music library for nearly two decades now, so it works really well for me. It's like a constantly rotating nostalgia playlist.

Love that you've got archival stuff and Christmas music filtered out - feels like everyone with a big library has a few odd folders that shouldn’t be in regular rotation

I've never used Spotify so can't compare to that, but Bandcamp is like a much better version of the local record store. You can follow artists and record labels you like, which will give you email notifications whenever they release something. You can browse new and old music by all kinds of esoteric tags and subgenres. Every week or so you get an email of some new releases in your favorite genres. You can download in multiple formats, personally I download FLAC for backup and 320 for listening. It's easy to search for tracks or artists you discovered elsewhere, it's easy to listen to and scrub through tracks... Just great. If you're a gamer, it's like the Steam of music.

My only complaint is that when I buy a bunch of songs my credit card gets charged a bunch of times (one for each artist/label) which has triggered fraud warning in the past, but I guess they do that to avoid the hassle of routing money to each artist in their own currency... It seems mildly customer unfriendly to me but in a world where people charge a can of coke to their credit card maybe not all that weird any more.

I think the unstated assumption is that the reader has an existing music library. Where that library came from is an excercise left to the reader. I use bittorrent, which I admit is a little morally smelly, but I justify it by buying vinyl albums of any artists I listen a lot to. It'd take a lot of Spotify listens to match the money to the artist of buying a single album from the band website. Lots of vinyl comes with digital downloads too. When I'm at home, physical media is fucking rad. I mean, I can unplug the turntable, spin it by hand, and hear the music directly from the needle. No software, no gadgets. It's so primal, like the artist is whispering to me. I hadn't realized how much I lost switching to Pandora until I switched back to physical media.

Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything? e.g. Merge the artists 'Guns N Roses' and 'Guns and Roses' into the most correct one.

I can't justify the time to do it manually and feel like if I just wait long enough a turn-key AI solution will pop up.

I moved away from Plex when they started shoving free B/C movies with lewd posters on my home page and made is very hard and confusing to remove (if removing it completely was even an option, I still don't know).

The whole reason I host plex is that I want an offline experience that I curate myself. The requirement for internet to authenticate and shoveling crapware in my face pushed me towards trying Jellyfin. The Jellyfin UI on TV and mobile is not as flashy and polished as Plex, but it is extremely functional and respects users choices.

Been a happy Jellyfin customer for years now though I only use it to organize and browse my library now. Actual playback is either MPV on PC or Kodi over NFS on TV. After trying many many players, these were the two I found best for respective platforms, nothing else even comes close.

I’ve been using Plex since it was a Mac only XBMC fork. While it’s drastically different than where it started, I haven’t noticed any recent changes. I do 99% of my viewing via the AppleTV app and it hasn’t changed. I removed all the shortcuts for their streaming stuff long ago.

I’m running the server in Docker and pretty lazy about updating it. Is that the side that changed? It looks like I’m running 1.27 and 1.41 is out now. Should I be sticking with what I have?

I really like Infuse Player on my AppleTV. It "just" reads from a network share that has a bunch of folders with movies and tv shows and just handles the rest. Occasionally I will have a codec issue but I just transcode for free using handbrake.

I never really understood what is the point od running something locally and then registering on .com domain. Like if I will loose internet connection I cant listem my own music? Seemed radicoulous. But I guess it does nit require much knowledge and people keep using it.

What about their plexamp app for streaming music? It looks pretty nice and seems like a good deal if you purchase the lifetime plan for 50% off during Black Friday.

On another note, Jellyfin can look inside .iso files, which afaict Plex is not able to. Very handy with my collection of ripped dvd's.

Interesting they felt the need for a re-write when it was already so good. I wonder what the impetus was

That's why the author moved beyond that stage and to apps that connect to existing music libraries hosted on jellyfin. Apparently there are a lot more options out there than I knew about.

My question would then be, what do you think needs "evolving"? This space hasn't seen transformative changes in decades, with ample time to converge towards effective paradigms and implementations. Stability would be pretty much what I would expect, or even desire there.

Roon is where it’s at if you want a decent music player. Not free but well worth the price, imo.

If you can't find a place to pay for it, then just do what Spotify did when they launched. I recommend Nuclear[0] for that

[0] https://nuclearplayer.com/

Why is acquiring music difficult? If it's DRM you're worried about, the iTunes Store is all (or at least primarily) DRM-free.

Between Bandcamp, 7digital, and Amazon (which I check in that order), I have always been able to find anything I was looking for.

This is hilarious. The most probable explanation is that it's matching the tvshow part, but a repro would be interesting.

Can you share more about your set up?

How much storage, are you backing up your data elsewhere?

And what did it cost you, apart from time?

Why do you need Cloudflare if your services are only available over Tailscale?

This is partly self-hosting. You are relying on clownflare and tailscale for your services to be accessible. Do better

I've used beets to import and tag a huge personal music library:

https://beets.io/

beets, it's ridiculously good, https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/#

Do you use a local client that accepts caching/offline playback of the content ?

I'm looking through the android clients and none seem to fully embrace keeping the most played tracks on device ("offline mode"). Tempo[0] has in on the wip list, while StreamMusic straight removed in it the latest update[1], so as of now it looks like a pretty tough feature to get.

Listening to music in remote places is nice, and that was the main reason for paying for Spotify for me.

[0] https://github.com/CappielloAntonio/tempo#readme [1] https://music.aqzscn.cn/docs/versions/latest/

Seconded! And the Subsonic-compatible API means that I have Android/iOS clients (playing music through the browser on mobile devices isn’t great). The web interface works well on any desktop.

I've been working on a custom media server that does streaming, block-based storage on top of S3, with the local disk being used as a cache.

I implemented an override of Stream in C# that can be passed directly to an HttpContext file response. This gives me range-based response support on top of cached S3 media blocks for free. The front-end uses ffmpeg to do a quick transcode on uploads to guarantee fast start of mp4 content in my html video elements.

The cool thing with having a reasonable sized cache is that you can switch to glacier infrequent access tier (i.e., the one intended for quarterly reporting) and save a lot of money on storage. The other fun bit is that it is shared across all clients on the LAN, so if someone watches a show before you, you'll just read it from local during your run through.

For me, I don't need a lot of fancy bullshit in a media solution. An un-styled web player that just works on my MacBook is pretty much the only client support I care about. My media library currently shows up as a monolithic <table> without any pagination. Time to first frame on an uncached video click is well under a second on a 1gbps fiber connection using 32 megabyte block size to US-EAST-1 from Texas.

Is that wise though? I mean I understand the desire to use cheap off-site storage, but S3 clouds can be expensive when requesting files a lot, streaming data, lots of read/write operations.

(Disclaimer: this relates to the commercial project I run, but it is directly answering the parent)

It's not self hosted, more a middle-ground between rented Spotify and self hosted data sovereignty, but this is what we do at https://asti.ga . You store your music in some Internet-accessible storage, such as any S3 compatible endpoint, and Astiga connects and streams your library (and provides offline etc etc). AMA.

Could you run a user space s3 filesystem that jellyfin thinks is a regular disk filesystem.

You can do this via rclone with Jellyfin.

The nice thing about these media servers is support for mobile etc

I like Jellyfin and have it set up for movie, tvseries, youtube channel hosting for family members.

As a music server it has a few shortcomings (that can be fixed with contributed code - ATM this one is waaay down my TODO list so anyone that wants to step up - go for it, please) ..

It currently has non existent support of FullAlbum.flac with 'standard' TrackIndex.Cue track timing lists.

I ripped a lot of my early albums and CD's as single lossless FLAC (and APE and another format) files with track timings courtesy of either hand entry or the exactCD (?) database - there are many such rips out there is full album rips where popular for a good run of time.

Jellyfin sees these as single files, not as an album of tracks, and plays them as such with no track selection, next track, or resume.

Addressing this is on the github issues list.

Foobar2K and other music players have no issues with these files.

Personally I switched Navidrome since I found the clients to be better and the scanner to be lighter, but there's a few things I miss: casting was nice, as well as centralizing my media on one everything-app.

I haven't spent much time trying Jellyfin but I really like having my music information in a central location (Navidrome) and being able to stream to a variety of different clients based on my device. It works well for me so far.

I've used both, and wound up using Jellyfin mostly because it also does movies/TV and I mostly listen to music from external apps, so a music specific server wouldn't be adding much benefit.

For me Navidrome actually could run on my raspberry pi with my library.

I use Navidrome with Amperfy on MacOS/iOS and love it.

Plexamp is awesome and i miss it a bit as a Jellyfin user... But i don't trust the plex codebase. My suspicions were firmed up when Lastpass got hacked literally through Plex.

Oh ha! It's loading now, and just noticed the reference. Nice!

Can you elaborate? I'm not aware of musicbrainz having any recommendations/discovery features.

Interesting. This is what has stopped me from self hosting music. I love the discovery you get from Spotify and other music streaming services.

Too bad, because you are referenced in the post! He was inspired by https://youtu.be/4VkY1vTpCJY

Pretty sure it does use metadata and folder/filename as fallback.

Musicbrainz Picard is great for normalizing metadata for music files/albums, maybe give that a shot.

This happened with my library too but they fixed it a few updates ago, all I had to do was let the scheduled full scan run.

Does it help to connect a different frontend app like Finamp to your jellyfin server?

>I'm not willing to accept a single second of added latency or buffering or downtime...

>... near-instantaneous access anywhere in the world to every song ever...

Nobody needs this. You think you do, but nobody needs everything everywhere all at once. If being wholly unwilling to wait "a single second" isn't sarcasm, then... yeesh.

> The fact is that the vast majority of us don't have the resources to self-host a Jellyfin instance that can provide near-instantaneous access anywhere in the world to every song ever made at 320kbps.

The fact also is that the vast majority of us don't have a requirement to be able to access our media from anywhere in the world. Most people aren't traveling the world on a regular basis, they stay in one area except for maybe an occasional vacation.

> And of course I never have to worry about managing a library of mp3 files. When an artist I like drops a new album, it'll be on Spotify at 12:00am exactly and work perfectly. This isn't possible with self-hosting.

If that's important to you, then indeed self-hosting will never be able to match it. But for me at least, my music listening has been 95% static since about 20 years ago. On occasion I hear something new that I add to the collection, but for the most part I listen to the same music I did some time ago. Paying $6/mo to Spotify just to listen to the same things I already have in my collection would be a gross waste of money. So for me it's the exact opposite: self hosting is a no-brainer because I simply would not get any value for my $6/mo.

I'm a bit confused, why would you have problems with latency for music? This is not real time sound mixing where you need millisecond latencies, the client can just download the whole thing and play it. Even high quality audio files are tiny (unless you're listening to 4 hour classical operas).

It's no-brainer for people who do not care about freedom or file preservation. Spotify can pull the plug on whatever your favorite song is and there is NOTHING you can do about it. Then again, spotify has hundreds of millions of clueless subscribers, such as yourself, who will willfully consume the most crappy audio codec and praise them for it

Yes, "Spotify Alternative" does seem to miss that Spotify / Apple Music+ / etc are legal and somewhat ethical ways to get access to a huge amount of music that would be expensive to purchase and a huge pain to torrent.

E.g. lately I have been listening to more classical, and the musicianship between different performances of the same piece varies widely. It is very nice to be able to quickly explore a few different albums before I find the one I like (also to study the differences). In the Olden Days I would hogged the headphones at the music store... or, more likely, not make my own decision and purchase based on reviews and name recognition.

On the other hand, I of course never actually purchase albums anymore. ("somewhat ethical")

If you listen on high-end equipment the audio quality is noticeably worse than many other solutions and depending on your music taste, Spotify often removes content or doesn't have it in the first place.

Spotify prices are quite reasonable, especially when you consider what has happened to video streaming services like Netflix. Plus Spotify has a large portion of all music ever, and mostly has close to 100% of new music that is being released.

Hosting my own, even though it appeals a lot to me on principle, just would be either too costly to maintain legally (buying new music) or too cumbersome illegally (torrenting any music I want to listen to).

I guess if someone is really into music, they will spend a lot of time on finding new music, and will be inclined to spend more money on the hobby too. But for casual listeners like me, it's far too convenient to simple select a song on Spotify and click "play radio" and get an unending playlist of new songs.

Afaik it's not terribly good to the artists. One of my favorite bands left the platform; I'm not there yet but if it happens en masse (or at least enough to effect me noticeably) then I'm out too.

I got a smartwatch with a cell connection, some good earbuds and started going to the gym, then I learned that their watch app is complete garbage. It refuses to play the music I want, either playing something else or nothing at all. It will play it out loud on my phones speaker in the locker instead of through my earbuds. It refuses to download the playlists I want. It refuses to stream the music.

None of that is a problem with the Apple Music app, so it's 100% a Spotify problem.

Also, Music sometimes disappears from my playlists.

Nothing. It's pretty cheap, and saves all the hassle these people are going through to self host. I'd guess for most people here paying for music streaming service isn't really a problem. Buying all the music would likely be more costly, though seems a bunch just want to pirate music and make out that they are "saving money". Music discovery would be more problematic.

"You'll own nothing and you'll be happy": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_ha...

They went down for like 30+ minutes today.

Endlessly repeating popular songs I like until I hate them.

It's a shit company that I don't want to support.

I used Plex for years but ditched it when they got caught sending all your watch activity to their company for whatever. My privacy is worth the pain. I'm running Jellyfin, but it's not a smooth system at all.

Assuming there's last.fm/listenbrainz reporting plugins for Jellyfun, then both those services will provide recommendations based on what you have listened to. Maybe not as good as Spotify's but it's something.

https://listenbrainz.org/my/recommendations

https://www.last.fm/player/station/user/{username}/recommend...

Check out Doppler for iOS https://brushedtype.co/doppler/

I just googled owntunes and can’t find any information. Can you provide a link?