Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

Spotify « radio » is the best reason to listen to real radios ! [honestly the DJs on most of the radios I listen to are insanely skilled !]

Btw, is there somewhere a search engine to know when a given [set of] track was played where, in the internet radio world?

> suddenly it's all the same music you've already been listening to, very little new music.

However, if you expose the gods of the algorithm to a new artist, suddenly all the auto-generated feeds will try to include that band regardless of fit. Weird how these "social graph" systems tend to form and perpetuate bubbles.

On top of that, there are some weird shenanigans with meta-data. Listening to "foreign" bands may very easily taint the weekly mix with songs in a language you don't even understand and probably don't care about. An anecdata of course, I just looked at my "daily mix x", which appears to be in my local language, but with styles all over the place. Another mix contains mostly correctly turn of the century romantic pop.

I suspect the algorithm biases heavily on metadata so that it could be easily fed "albums/artists that publisher x paid to promote".

Spotify radio regularly makes me angry, and makes me want to press a "dislike" button really hard. But of course, that button is missing ...

Spotify has not viewed itself as a music company for longer than that. It's a platform for audio. And, while there are still music first people at the company, they are not in the power positions that they used to be.

The transition didn't start when they laid off Glenn MacDonald, but that sort of cemented it. They had already gutted curation before that and by this time you were far more likely to find people talking about AI in the halls than music. If you've never heard of Glenn, check out his book: "You Have Not Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music." Or his old online projects at https://everynoise.com/.

Anecdata incoming, but to offer an alternative view, I would really love to not use Spotify anymore since they change things constantly in ways I don’t like, but their music recommendations are fantastic for me.

Their generated playlists are great, and they do a good job recommending playlists I’d like from other users as well. And while I hate the format, their music shorts actually give me consistently good music. I just hate that it’s in the TikTok swipe style.

I wonder if it's a bit of a vicious cycle. For example, if you only ever listen to new music that Spotify gives you then at a certain point, the algorithm only knows how to output the things that it has already outputted. If you don't give it any new external signal then it doesn't have a good way to find new songs.

Does noone use the Spotify "daylist" playlist, that cycles between genres you have listened to previously?

This regular plays music I have never heard (both old and new).

YouTube is much better than Spotify for this in my experience.

I miss last.fm and audioscrobbler so much. Yeah it's still there, but it's not like the old days, which was far better for feeling like I was in touch with other users, finding tons of new music, and not hearing yet another Home Depot ad.

I half wonder if Spotify US is one of those harbingers of doom for the old web in the same way I think of Twitter and iPhone/SPAs/The Stream UI.

I do appreciate that the algorithm here, since you're paying for the music, is not to increase your cortisol levels, but to increase your listening time and perception of the product

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I use YouTube Music and it definitely does work but yeah it weighs songs you've already said you like way too heavily and generally seems way worse at discovering similar music than Last.fm or Pandora from over a decade ago. (If anything I remember Pandora being too good at finding similar songs - the playlist would end up almost monotonic because it found such similar music.)

Fortunately they do have a "Discover playlist" that completely excludes music you've heard before. Unfortunately that's all you get. No way to e.g. say "play me reggae I haven't heard before", and it's only updated once a week.

So yeah... kinda shit. But still better than the alternative which as far as I remember from the 90s is to only listen to extremely well-known bands and find good news music like once a year.

This hasn't been my experience at all. Not sure why Youtube would suggest big breasted female artists when I never, ever, ever watch the video when I'm playing music.

I find Plexamps Radio features, and DJ's to work great against my library. It also helps if you, as an individual, have a diverse and large music library to supply for the sonic analysis.

> 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.

If you are a bandcamp user, find people with similar purchases to you and follow them. It is a good way to browse for new albums based on people with similar tastes.

I tend not to overload my personal library with stuff I'd never listen to.

However navidrome at least supports lastfm via external Integration: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/external-integrations/

I never used it so I can't tell if this is what you're looking for or at least the right direction.

Soulseek provides a similar experience! You browse users' files and find folks with great collections of cool stuff.

Substreamer is available for iOS and Android, DSub is Android only afaik.

If your smartTV supports Subsonic API, it probably works, but if not, it's possible to point Jellyfin and Navidrome to the same audio directory.

If you use an AppleTV, there’s also a pretty decent navidrome client called LMP.

You're welcome. The Android app is pretty good, but for iOS it remains unreleased, so you have to deploy yourself. Prologue seems to be the best iOS App.

There are other unofficial Clients (e.g. in flutter), but I tend to use audiobookshelf as streaming player paired with vlc to play downloaded offline files (the app is not so great here)

I'm sold, thank you will install it.

Navidrome's killer feature is its simplicity, and not just the dead simplicity of setting it up: Jellyfin has everything and the kitchen sink, which is nice - especially for video, whereas Navidrome offers a well-honed, long matured, music search/browse/play standard API, namely Subsonic which opens a world of clients for a multitude of platforms and all tastes... On that front Jellyfin feels narrow in comparison.

Smart Playlists mainly. They let you add logical filters to create playlists. Think IF song_name NOT contains "live". That's not syntactically correct but that's the idea. Also lots of apps can connect to navidrome so you can import everything easily. Like Feishen is a desktop music player, and

I use and like plexamp but I also think it's a low bar to set; Winamp 2 streaming from a file share is a better UX experience and less work than the funky ux Plex and plexamp has.

Yes but you have to use the S1 player and run a second container with middleware, bonob. At least that's what ended up working for me.

Yes my bad

>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.

Any reason you're not just running network level AdGuard and Firefox with Ublock Origin to block all ads on your home network? Even just FF+UBO would block YouTube ads.

The selfhosted subreddit is also a really good resource to use for interesting things to run.

I've been on this mission but unfortunately also trying to defend my PhD in a month. But I do have a lot more Linux experience. Here's stuff that I think will really help.

yt-dlp: a video downloaded. Originally designed for YouTube but supports a lot of sites. I suggest heavily aliasing this with options like sleep intervals, aria2, and make sure you download the user agent switcher. For YouTube you probably need to import cookies from a browser. But you'll be able to watch the videos without the ads.

Btrfs: it's a file system, like ext4 or ntfs. Has a lot of useful things like being able to create subvolumes, raid, cache drives (or volumes), quotas, snapshots, etc. Think anything that you'd do with zfs but it's been easier to use and it has a copy on write system that helps dedupe. You can also compress the file system! I use duperemover. If it finds dupes it replaces one file with a link (which btrfs natively supports). It'll hash the files so run it early and then set up a job (use a systemd timer)

Tailscale: take your network anywhere. God, tailscale is so fucking useful. You can even put it on a raspberry pi or your phones. It's nice to have it on an old phone which you can throw termux on and have a little server. I've used these to jump to another machine that has had issues where it could connect locally but not outside. You can also set up exit nodes so you can do things like push all your traffic through a vpn, make all your traffic use pihole, or just make it appear like you're somewhere else. You could use this to even make it effectively impossible for streaming services to know you're sharing an account. The data is going through whoever's house pays. If you get fancy you can set up rules to port specific traffic through specific locations but this is still a bit above my head. I just know it's possible. Unfortunately with iPhones you have less control. They can even break out of all this and you don't have full control. I need to get someone to explain more networking to me.

Systemd: it's annoying at first but damn there's so much to it that is helpful. Use systemctl edit to edit your service files. The ones that come with services like jellyfin aren't nearly as locked down as they should be (I intend to push to them in a few months). You should also use systemd mount for your drives. You need a companion automount file but your drives will go offline when not being used. This will really help with reducing energy costs. Be sure to note that there's even configs for you gpus. It also lets you control a systems resources. There's also nspawn and vmspawn. I wish these were a bit more popular because they can do everything docker can and more. Nspawn is a suped up chroot so you can really containerize things and even run different Linux flavors (I've even been play around with running an arm container on my x86 machine). Using machinectl you can enable these as services and even create triggers to spin up or down. There's also importctl so if you create an image (or someone else does) you can just pull that! Which kinda makes it easier than docker in many cases other than the fact that not many people have made images (or publicly available). Docker's big win is popularity but systemd has felt nicer in every other way (documentation sucks). There's so much more to systemd and that's why it's loved and hated. There's a reason it stuck, it just is too damn useful (don't forget to check out homectl too)

Ffmpeg: you probably know this one but it's also worth spending some time to learn it more and write some scripts. If you care more about storage I encode most stuff to av1 with nvenc. It's not archival but honestly I'm often getting 50% storage reductions and I can't tell the difference. Your source file probably wasn't archival grade anyways. Good enough for me. Hevc is also giving me good success.

There's a bunch of other little tools that help. For example, I have my main computer sitting behind my TV. If I'm working on it I'm in it via ssh. Otherwise games and movies are on the TV. I use ydotool as a keyboard and just made a shortcut on my iPhone and a trivial script on my Android so I can push commands that way and use a wireless mouse. There's kconnect but it's been more a hassle than help ime. I did the same for backing up photos on from my phones (they wake the drives first). Android can rsync but for iPhone I can't find a good free solution other than writing the hackiest shortcut you've seen (ssh in, check if file exists, if not then write. You can't rsync, the fucking thing will timeout and despite there being terminal emulators for iPhone you can't access your photos from them. I've found zero ways to link them and I'm upset). Check out things like fail2ban to jail users that do too many logins. You can also use nspawn to containerize these services, spin up and down, and between btrfs, homectl, and pam it is really easy to containerize users. You can mount their volumes on demand and get their accounts syncing across your intranet. It's kinda crazy what you can do.

My goal is to get some images so many of these things can start becoming plug and play. I'm getting close but obviously bigger priorities right now. I'd love help if anyone is interested. I'm not an expert in these domains so I'm sure I'm doing some things wrong but I'm learning a ton

What about backups? My greatest fear is self-hosting valuable stuff (like family photos) only for my NAS to fail one day and lose potentially everything.

> the experience isn't there yet without quite a lot of work.

Do you host this with docker? It is usually the pain-free approach

For "content subscriptions" (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix) keep in mind that a part of the revenue goes towards the content creators.

For anything else, I can also highly recommend using local or self-hosted software. Plenty of open source software has even exceeded proprietary alternatives in the last couple years.

I really don’t understand the argument that these subscriptions are just making the rich richer.

In the first place why would that be a problem? If a company offers a good value and service for your money, isn’t it fair to compensate them for it? Does someone need to be compensated less just because they have been successful in the past providing good value for money? That would create weird or negative incentives.

Then, what’s the negative consequence of rich people getting richer? It’s not like the economy is a zero-sum game. The proportion of poor and extremely poor people has gone downhill in the last 200 years, while population has increased 8x (we’re probably around 10% of extreme poverty compared to +90%).

And then, there’s the lack of evidence of really rich people getting richer. How much of your money going to Spotify is really going to rich people compared to employees, artists, little shareholders? Maybe the impact of the earnings of Spotify is disproportionately helping normal citizens make a living compared to the very few big shareholders that are already rich.

What’s the alternative? Spending the same amount of money exclusively on Albums that probably bring a higher cut to big music companies and do not expose you to little or unknown artists? While at the same time you spend hours every month in the maintenance of your own music service while you could have used that time to help in some community projects or just earning more money to donate to causes impacting the extremely poor?

I’m really not sure at all that a subscription service like Spotify has any negative consequence for humankind.

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

If you run it 24/7 on a dedicated desktop with decent idle (i.e. no high power video card, low power CPU), it likely uses ~ 50W average. That gives an estimate of 0.05kW24hr30 = 36kWh, which would be in the range of $12/month at current australian electricity prices. If you have bad idle power usage (or somehow mostly active not idle), maybe you'd be looking at twice that. But for OP who was spending $xxx/month on subscriptions, it's a pretty negligible cost. If you really want to save this too, raspPi can do a lot of home server needs nowadays

Dunno, my N100 with 1 SSD and 1 nVME (which hosts over 15 services including jellyfin) is probably not really relevant compared to my desktop PC. ~10W vs 180-350W depending on what I’m doing.

Run it on Raspberry Pi. It brings down electric consumption significantly.

And while it heats your home in the winter, it also puts more strain on your A/C in the summer.

There are also noise and light pollution issues if it's near a bedroom.

I have got 26 docker containers running on it. Looking at current utilization, it's 6% of cpu, 10GB ram out of 16gb. The issue is disk access. The thing has total shit bandwidth to storage, this was a surprise to me and a bit of a learning experience. It has an nvme ssd and a 3.5 hdd, but in the end usb drives attached to the usb 2 ports are much faster than either. It's a Lenovo, so I guess they cut costs somewhere and the usb 2 ports should have been a giveaway, but I was tricked by the nvme.

That's been sitting on my ideas list for over a decade, because I've wanted Pandora that runs locally from my collection. But I'm not sure I'll realistically ever get to it.

Time is pretty much the reason.

Why roll your own media player? The reasons not to seem obvious.

I ran my own seedbox for close to 12 years on a VPS. My choice was either never upgrading the OS (which was always an Ubuntu server) or setting up everything all over again. There were few more things like a VPN, a note app at one point, 2fa setup and so on. Finally I stopped and this Nov the VPN will expire and I am planning to let it go really.

I see where you are coming from but all that experience really tired me out. People say once you do it, it’s forever but is it? I appreciate it that some people can do it — no I really do — but maybe it’s not for everybody.

Then there are managed solutions — oh, I am sure there would be, there were and are for seedboxes as well but the good managed seedboxes sometimes would cost as much or half of my annual VPS cost in a month, yes 1:12 or so. Now I believe there’s nothing wrong with pricing a managed solution high but not all can afford it or are willing to afford it.

I really appreciate it though. Would you mind sharing a tutorial if you’ve saved one somewhere and what disk, CPU, and memory I am looking at for this? That would be very kind.

The one thing that bothers me about Lidarr is that it is album based, not song based. Before streaming services, I managed my local music library with albums as well, but my habits have changed. I basically only listen to my "Liked Songs" playlist on Spotify, and really only have a select few albums that I listen to on the whole.

I tried syncing Lidarr with my Spotify account, but 95% of the downloads then where songs that I didn't care for.

Sure, but that’s piracy. Kinda like saying Winamp is alternative to Spotify. The music is kinda the most important thing.

Life-changing. Thank you.

I'm going to assume OP isn't interested in piracy given they were talking about buying...

Actually most of them are dead and no their families are not getting anything either I am pretty sure. Heck almost 80% of my songs I won’t be able to buy from anywhere at all.

Fun fact: I bought an MP3 from a record label site in my country and the file was from songs.pk. Yup!

There you go - artists thanking me :)

wrote a python tool to do daily scrapes from a russian music tracker site and sync all the titles onto a mariadb database. led me to discover all sorts of music which I would otherwise not able to stumble up on across all my 4 paid music subscriptions (Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal and Amazon Music). Some that I could not find on these music services, now live on my private Roon server. Mostly ancient multichannel formats, DSD/SACD and vinyl rips. And some precious private live recordings from concerts long gone, as in decades ago.

Tidal is not available in my country.

I am a heavy user of bandcamp, but I find their notifications...lacking. I ended up taking their emails, categorizing them, and putting them in RSS [1]. This has cleaned up my notifications and makes it much easier to follow artists and to easily separate new releases vs news/merch/...

Also, I find bandcamp's wishlist manager to be severely lacking. I use the wishlist as a queue of things I need to check out or have already checked out (and may not have liked). But, it isn't really meant for having 1000s of albums in there.

So, I wrote a wishlist manager [2][3], which lets you organize, comment, rate, and listen to your wishlist.

I spend a quite a bit on bandcamp, especially since many of the bands I listen to are only available on bandcamp (no streaming services!). While I am glad it hasn't been enshittified by the acquisitions, I do think there could be a few small UX improvements.

[1] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email...

[2] https://flathub.org/apps/net.line72.campcounselor

[3] https://line72.net/software/camp-counselor/

>credit card gets charged a bunch of times

I avoid this by buying the virtual gift cards and redeeming them on my own account

I can't justify the time to go torrent music every time I want to try something new. I don't have a "small list" of artists, I listen to tons of artists and if I immortalized it with a torrented library, how would I ever find new music?

> 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've recently started using Beets[1] to organize my music collection. It's a command line application that IMHO is not entirely intuitive to use at first. But once you get the hang of it, it works incredibly well.

[1]: https://beets.io/

I don't usually recommend software that isn't open source, but MusicBee is really great for organizing tunes. You can build really deep auto playlists based on any tag you like, you can do bulk updates across lots of fields, you can have it reorganize files into folders around any of the tags, including with fallbacks for missing tags, there's configurations to download metadata from online, all kinds of stuff. Plus it's a super customizable music player too.

> Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything?

MusicBrainz Picard ... one album at a time until you get the hang of it.

MP3Tag for manual cleanups and out of normal oddities, etc.

I think this is the path. I like jellyfin but I find it has trouble with some files on some devices. Kodi handles pretty much everything. Not as nice for browsing though.

The good thing about docker is that you can just spin up 1.41 in another container and check it out.

I used SMB before with Infuse, but switched to selfhosting Jellyfin as scanning takes too much time over the network (the files are on HDDs attached via USB). I still play with Infuse, but it uses Jellyfin's database.

I give all my services a proper subdomain so SSL works. But I keep all my services internal and run a pi.hole with DNS for my local services. (I use wireguard to vpn into my network to access everything).

If internet goes out, DNS to my local services still works fine since it is being served directly from my pi.hole.

Might not be true for all setups, but I find that Plex is a resource hog. Navidrome and Jellyfin are a lot leaner. Plex was using quite a bit of CPU just browsing the library.

Plexamp sounds awful to me, trebly and thin. Googling around I found it was a common complaint.

It DOES handle multichannel audio well, though I don't think it can do Atmos natively.

Love the testimonials!