hello,
im really tired of google music and spotify, and want to self host my downloaded music and create my library.
however, i know nothing about self hosting. My knowledge is absolutely zero. And Im completely lost about how to self host my own music. Dont find any good tutorial for dummies and i have a lot of question. I dont understand nothing. I see the tutorials of Navidrome and Ampache and still understand nothing. All of that looks extremely complicated to me.
How can i self host my music? I need to pay something? A very old and slow pc is enough?
Im completely lost. If someone can suggest something - like a tutorial , dunno - to build/self host my own music I appreciate a lot.
ty
I use a Plex server and the PlexAmp app wherever I want to listen. There are probably better options, but it’s something I set up years ago which was dead simple and requires almost no maintenance.
Yup, that’s what we do as well. 30tb of music, TV, and movies. All available to me and my friends wherever we are.
Plexamp is the best music service I’ve ever used and it’s a great way to get into self hosting. Once it’s set up why not add some tv and movies?
I started with TV and movies and thought why not add some music!
Agh Plex always rubs me the wrong way… It acts like closed source software as much as is possible. Went with Jellyfin and it’s been great. But haven’t tried music.
I actually plan on switching to Jellyfin soon but I think I’ll keep Plex running just for Plexamp
I run both for a similar reason. It’s the same library, point both services at it and you have more choice of apps. Yet another benefit to self hosting.
Take a look at the Finamp desktop client. It comes very close to the Plexamp client from back when I was using Plex.
I have heard symphonium is very good if they are looking at closed source Plex anyway. It works with jellyfin and navidrome.
I just use syncthing to sync all of my music to my phone’s SD card. Then PowerAmp since there aren’t many fully featured foss music players. I am keeping my eye on Auxio though, keeping it installed and updated.
Symphonium is a great Android music player which connects to a Subsonic or Jellyfin server (or any other protocol like SMB).
Navidrome is a music server which implements the Subsonic protocol. This means apps like Symphonium can connect to it.
Any old PC is enough, even a Raspberry Pi is fast enough for a music server.
- Install Navidrome on the server/pc
- Configure Navidrome (open ports, add your music library/folder)
- Connect a subsonic-compatible music app to to the server (I.e. type in IP or domain as well as the port).
Anything more like SSL (https) and a domain is optional for getting it working, and only a benefit if used outside of your home network. Using Tailscale makes a domain/SSL unnecessary and also no longer needs messing around with networking (e.g. no opening ports on the router).
Can confirm. I have an arm board from 2010 with 256MB of RAM. it hosts music fine through minidlna and still has memory and cpu free
I checked out Tailscale, and my 👀 popped when I realized what it does! 😄
I proceeded to install it on my phone, only to realize a moment later that my connection was down. I headed over to my Rethink DNS firewall and saw that Tailscale had taken over my VPN connection, causing Rethink to shut everything down (as it’s supposed to).
Now, unfortunately, I’m probably gonna find out that Tailscale needs highly sought out for VPN slot on Android, and that I can’t use it because I’d have to drop my firewall? 🙈
Yes, the restriction to a single VPN client is annoying.
Blocking ad/telemetry domains can be done by adding Adguards DNS servers in the OS settings. Sadly blocking apps Internet permissions completely is not possible (except on OS like LineageOS, CalyxOS or GrapheneOS).
Yep, was afraid of that. Sadly, not a solution for me then.
Thanks nevertheless! 🍻
What I’ve been doing:
Easy option: because I only have around 40gb of music, I sync it between my PC and my phone using syncthing since 128gb is the minimum nowadays
Hard option: streaming is cooler so I installed nextcloud with an optional plugin called “music” which allows to connect an app called “ultramusic” and it becomes “self hosted Spotify” with android auto support and all the bells and whistles. Disadvantage: Nextcloud is a moving target. For some reason they have to release new incompatible versions every two or three months. So for plugin developers this is a very annoying upgrade threadmill that eventually leads to burnout and that plugin dies. Even officially supported plugins sometimes don’t support the latest version when they launch it. If you choose to use nextcloud with docker, make sure to stay behind 1-2 versions (tag nextcloud:28 when nextcloud:30 is released) or your plugins might suddenly break without any warning. According to fanboys this is the industry standard nowadays and it’s up to the user to manually check the GitHub issues of each of the 30 plugins if it’s compatible before updating. Even if it’s official plugin. They call it “stable” but they mean “beta testing for the paid enterprise version”.
I’m going to go another route here: do you need streaming?
Like, I’ve simply gone with a giant pile of FLACs that I put on a SD card for my phone, and use over the NAS for when I’m at home and don’t currently use any fancy-pants streaming stuff.
So like, depending on how you’re using your music library, you might not even need to drop deep into the giant self-hosting rabbithole for this.
I mean, most high-end phones today doesn’t support SD cards so this can be a reason why to selfhost.
Based on OPs experience this is the best solution.
If they want to learn, I found plex + plexamp was pretty easy to get going.
that I put on a SD card for my phone
Pretty soon you won’t be able to buy a phone without expandable storage. On the plus side, internal storage is going up, but it’s still not big enough to hold a complete FLAC collection if it’s a reasonably large library. You can re-encode your library just for phone usage, but that’s a bit annoying to maintain.
Also, I’ve found all of the offline music players on Android kind of suck, and don’t support the workflow I like or have bugs.
FLACs
on a phone
in SD card
¿??? it’s not like you’re going to be able to autism at a -0.0002dB disparity on the trumpets channel with those audio chips, why not just store the files there as opus or MP3 for ~6x more capacity? (not to mention faster overall reads)
I’ve been using ogg vorbis for music since about the mid 2000s. In the begining I was ripping them from my CD collection using grip on mandrake Linux (anyone remember?)
Nowadays I download vorbis direct from bandcamp.
Recently I compared 192 kbps vorbis files to FLACs and couldn’t discern the difference, which I’m happy about since my 15000 file collection can fit on a very cheap 128GB SD card in my phone.
I use syncthing to sync music to my phone automatically.
Really happy with the setup.
Because I stuck a 1TB sd card in my phone and don’t have to deal with transcoding or dealing with, well, anything, but copying new files over and listening to things.
I’ve developed quite the liking for stupidly simple solutions, and ‘copy the files to a sd card’ is about as simple as it gets.
OPUS is such a delightful format I transcoded my FLACs just for fun.
OPUS is such a delightful format
Agreed. My audiobook library was transcoded from various formats to 32kbit OPUS and they still sound about the same.
Shocking how decent it is with spoken voice and stupid low bitrates.
Plex is good and the Plexamp app for music is excellent.
deleted by creator
was mentioned in the post
That’s what I get for skimming.
lol it happens
Scamming is bad, think of the victims.
Skimmed comments, but if you download and manage your music on your own on a machine you can have a super simple setup like I do. All music is synced using Syncthing to my phone. So my phone gets local storage, and then I use Poweramp (android) to play it.
I pretty much have a folder for all the music though. But I assume you can sort music into folders to have them as playlists. But perhaps not as practical as desired.
Isn’t Syncthing for Android getting sundowned?
Use syncthing-fork from fdroid.
The fork isn’t
Wha?! I didn’t know this was happening… Damn, that was my solution to multiple applications
So, self hosting is complicated. Everyone in this comment section has had tons of experience with it. I tried Plex, failed. Jellyfin, didn’t connect. Entire OSes on a raspberry pi, didn’t work.
I don’t know your situation but for me giving up and just keeping it stored on my phone and manually updating is good enough.
There are two main ways you can do it. You’ve already mentioned you have your library/music files, so that’s a good start, you’re basically looking for a way to access it on other devices. The first way would be to set up an old PC/rent a cloud server, and set up the service you want to use, though for now this may be a bit too complex if all you want to do is stream your own music, and have no experience. That being said, it’s always good to have a look and see, there may be a tutorial that works for you if you want to go down this route.
You’ve mentioned Navidrome, and it’s a good shout, basically just looks at the folders of music you have, and lets you stream them to your phone/PC (and more) like Spotify or Google Music. For the simplest possible setup, I’d recommend a service like Pikapods (https://pikapods.com), which essentially selfhosts applications for you, and gives you access to the files. For Navidrome, for 50GB storage (and the recommended settings of 1 CPU core and 0.5GB RAM), it’s $3.01 a month, which, though not free, is very affordable if that’s all you want to do, plus they handle updates, etc. You shouldn’t need to set any variables, and can upload your music to their service via FTP (File Transfer Protocol, a way to copy files to another PC/server from your PC), and they have docs on how to do that on the site.
Hope this helps :P
Yunohost and Navidrome.
@zeromoney I have a self hosted streaming service for music with #Jellyfin. But i think there’s no an easy way to deploy it. You need to have some basic linux knowledge.
I just use Auxio on Android or GNOME Music on Linux to listen to my downloaded files, and sync them via Syncthing.
