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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Self hosting for things I care to keep around, streaming to get new download ideas and for stuff where hosting everything would be too much.
For movies and shows I find myself some Linux ISOs.
Music, I get from Bandcamp if available and if not, there are very good Tidal downloaders out there. Tidal also doubles as my “I want to check out this song” service.i also only download flac files, and i keep them in my
~/music/losslessdirectory. 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.Same almost. I have an ~800gb main library of mostly lossless files that I squash to around 150gb by transcoding to 196k or something opus that i put locally on my phone. I also strip embedded cover art which can save a stupid amount of space sometimes; relying on folder hierarchy with cover.jpg/png files. (Bitrate is pretty overkill for me so I may drop it to 128-160…)
I haven’t had the time to manage the tags properly on my reference library*, but my folder hierarchy encodes artist/album/title with optional years and track numbers. I wrote a linter script to check the structure, that every folder has a cover art image, and to warn about lossy formats not in directories suffixed with [lossy] (purely for documentation purposes; not used in script logic).
My transcode script generates tags from the folder and filenames, only copying genre tags if they exist and stripping everything else. Lossless files are transcoded while structure, art, and lossy files are copied. Then that result is synced to my mobile devices. So whenever I add music my workflow is to just name file folders properly and download or extract art then I just lint, transcode, and then resync.
*(Tags of my reference library don’t matter so much to me, but the squashed lib needs consistent tags for mobile apps for behave as I intend)
Do you have your scripts hosted somewhere? Sounds like a really cool idea!
I hadn’t bothered because it was mostly LLM slop I edited until it worked, so it’s specific and not robust. Just had to hack something together the night before I had to leave on a trip… Haven’t had time to tag my music properly, so I’m still using it. The magic sauce is just ffmpeg and the mutagen Python lib.
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 it all on my phones internal storage.
A as a step towards B man
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
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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.
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…
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”
why not both?
Use the left to find content, use the right to consume the content.
@v4ld1z I download my music onto each device, personally, but I do have some experience with streaming. I prefer it just to be rid of the companies, but I do also cut the quality of all of my music down from FLAC to 128kbps MP3s. I can’t hear the difference, even on high end equipment, so it’s just a gain for me. YMMV on that though.
I just use nextcloud to sync it all, though, and Symfonium on mobile/strawberry on desktop. It’s about 10 gigs for all of my music. I don’t have the largest collection, but 1.3k songs is still quite a bit
Both. Use YT & Spotify as discovery engines (along with Pandora, Jango, and Soma FM), but download your favorite tracks and self-host.
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.
That’s a neat summary of the entire self-hosting philosophy, I’d say.
there is a hidden button called bandcamp, idk where you can get music to stream maybe api server that use your free ytmusic and spotify solutions)
Poor quality no los dos?
Por qué no los dos?
I used to use YouTube music revanced, but at some point it asked me to verify my age to listen to a song my rage against the machine, and that was the last straw. I uninstalled YouTube music, took a dusty raspberry pi 5 from a shelf where it’d been sitting for like half a year and connected it to my router with an Ethernet cable. Then I installed qbittorrent (headless) and mounted its downloads under the
musiccategory (it stores the downloads in separate directories, depending on the torrent’s category) into Navidrome. I also have Prowlarr installed for easier searches of indexers. So far I have an 80GB library of music. I try to keep the size down by downloading 320kbps mp3s where possible.I use the Symfonium app, it was totally worth the 4.50€, I’d be willing to pay more honestly. On desktop I use Feishin.
I also have Listenbrainz set up as a scrobbler on Navidrome. The stats are pretty cool.
So in theory I’d be down to use torrents again if they weren’t as unsafe as I’m told they are. Do you use a VPN or do you just download away? What’s your setup look like in general?
Symfonium is awesome, I can agree with you for sure. I’d also be down to pay the price for it.
Slovenian ISPs don’t give a shit about piracy, so I don’t use a VPN. I did, however, decide against running the setup in Germany on my netcup VPS because they’re really strict about piracy.
I use Traefik as a reverse proxy in my setup and I run everything in docker containers (managed with docker compose). Would you like me to share my configs as well? (I ask just so that I don’t waste my time gathering them and making sure I didn’t share API keys or something :P )
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!
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.
