It supports almost all of Subsonic (highly recommend play:Sub on iOS). FLAC works. I never re-encode your songs, they are kept byte-for-byte. It doesn't support Last.fm (yet?) but I don't think it would be too hard to add. It respects metadata tags. There are still some glitches, and the web player kind of sucks. You can (batch) edit metadata on the web but it does not change the file, just the web/API interfaces.
To be honest I have mostly lost motivation to work on this, but I was aiming at exactly the pain points the author of this article describes. Send me an email (profile) or tweet/comment if you think it's worth pursuing again.
Quick update: I think uploading might be kinda totally messed up right now. I'll check it later after I'm done with my day job. Sorry everyone and thanks for trying it out. Send me an e-mail if you see any bugs and I will take a look.
New update! Thanks to some helpful new users e-mailing me, I think I figured out what was wrong with it. It was a cache issue (of course). I have disabled the cache stuff for now, and hopefully it should work again. If you have already uploaded some tracks and they didn't show up, they should show up now.
I signed up. This is a thing I would love! A smaller plan would be great or a yearly cost. I pay for subsonic ($12/yr) and would love a remote service for my music host. It’s the main reason I leave my tower on 24/7!
I like this idea. I'm going to look into adding a small annual plan. BTW, currently you never lose access to your files even if you don't pay so feel free to use the site for free and wait until I get the annual plan in.
This is how a technically inclined but maybe less so than your current users may see this: Like its a kind of Dropbox? With folders and whatnot? But with a Music player App to play the music on various devices, which will stream the music from that drop box?
So it’s like a Spotify, except it takes the music from this drop box like thing instead of their server? For which operating systems do u have music player apps? Android, iOS, windows, macOS, Linux? What do these apps look like, where’s the link to those apps?
How do I upload data, via the website? Or is there another app? How about some screen shots to see how it’s uploaded and then played?
Thanks for the feedback. Agreed it's not presented well.
It's kind of like Dropbox. You can upload files from your browser, and you can also listen to your music in your browser. It supports an open protocol called Subsonic. There are Subsonic apps for various OSs. But, we don't have our own native app. I definitely need screenshots / open demo page.
Thanks for the answer! How about a paragraph like this:
Inter.tube let’s you easily store your music collection in your own cloud and listen to it on all your devices. It's kind of like Dropbox, but focused on storing and streaming music. You can upload files (mp3, Flac, …) from your browser, and you can listen to your music either with your browser or via music apps. We don’t have our own native music playing App. You can use any music playing app that supports an open protocol called “Subsonic”. There are Subsonic apps for various OSs, including Android and iOS. See our list of recommended apps [here].
Thanks! Good question, I think it's probably mostly a mental block on being "done". There was always "one more feature" I wanted to add before trying to market it. The feature I can most think of right now is playlists. They are supported in Subsonic but not the web UI.
Currently I have exactly 2 customers, who are pretty much friends helping me test. The good news is the site is optimized for being set-it-and-forget-it (all serverless arch) so just having one customer is enough to break even.
I've built sites like this; clear, concise, to the point. Not many people used them.
Once I started adding a bit more "flair" to it, things got traction. I'm not talking a complete redesign, but I too had to go back to capitalizing words, adding color, and caring about the "experience" for the market I was aiming to capture.
I hated it, I still do, but I hate it less after seeing success with the changes I was willing to concede on. Just sayin'.
As a concept I absolutely LOVE no-BS sites like this. The downside is that they make the service appear simple enough that I could code one myself, specific to my needs, and/or self-host it - inevitably neither happen! - so I just don't sign up in the end.
Yeah I feel you. It might feel kind of like "selling out" but making it professional is almost certainly the better choice for things like this, especially if you have to pay money for it.
Have a really small demo tier or a demo account, say with public domain classical and jazz standards, just something basic.
The demo tier could be phone number based, then a write once system, let's say 100mb ... something really token.
You could even have a few sample tunes everyone gets by default. Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin is in public domain for instance as are say, the rags of Scott Joplin, Debussy's Deux Arabesques, etc.
If that doesn't onboard people then have a no-hassles 7 day refund. If someone gives you money but then decides they don't want it, have it built in the interface they can back out for 100% money back in 7 days.
> Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin is in public domain for instance as are say, the rags of Scott Joplin, Debussy's Deux Arabesques, etc.
I could be wrong about this, but aren’t individual performances of these works still protected? If I record an album of works by Debussy that performance isn’t in the public domain and couldn’t be used as sample tracks.
Funny apocryphal story about that song. For a long time I had got in my head that was extremely disruptive for the time. I envisioned men with powdered wigs running distressfully throughout the aisles as he plays the work for the first time as their wives fan themselves and couch faint in the seats.
I still think that every time I hear it and I think it's hilarious to imagine European high society losing their composure over this sonata. This and Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 are ridiculously close to modern music structure. That's a 110bpm breakbeat done with violins you're hearing.
this will allow you to navigate through things when listening over bluetooth using the media buttons. I'm sorry for the rather advanced example but here's how I use it to navigate through hierarchy with double and triple tapping: https://github.com/kristopolous/music-explorer/blob/master/w...
> "Free 2 week demo. No credit card needed. [Try it now]"
> "Register" is too committal ...
I actually didn't notice the "No credit card needed" until I had written a long explanation :-)
That is how hard the "Free demo" has been abused to snag my credit card, so maybe experiment with some variations as long as it doesn't delay launch :-D (FWIW: personally, with my background and as a non-native speaker, "register" doesn't sound as scary as "Free 2 weeks demo".)
You gotta pair it with "no card needed" otherwise it sounds suss.
There's other ways. "Upgrade to a paid account if you like it" works. "Upgrade" implies work. "Paid" implies the work is paying. Thus the thing you're currently engaging with doesn't need payment.
You can also call it "Free tier" which has "14 day expiration" as a stipulation.
There's no best practice here because it's dependent on the product, value proposition, where you are in the funnel and who the customer is. They'll perform differently and counterintuitively and most frustratingly, change over time (because the context of the relationship between your prospect and product is always dynamic)
I think the parting advice I can give is <all products are relationships>. The interface and experience defines this relationship. We shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us or the interface sets the terms of the engagement or the medium is the message. It's been stated a myriad of ways.
I kinda hated "Selling the invisible" by Harry Beckwith but out of the 100 or so marketing and product development books I've read, I think, for you in particular, a weekend paging through that book might really help you here. You have to read it as an analogy of how to design software of course.
Because devices change all the time and most people don’t even have a repository of music files they keep. To even start using this service in earnest requires all that. This dude made the perfect thing for a period that existed like 20 years ago.
I had the same first thought, but I'm not sure it's as big as a problem as you make it out to be. I know plenty of people who still have music in the form of mp3's. One of the biggest issues the service has is being able to reach the right people. I don't really have a solution for that. GPM was used by millions of people, the service doesn't need millions of users to be successful. It can still be a valuable product that serves a niche audience.
Agreed. Personally I like to support the artists directly by buying their albums in MP3/FLAC form (and going to their shows) so I know I'll have a high quality backup forever. I am not a big fan of streaming services like Spotify, although I will certainly admit that it is way easier to use them than to manage your own music library.
I'll look into serverside Last.fm support. I think it should be relatively easy to add. Agreed that an app would be awesome but I don't have the resources for it :(. The web interface works decently as a PWA (at least on Android according to testers, it has MediaSession support and stuff) but it's still kind of bad, definitely not a real app substitute.
I didn't really promote it anywhere, except I posted on the Google Play Music Reddit I think. I got some good feedback from there. TBH I have no idea how to market things. Not sure how to toe the line between "hey I want to make something cool for you" and spamming. I'll check that out though. I definitely had music enthusiasts in mind, I understand their hatred for re-encoding :)
This seems like a good fit, but I'd echo some other requests on here for yearly plan (hate monthly), and playlists. I personally am fine with the barebones aesthetic but you may want to do a bit more for general marketability.
I really like this. I'd say the only thing I'm missing is being able to make custom playlists like Spotify. I think there are plenty of people who still have their own music that might find this useful, but I have no idea how you might reach these people.
edit: I may have found a bug? I uploaded multiple remixes of a song and it only shows the original version. I don't see a way to see what raw files are being stored, which I think would be incredibly helpful.
edit2: Oh, I guess it just generally isn't properly showing new songs atm. Ah, well. I'll try again later.
Being in the same market, and being frustrated my service isn't even mentioned on this page despite being mentioned in the OP, I'm interested: how would _you_ find out about this? Would you search for it? Would you expect to see it advertised somewhere?
Thats's a good idea! I think I will add a smaller plan later. Please check back soon (might take a few days, looks like I have lots of bugs to squash)! The prices are more or less a direct reflection of the potential fees so it should totally possible to do a small plan.
BTW I should also mention that if you don't pay after the trial, it never actually locks you out. I haven't coded that part yet and it I feel bad about charging for buggy software so it's more of a donation at the moment. So feel free to use it for free and contribute if you like it later on.
It would need to be more than that. $2 is about the cost storing 100GB on most cloud storage services, and that's before you pay for any egress or access fees.
My secret sauce is that I'm using B2 (Backblaze) + Cloudflare Workers to save on egress fees. I am thinking of switching to Cloudflare's storage thingy as well. But bandwidth is cheap, in exchange the download speeds are not so great (CF probably better).
I hadn't seen backblazes storage pricing, it's very cheap. Even at that, 100GB of storage is ~$.50/month. $2 is tight. I don't think it needs to be much more, but probably close to $3-$4 I would say.
(1) could you hash everyone's mp3 files so that if person a had the same songs as person b, you only need to store them once? (2) people obviously storing copyright stuff in there -- do you have legal issues?
I am wondering about the legal part. Because the users store licensed files on your server, then you "distribute" it back to them, could it be any licensing problem?
I assume it could also be solved by encrypting the file, so you only store encrypted files on your server, and only the user/owner of that song can decode it.
No more than storing your legally-archived CDs on <insert cloud storage service>, I would imagine.
IANAL, of course, but intuitively there shouldn't be any issues as long as the songs aren't made available to anyone other than the user who uploaded it.
There was a startup a while ago called mp3.com[1], their model was:
1. put your CD in your computer
2. our website recognizes the CD
3. we grant you listening access to songs on that CD (without actually ripping/uploading)
They got sued and lost:
>Judge Jed S. Rakoff, in the case UMG v. MP3.com, ruled in favor of the record labels against MP3.com and the service on the copyright law provision of "making mechanical copies for commercial use without permission from the copyright owner."
That's interesting, although one of the comments in this thread mentioned Capitol Records v. MP3Tunes [1], a similar case tried in the same court 10 years later.
MP3Tunes 'won' in principle but they were liable for ignoring DMCA takedown notices and seeding the service with unauthorized copies of music.
> First, it established DMCA safe harbor protection for online locker services, potentially granting them "broad immunity from copyright liability". Second, it endorsed data deduplication, which allows cloud music services to more efficiently allocate storage and reduce the amount of space needed per user.
I would be curious to know why the rulings were different. If anything it seems like MP3.com provided stronger guarantees that their users legally owned the songs by requiring them to insert a CD.
Thank you! The way I tried to solve this problem is by using signed URLs for the files. So every file URL should only be accessible to a user with the matching credentials. At least, that's the idea :-)
Signed URLs (or pre-signed URLs) typically expire after a short time frame. The idea is that they exist for long enough for the object in question to be retrieved in the application, and they then automatically expire. Although they don't typically have a single-use limitation, this is often the intention a developer has when using a pre-signed URL.
Yep! It's a bit of a balancing act because you want the files to be cache friendly (skipping tracks back and forth shouldn't make you download it every time) but you also don't want people to abuse (share) them. You can also restrict the signed URLs by IP address but that can cause trouble for people with dynamic IPs so I opted not to do that.
I have not. I tried to be careful about the data, so each user has their “own copy” of the song so it’s essentially a dumb file backup service at its core. I wanted to avoid doing anything that could be sketchy or misconstrued as file sharing. I hope that’s enough but I honestly have no idea.
I paid for plex, I stream my own music from anywhere via the callback into my home net. I can chromecast, play in-car, whatever. If I have IP "it just works"
Its backed on an RPI-4 NAS I built, running the plex arm linux code. I have another RPI-3 in the living room as a headless music source to an amp. In the past I've used HDMI to VGA+audio splitters to scatter output to devices. This is my music, on my disks, under my control. I own these rips, the bits are mine. I keep the discs behind them on the shelves just in case but I haven't opened a CD case in nearly a decade.
Plex isn't perfect, but its pretty good. plexamp is available when you take subscription, and periodically plex offer lifetime buy deals, which I leapt on.
Jellyfin is [edit: not - it's from emby] another variant of the same codebase (forked)
I also paid for tidal. I don't like these music rental schemes, I like to own my CDs and rip but for exploration, finding what you don't know, its really useful and unlike some of the other choices, its owned by musos. I think at some level its still greenwashing the truly awful world of A&R/IPR on music, but if anyone has to get payola here, it might as well be musicians.
If only Google could stop screwing with my Android Auto. I have an older car and using Android Auto on the phone was nice! Then they killed it and replaced it with Assistant "Driving Mode" which they ruined and now it only works when inside Maps while navigating- which means you cannot use it unless you put in directions to where you are going. Most of the time I know where I am going. I need to put in fake directions and ignore them in order to listen to my damn music. We are moving backwards! If there's one place where I have a short fuse/temper for these aggravations it's while I'm trying to drive!
Same. I'm actually surprised at how well Plex works without having direct remote access over the Internet. The only port open on my router is the one for Wireguard.
Does plex have anything for audiobooks (preferably streaming with the option to download locally)? I quit audible after they removed desktop support but I managed to get all my books out of their DRM, but right now they just sit on an external ssd and I have to manually load them onto whatever laptop I'm using (which also means they don't keep their place between devices)
I'd never thought to use Plex with audiobooks before but this post and guide got me started. Now I've got all my [Amazon audiobook service] books saved safely for when someone inevitably tries to pull the plug on it. And streaming through Prologue is a way better experience than the commercial option
I've never used plex so this might be completely out of the ordinary for even more normal plex use cases, but is there a web client?
I use Android, iPadOS, Fedora Linux, MacOS and possibly in the future Windows (my last job required it, my next job might too) and unless the standard plex app supports audiobooks I doubt I'll find much consistency using native apps for each of those operating systems, if they even exist on all of them
Yes, they have a web client, but their audiobook support is not great. Plex is primarily geared towards music (albums/tracks), and the podcast support is built on top of it by independent clients. I recommend Prologue for iOS and Chronicle for Android.
I've heard good things about audiobookshelf [1] as a cross-platform alternative, but it is pretty early in development.
Seconding audiobookshelf. The web player and apps are both pretty good.
In general, I think a dedicated app for the content of interest typically works better than a general media server like Plex or Jellyfin. The same applies to books (Calibre/Calibre Web) and comics/manga (Komga).
Jellyfin is excellent. Swapped to it from Plex about a year ago. Haven't looked back once. I run the server on an old M1 Mac Mini, it's the first time I've felt I have my own personal Netflix. I can stream 40gb 4k HDR Atmos rips to old stereo 1080p plasmas with ancient Firesticks (on wifi) in bedrooms in my house with almost zero delay, even when fast forwarding, and getting near realtime frame previews as you skip. It's lovely software.
In the UK businesses generally write computer hardware off over 3 years, or 5 years if it's a really extravagannt purchase, this little M1 is now written off from a business perspective... so... They make really great low powered, insanely fast & quiet home servers... It's a lovely time to be alive! :-)
They are still £500 on eBay, compared to the Lenovo micro systems which are less than 1/2 the price for a 10th gen and doesn't have everything soldered down it doesn't seem like a great deal yet.
I'll probably be waiting another few more years before I have an M1 for my home server.
Mine just works with Wireguard. I took a couple extra steps to make it convenient:
1. Public DNS entry gives jump box IP. With some http forwarding the Letsencrypt flow initiated from the internal Jellyfin server.
2. My Wireguard server (running on the jump box) runs dnsmasq and answers DNS queries for wireguard clients with the wireguard IP for the Jellyfin server.
3. DNS server on the home network gives those internal clients the local IP.
Works great now; obviously not plug and play but I had fun setting it up.
I have a similar setup, with an internal Jellyfin server on my lan. Every phone in my household has Wireguard that automatically connects if you are not on my wifi (which means pi.hole, nextcloud, access to cameras, and other services are also available).
It works quite well. Each family member has their own 'Library', since we all have very different taste in music, plus an 'All Library' that includes everything. We can also stream movies and tv shows I own and have ripped.
The clients are OK. We are mostly using Finamp for music playback.
I like knowing my music is always available to me, can't be removed, and is always the same version (I don't necessarily want a new remastered version)
I used Jellyfin for the first time recently. It was very smooth and worked flawlessly for my use case (watching episodes of a TV show on my phone after downloading them on my computer).
I never used Plex because it creeped me out. Maybe I misunderstood something but it seemed like it was needlessly phoning home.
I'm really trying to like Jellyfin, but unfortunately the Roku app is just absolutely terrible by comparison. The thing that grinds my gears the most is I can't see how much time is left in what I'm watching without pausing.
I feel like they had a boom early in the pandemic and then just completely flamed out. Now I feel like support is terrible across the board - It's not just jellyfin that sucks on Roku, so does Netflix/Hulu, and don't even get me started with channels just entirely disappearing because of developer disagreements and licensing.
That said - Jellyfin really sucks on Roku. The android tv version of the app is miles better.
Emby, a (somewhat) open source C# project, is not a fork of Plex Media Server, a closed source C/C++ project. Emby was forked as Jellyfin however, as a reaction to Emby becoming more and more of a closed source project.
Plex was forked from XBMC which is renamed to KODI an open source project. Think the fork was around version 8 or 9. KODI is up to 20. Downside to KODI is it does not have streaming built in like Plex. But has built in emulation again like earlier version of XBMC.
what do you mean by "KODI ... does not have streaming"? I have rpi with KODI on my son's TV and it streams everything over CIFS from my NAS - the NAS doesn't transcode or otherwise do anything but host the cifs share.
Plex can act as a 'head unit' and do format transform and metadata management. Then stream it to a secondary plex client. KODI does not do that. That is the one killer feature Plex has over KODI. In all ways KODI is better except in that use case. Picking data from a CIFS is basic XBMC/KODI/Plex functionality and has been in there for a long time going back to the original xbox days. Jellyfin is similar with its ability to transcode and stream that to a client. In some cases they let you stream it thru a web client (which is kinda cool).
It is a nice feature for low bandwidth applications. Say a VPN to your phone, or a friends house who has crappy internet. If I remember correctly there were a lot of clients also for TV's which have absolute rubbish CPU power and no local storage (for holding metadata). Also the centrally managed metadata is nice when you have more than one client. You can get the same effect with KODI and using a DB like mysql or mariadb. But it is sort of finicky to setup correctly.
I personally use KODI as I do not need that particular streaming feature. Also it is broken with ISO's which is one of my major use cases.
Does Kodi serve up files? e.g. Can I install Kodi on my PC with all my media, then watch that stuff on my phone when I'm away from the house, or grant a friend access to my library?
That's what Plex does: it has server apps and client apps.
You're scaring people away from selfhosting with that $15/month. There are plenty of cheaper options, including under-$1/month with a dedicated IPv4 and enough storage for thousands of songs (or hundreds if you're using flac): https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month/
Those 1$ offers usually come with just a single 10GB disk, so pretty useless for storing anything. Unless you manage to store the files elsewhere, which will probably have costs again.
The negative reactions to you saying $15 are a good example of why there are no good Spotify and Netflix alternatives for people wanting to stream their own media.
People claim to want it, but they put a very low monetary value on it. No new business can survive on $3 a month subscriptions.
That's 600 to 1200 USD a year per customer, an _entirely_ different class of service and relationship.
The completely different order of magnitude endpoint I was thinking of is much more like the sort of 'streamed remote file storage as a service' (using off the shelf tech and software with a tiny bit of maybe custom glue) and almost zero support; with you get what you pay for levels of congestion and peek usage pains as potential problems to complain to that greedy last mile ISP you were forced to use because it was cable or barely better than dialup DSL.
iCloud is $0.99 for 50GB. Surely somebody can offer a 5GB stream-your-own-music plan for $10/year? Another person in this thread apparently is already running one, but the minimum plan starts at 250GB! And 5GB to 250GB is also a huge jump for most people.
Wow $15 a month? What's in that box, you're not just using it for some music streaming right? I've got my reverse proxy running on a 3.45€ instance from hetzner and I can't imagine you need much more for some music streaming right?
I just spent 5min browsing their website and I still have no idea how much it costs, or whether they offer cloud storage or I need to install a media server application on my NAS at home. And how come they can offer "free movies"? Could anyone explain what their business model looks like? The website looks rather sketchy…
Plex through its web interface and apps offers free streaming of some live TV and movies. Free as in beer.
For enthusiasts, it can also catalogue and offer a portal for your local media collection. That is also free.
The Plex Pass is not free. It offers some neat customization features for the app, plus hardware transcoding of media which I suspect is the reason most people pay for it.
I wish Plex or Jellyfin would get support for audiobooks. I can keep my music library on my phone but my audiobook library is much larger and sometimes I get an itch to listen to something I don't have on me.
Plex has a setting at the library level that tells it to remember your last spot in an audio track. So if you set up your audiobooks as if they're music, this will allow you to listen to them reasonably through plex/plexamp.
That's not really a satisfying solution - you're missing out on the metadata matching features of the system. But it does get you there.
There's another app, audiobookshelf[1], that does this better. There's a server component analogous to plex server, as well as a web app or a mobile app for playback. The user experience is way better, but organizing the audio files is rather a pain.
What do you do for podcast? I feel like its the biggest (and really only) regression Plex ever did. Theres a plethora of other apps, but they all kind of suck and don't work with everything. My pain point is lack of Sonos support.
Spotify has podcasts but literally has the worst UI for keeping up with podcasts. They make it as difficult as possible to find what you've already listened to and what you're currently listening to, outside of the last few played podcasts.
yup, the plex streaming music solution works perfectly for my family as well.
I wish plexamp was a little better though. the interface is a bit unintuitive/inconsistent and it doesn't behave well with android auto.
I use Jellyfin, it's about the same thing as Plex, but free. I host it on my homelab along with a half dozen other services, and I can stream any of my media from anywhere. There's even pretty nice third-party clients. I use finamp on android, it's specifically a music player frontend for jellyfin, and has options to download your files and play offline.
So far, the biggest problem is simply learning how to find music again. Spotify was too convenient for discovery.
But, I've been happily streaming my collection for a couple of months now, and removing Spotify and the radio has gotten rid of most of the last remaining advertising vectors in my life. It's nice. I very much enjoy knowing that I own and control my media and the data about my usage of it. There will never be ads or a creepy business model. If something goes wrong and knocks the server offline, I have my music cached on my phone.
I wish this were more accessible to everyone. Setting up a public-facing server, or even a private one with a VPN tunnel is too much hassle for the average person. It's so very worth it though. Owning your own services is so liberating
I've found out the best places to find new music are the ones on the illegal side of things. There are still torrent sites with amazing communities, recommendation systems and all the possible music available in all qualities.
Too bad it's not really OK to mention them by name, but if you dig a bit, you can find them.
I didn't know that, but glad to hear it. I've just been using Bandcamp because it's got a very simple straightforward interface, isn't bloated, often has better pricing, more formats available to download. Most importantly many of the 'smaller' artists tend to be there.
I also use Jellyfin along with an Android app call Synfonium. It has heaps of customisation and works with many media providers including Emby, Plex, Subsonic etc.
Soulseek seems to be still around because it was adopted by serious music lovers who are also techies. Browsing the libraries of some of the users on there can be breathtaking as to the size of libraries and amount of care in curating and categorising them.
I dont think anything bette came along so people are just still there sharing their libraries.
I'd love to try Jellyfin and Finamp at some point. Last time the biggest issue was how it would not transcode the music from flac to opus in realtime. Plex can do it pretty fast even with a super low power Intel Atom. The provided AAC is quite a bit slower, so I'm still staying with Plex and Plexamp.
Oh man I thought I was the only one who still had a carefully curated digital library... I threw out my CDs a long time ago, but my digital library is my baby. I've been curating this since I was 10. It's who I am!
Most of the time, you only need to listen to music on your phone or your computer, right? My main collection (mostly FLAC) is on a NAS with RAID.
But then I've got some scripts that maintain a copy of that collection, except converted to MP3 at a variable bitrate [1]. I just store the entirety of it on my phone. It's 107GB.
Adding a new album to my phone is as simple as using a SMB app to copy from my NAS.
Now when I'm stuck in traffic under a tunnel, or driving through the country, my music keeps playing!
[1] - a variable bitrate (VBR) keeps a smaller file size but pretty decent sound quality. it just lowers the bitrate when there's silence or simple sounds, where a high bitrate isn't required.
I do roughly the same thing, but I use Syncthing. I always had trouble keeping my phone connected reliably enough to run a long running script, and Syncthing works well.
I have a 1TB sdcard in my phone that has a mirror of my 600GB+ library. I use Foobar2000 on my phone because it's easy to just pin my Music folder from the filesystem and navigate through the folders. Just about every other music player out there seems to be designed around importing tags into a library, which I don't like.
I do the same thing, but I am facing some read only problem. The changes have stopped getting synced. I need to investigate more. Do you face any syncing problem?
> Oh man I thought I was the only one who still had a carefully curated digital library... I threw out my CDs a long time ago, but my digital library is my baby. I've been curating this since I was 10. It's who I am!
You’re definitely not alone. I’ve been collecting MP3s since they first began, choosing 1-2 songs a night to leave downloading over dialup. I still have ever MP3 I ever downloaded short of deleting the files from that period where you’d download a song on IRC and it’d be something else named wrong on purpose.
I do use Apple Music for my family/kids, but my MP3 collection is one of my prized possessions and the basis of nearly all my daily music listening.
Music itself has no value now, streaming services killed that. If you like an artist go to their shows and buy their merch, thats how artists make money these days.
If you buy from Bandcamp the artists will get paid, it's not only merch and shows. Shows are not even possible if the artists you listen to don't tour around your area, better to give them some cash buying the digital files than wait for 5 years until their next tour comes anywhere close to you.
If you like an artist/band, buy their music as directly from the artist as you can.
A lot of artists lose money touring. It’s difficult as hell for the majority of working musicians to make a living. If you appreciate them, buy their media, back a Patreon if they’ve got one, etc. Sure, see them live and buy some merch if you can, but that’s not a substitute for also buying their music.
I prefer to not pay record companies to listen to music of long dead musicians, and I try and see as many live shows of performers who are still touring, and I buy their shirts.
I have wasted so much money on music I barely bother with. Lots of stuff is a one play only for me these days and streaming suits that for experimentation. I do pay for ad-hoc streaming but don't get value out of it (time), nevermind the artists. And yet it's still better value than what I used to pay for records.
I have music constantly on in my life, but you know what, i really hate hearing the same songs over and over again. I used to leech music and have a collection of it (i still do) but i prefer humans mixing it up, in random orders, with different sythns, styles or vibes over it. So while i have never subscribed to any streaming services, i do subscribe to DI.FM. I get access from any device i have, as many as i want, and instead of scouring the net constantly for new music, i now just feed off the bounty. They have sister stations for all styles.
Literly i have music on all day everyday. I have different styles for different moods, times of the day, emotions. When you listen at that rate, you either love repeats or you spend your whole life looking for the next song. Curating a playlist is most of the battle.
Nope, maybe it shows my age, but I still buy CDs and them ripp them, or buy MP3s.
Then I have my set of playlists that I either sync to the phone, or set of SD/USB cards to plug into the car.
I am not keen in losing my audio collection to some subscription service.
Movies is another matter, it is most throw away content anyway besides some jewels, and for those, DVD/Blue-Ray. Just in case, someone makes the comparisasion with Netflix and friends.
I wonder if there is any advantage to a digital recording converted to say high quality aac, flac or whatever over ripping from a cd. Lots of my cds have very poor production on them.
And on that note, how many recordings have been revisited? Can they improve them from re-masters, have they been, are they, or is that all a con to get you to buy them again?
Yep I store my music collection on my phone as MP3s on my iPhone 6s -- only 32GB. My collection is only MP3s to begin with anyways, and I keep a copy on multiple desktops and backblaze, using backblaze as origin/source to distribute to the rest.
I only ever listen in the car. I create playlists that I can vocalise so that Siri can pick them up and play them so I can listen to stuff hands free. It's a pretty good system.
The only real issue is the iPhone can sync to only one mac/library, and you can't do the reverse which is sync your library from your phone back to a mac or Windows or Linux. I can't imagine a good solution for this without redesigning the interface to upload your music is like copying to another filesystem -- but Apple doesn't want you thinking about filesystems anymore.
> Oh man I thought I was the only one who still had a carefully curated digital library.
I totally do too. And we're not alone. I not only ripped all my old CDs to FLAC (which I use both as archive/backup and source) but I still buy CDs. Nobody want CDs anymore, so I just buy them used. And then I rip them. And then the CDs go into a box in the garage/shed.
My car doesn't take FLAC files but it's got its own storage so I convert the FLAC to 320 kbps MP3s. I don't bother "streaming" from my phone (which I rarely have with me anyway): the music is directly in the car's SSD.
Plus there’s still tons of older albums not on streaming services. I’m big on older theme park soundtracks and many of them never made it to digital officially. In fact I just paid over 130 bucks for a cd.
If you use iOS, you can set music synching to automatically encode to mp3 when synching with the phone, that worked really well for me, for a while.....
Apple music, if you keep your own music, has completely gone off the rails for me this last year.
I couldn't sync for ages because it told me my device was full, it had just lost it's handle on the music, none of the syncing options would add or remove anything, eventually, the other night, I went into the settings for the music app and manually deleted everything and resynced and it finally started working again!
But then, 12 hours later after sync completes (Same as you, around 100GB of music), I discover the album artwork is completely messed up, almost no albums have the correct artwork, they've all been swapped around at random, all albums have the same artwork for all tracks, just that they're completely the wrong ones.
Checking the apple forums, it seems this is not uncommon, and has been happening for a year. I did actually notice that one or 2 albums were wrong but put it down to slight glitch I could live with, but having them all wrong is infuriating, I recognise many albums by their covers and it helps browsing to pick something out.
I really loved iTunes, especially for automatically storing the music in a nice structured directory format. I tried apple music briefly when it first came out, and the first thing it did was to screw up albums, splitting up compilations, getting the wrong editions of albums and started downgrading all my unencoded music, put me off for life, I'm quite happy managing it myself and don't have to fear losing favourite albums due to licensing issues.
I do the same thing only I keep opus files on my phone. They sound just as good as mp3 in my listening environment and take up even less space on my phone.
I have a limited enough music taste that buying what I like will be much cheaper in the long run than paying for a monthly service.
I briefly used a family member's Spotify once and the UI was utterly enraging - I. thought there was something wrong with me until I started seeing the same comments echoed here on HackerNews.
I've taken to doing a similar thing except on my phone and anywhere with limited storage I use different things instead of MP3 because that is an ancient technology. I have the lossless copy on my big storage. And on my phone I have xHE-AAC copies of pretty much my entire library. I figure since everything I listen to on my phone goes through compression anyway even through the highest quality ldac that my nice headset has and especially because the vehicles I drive in have crappy Bluetooth audio that using this way more efficient codec is a pretty good trade-off.
> But then I've got some scripts that maintain a copy of that collection, except converted to MP3 at a variable bitrate
Yes. I have / had been doing this for years, and just want to sing high praises of mp3fs[1], assuming some kind of Linux or macOS machine. It solves this problem in a way that I think more people should know about!
Nope. I have about 1TB of music, FLAC mostly, on a NAS with Plex serving it up.
I started seriously curating my digital collection whenever the Creative Nomad media player came out. Haven’t ditched physical media, though - I like to have a physical copy in addition to digital.
I only take a subset of the collection with me in the car, but I don’t spend much time driving anyway.
I expose everything as a Samba share and stream with VLC. But nowdays most of my music purchases are on Bandcamp so I use their app (which has a nice interface for saving stuff to your phone) a lot of the time. I usually spin albums so playlists aren't really a concern.
It's funny Youtube Music was mentioned because Google Play Music was actually great for listening to your music and having a curated library of stuff you uploaded along with the music on the service. When they killed that in favor of Youtube Music I noticed the "library" experience there is seemingly intentionally hobbled. The artist page is sorted by the "artist" field not "album artist" and then on top of that instead of using a nicer page[0] they use a playlist view of all their songs. Additionally the library view is intentionally split with a "uploads" and "library" tab unlike in Google Play Music where it would provide a nice shared experience with the nicer artist pages as well.
YouTube music is awful. I hate how everything is organized. Is it even possible to search your library? I haven't figured out the actual point of adding anything to your library because searching takes you to all available options every time. And it is never sorted the way you want. For example, if you search an artist, you get their top three albums, but then you have to click into it and search for the one album you want to listen to. I'd rather the top three albums be the ones I have in my library, not their most popular current albums. I don't listen to as wide of variety of music as I did in college and I think a lot of that is yt music makes search so difficult that I can't get to any stuff in have not listened to recently.
I remember thinking how disappointed I was when I moved from Microsoft's Zune to play music. Now I'd be happy just to get play music back
I used GPM for that exact reason. When Google announced they were killing it for YTM, I setup an Emby server and never looked back. YTM is an abismal service.
Supposedly Jellyfin is pretty good now, but that wasn't an option at the time and I've been comfortable with Emby.
I use navidrome[0], its a music streaming server you can selfhost and then use a player that supports the subsonic api for playback. I use the strawberry[1] music player on my desktop and substreamer[2] on android. Navidrome can also scrobble your music to last.fm if you tell it to. The actual music files are mounted with rclone and --vfs-cache-mode full to a directory.
Another Navidrome user here, hosted on a $5 Linode Nano. I have rclone set up to mount an S3 bucket with the music files. Scanning them is a bit slow, but otherwise I've had no issues.
I highly recommend Symphonium as an Android client. It is receiving constant updates, highly polished, has an offline mode, Android Auto support, and so much more.
How many Gb do you have on and how much do you pay for that S3 bucket? I'm thinking of doing that but I wonder what'll be the cost. I'm not sure what to put on the AWS calculator, becasue it depends on usage and whatnot!
I have a little over 250GB and I pay $5/month. This is using DO Spaces S3 compatible, not AWS S3. The droplet is $7/month so $12 total. Never even gets close to being out of resources.
A shameless plug, but you may also like Quod Libet[1]. Although not for everyone, it has very advanced searching and the more unusual integrations and features all implemented as plugins.
I also use Navidrome on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 2.5" 1TB disk connected to it via usb. I don't use metadata and or last.fm; My folder structure info enough for me. Easy enough to play music on mobile devices around home.
For playing music in the living room i use an Ikea Sonos (Symfonisk bookshelf) and the standard Sonos app connecting to the collection via smb.
For the car i transfered (most of) the collection to a sd card. Makes it also it's onw backup :)
I could also use Spotify since the kids love it, but i don't really use it that much myself.
Another Navidrome user here. I used Subsonic for a decade before the developer eventually abandoned it, and Navidrome is a great replacement (and doesn't make me install Java like Subsonic).
I host mine on a Digital Ocean VPS with 1 core and 1GB of RAM, syncing my music from my home PC to DO Spaces storage with rclone. Works perfectly
As someone currently running a Navidrome instance with 40k songs...yeah, I wouldn't wish that on anyone(horrible performance), but it is an option I suppose.
As someone also hosting thousands of songs who has been using Navidrome for months I can't say I experienced any performance issues.
The codebase is fairly small so it should be fairly straight forward to investigate and narrow down the performance issues you're experiencing.
In two places. The web client takes _minutes_ to load the artist page. It's slow enough that I get the Firefox warning stating that the page is slowing down Firefox. The web client (seemingly) doesn't load the song/tracklist in chunks and attempts to load every song at once(at least on the artist page).
The second issue isn't specifically a "Navidrome" problem, but every iOS and Mac desktop client I've used(and I've tried _every_ one that Navidrome lists on their site) attempts to load every song on load and basically becomes unusable.
I'm about two notches away from writing my own music streaming server. Navidrone is barely functional for me...and falls under software I hate, but there are no better options.
I have no such issues using Navidrome (docker image from linuserver.io) with 150k songs. On the client i use sonixd which also have no problem running. It might be something on your server
We feel your pain! We are in the same position as you and this is exactly why we exist! We scrobble to Last.fm, have native apps for iOS and Android, a web based player for the computer, and tons of device support in one form or another – Chromecast, Alexa, Roku, Apple TV, Android TV, and more! Our core, free service gives you unlimited access to all your music, device support, and no limitations on uploading, recommendations, nor playlists. On top of that, we are always improving our recommendation system, which recommends only music inside your own library. We never modify your original files, and we never change your metadata. Give us a try – it costs nothing but a bit of your time – and we hope we can fill that void in your music addiction.
How are you able to keep the core service free, given the storage requirements?
Also, I couldn't find a list of plans on your website - it's just a bunch of "sign up" links, but I would prefer to see what exactly you're offering before I sign up for anything (even if it's free).
If you scroll down and click on "premium service" in the text before the last sign up button, you get to this page: https://www.ibroadcast.com/premium/
what if, and I know this is totally insane/impossible but what if there were some sort of a small non volatile memory type card you could put into a phone with a large amount of storage and then you could put music files on it and just always have them with you! you could even combine that with like some sort of copper conduit to an ear-speaker and then you could have music in very high fidelity and never ever worry about not being able to listen to your favorite tunes, if only there were some such technology I think with modern tech you could even achieve low costs, like $30 for a quarter tera, that should fit at least a few albums
I tried that but when I popped open the little door and installed the memory card I couldn’t make phone calls and surf the internet for some odd reason. Maybe the hackers got in or something, I did find the card lying on the ground when I went to the social security office.
Also have been having a hard time figuring out where to plug in the headphones, like, a really hard time.
I dicked about with jellyfin server and an old android phone connected to a stereo for remote play. Almost good, but WiFi and battery save kicked in and play was spurious. Transcoded library to opus, shoved on the memory card. Turned on airplane mode. Jobs a goodun.
Another solution that is surprisingly powerful is Logitech Media Server [0], which despite its name is open source and cross-platform. The server can run on any unix-ish machine, and clients can be any number of Raspberry Pis or ESP32s, or custom boxes, or any computer. Multiroom syncing is great. Works for local library and streaming. There is even a modern web interface available [1]. I looked into many of the other solutions in this thread, and LMS suited my needs best.
I use squeezeboxes to stream music around the house, using the Squeezer app on my phone to control them. The Squeeze Player app works well for streaming to my phone, although I haven't spent time figuring out how to get this working from outside my LAN; I use Squeezer to download music from LMS to my phone.
The LMS music directory is managed by git-annex. I use git-annex to sync music to my computer for playing locally with mpd and to make new music I rip from CDs available to LMS.
I’m surprised not a lot of people suggest LMS now days. I’ve been using it for years and I highly recommend it for streaming your library, locally or remotely. Poor man’s sonos with multidevice sync as well!
It has an active community and a variety of very useful plugins. Heck, I use it as a Spotify frontend as well.
Just make sure to use the material UI plug-in linked above, a lot of people get bumped out with the built in ui upon first install.
Generally, I hate the experience of streaming from a service. Occasionally to discover, but youtube's good enough for that.
For me, the greatest unsung innovation was the car USB player. That took it from the 10 CD's or so to basically whatever I want, however I want.
As for streaming my music, I was an MPD user for years, but the client/server experience was often fiddly. Once I discovered mstream (one very good web interface, no client/server separation, honors folders) I never had to look back.
> For me, the greatest unsung innovation was the car USB player. That took it from the 10 CD's or so to basically whatever I want, however I want.
Amen. I only need my music on my phone with earbuds, and in the car. So I copied it all to a 128GB USB stick, which sounds better and is less finicky than bluetooth. If I add a new song or album to the master library on my computer, I just pull the USB stick and rsync it.
The only problem is the Tesla USB music player has a terrible UI, but I set it to play random songs from my library and that's usually good enough.
But some of the car USB players are so terrible. My 2012 Buick doesn't allow navigating by artist then by album. It's either top level artist or top level album. It also ignores the track numbers and plays songs in alphabetical order! It is completely useless.
A lot of truth to that; sometimes it takes a little work to figure how to "game" them by knowing how to your particular one handles tags. Mine (Toyota Entune) generally handles albums correctly, but if I want a custom list of songs that doesn't clutter things, I'll just retag them on the USB with an id3 editor, e.g. give them all the same "artist" and "album."
Roon: a very promising service, but one geared more towards the audiophile audience and with hardware requirements I'm not interested in investing in at this point.
If you've spent all of the time and effort to put your audio collection on local storage that's also encrypted and mirrored, you are the audiophile audience!
Roon is a great option. I don't really understand OP's objection? Roon supports over 800 different playback devices in addition to software so it's pretty unlikely you don't already have something that supports it.
> If you've spent all of the time and effort to put your audio collection on local storage that's also encrypted and mirrored, you are the audiophile audience!
There are two main meanings of the word "audiophile". It can describe 1) a person whose music playing experience involves more than just the default music player app that shipped with their phone, and/or iTunes, and/or Spotify. It, much more commonly, also describes 2) a person who buys diamond-coated gold CAT-6 Ethernet cables, because they make the zeroes rounder and the ones straighter as the bits travel from their computer to their $2000 preamp, tuned to inject noise that makes the music sound just right.
OP is definitely 1), but I think they also want to make sure they're not confused with 2).
Is there room in your paradigm for an audiophile 1.5? Someone who buys the $2000 pre-amp but knows full-well that interconnects are snake-oil; someone who knows that spending more than $1000 per separate will not be worth the money unless you have a dedecated listening room with accoustic panelling.
Even then, $1000 is very unlikely to be a meaningful investment.
The hard upper limit is the equipment the mastering engineer used to listen to the track when mastering it. Even if your equipment can reproduce more detail, that's likely unwanted detail.
Something you'll frequently notice when listening to youtube shorts on a big home theater setup – a lot of wind noise below 80Hz which the author couldn’t notice, but which is deafening. The same, though more subtle, happens when listening to professionally mastered audio with an excessive audiophile setup.
That's definitely true! This, I think, is the major misunderstanding about HiFi - high fidelity means highly faithful, i.e. the equipment is designed to create a faithful reproduction, and not to needlessly embellish.
If the track you are listening to was recorded in some teenager's bedroom on a crappy cassette deck, then it should sound as such. This is equally as important as being able to pick out the detail on a track that has been produced with all the latest state of the art equipment.
Music is fundamentally about communication of emotion that transcends language and the purpose of a good HiFi is to facilitate that communication.
However, when it comes to consuming things like video content, particularly that made for youtube, tiktok, etc. then it is probably unfaithful to even attempt to listen to it on a high-end system, just as you say. It's like eating MacDonald's in a michelin starred restaurant or scranning gourmee steak from a takeaway container while drunk on a street corner at three in the morning: context matters.
There is definitely a room in my paradigm for this category. There is room in my heart. This is who I aspire to be, if I ever feel like getting more serious about music. What I don't have, however, is the right term for this type of person. I just don't think they'll call themselves audiophile - they wouldn't want others to confuse them with the other "audiophiles" - i.e. the philistines (1) and the crackpots (2).
I agree with this. I consider myself a person who is very interested in a quality music-listening experience in that I want it to sound good (I can't believe how many people listen to music out of their phone's speaker these days) and I want a high degree of control/convenience out of my music player (mostly oriented around playing entire albums and/or dynamically building playlists on the fly based on where the mood takes me). But I really don't want to be called an audiophile, because of the crazy pseudoscientific baggage that word carries. So for a product to label itself "for audiophiles" creates a little "ugh, poor choice" flinch in me.
Their main USP IMO is their catalogue and their multi-room support.
The catalogue is a work of art - incredibly detailed information about every artist and album, lyrics for most. I know a lot of other streaming services have good info about the things in their catalogue but, as has already been mentioned, these catalogues are volatile where Roon's catalogue doesn't carry the risk of being pruned at any time.
I also got stuck on that same part. I'm just going to guess they thought there was a requirement to run the Roon server on a Nucleus (the premium hardware they sell to host Roon). I personally run mine on my NAS in a docker container and it's been running great for years.
I still blame my younger self for falling for the sirens of "access the world's biggest library", without realizing that said libraries gain and lose contents all the time and favor most popular contents. The fool I was.
At the time, I slowly got rid of my handcrafted library and only too late did I realize my mistake.
Don't blame yourself too hard. It's the marketing scoundrels that lied to you (and everyone else). They told you they were selling access to a library, but a library carries connotations of a mostly append-only collection. They, however, really sold you access to a commercial catalog - the opposite of a stable collection.
One of my hobbies is buying used CDs on discogs or from my local record store and ripping them with ExactAudioCopy. I use Picard (gui) and metaflac (CLI) to manually edit the tags. For each album's comment I try to put the artists involved and the album liner notes, if any.
For a web player, Navidrome is excellent. I use the play:Sub iOS app to access it on my phone and stream to my apple tv, which is connected to my audio stack. I also stream to my bose color link II bluetooth speakers.
I also subscribe to apple music via the family apple one plan. Generating a station based on a song usually leads to decent results, at least for jazz.
OK, serious question - why stream the music? Why not just sync between your computer and phone once a day or week or however often you obtain new music? Then if you don’t have a network connection, you can still listen to all of your music. Is the issue storage space? I did this with an iPod for years before the iPhone came out and it worked really well.
I have a small mp3 (sandisk). About 16GB, around 4000 songs. I carry it with all the time (when travelling, when doing sports, when running, etc). The best thing is that it's small, so I can just hang it anywhere on my clothes and call it a day. I still download mp3s from here and there like in the old days (and have backups as well).
Why not using my smartphone? I don't carry it when doing sports, for instance (it's so uncomfortable).
Same. I keep a small playlist of mp3 files in Google Drive and sync when I update it. SanDisk is cheap and great for exercising. I hate lugging around my phone and letting it distract me.
This is easy to answer: my music collections add up to about 400 GB now. Phones are pretty stingy with storage, it just won't fit.
My solution is to have a pretty serious 20 GB/month data bundle, run Wireguard and some additional hackery so that the BubbleUPNP app on my phone can use multicast to discover some MiniDLNA/ReadyMedia containers running in my switchboard cabinet, and stream my collections that way.
Use BubbleUPnP server instead, and dump it behind nginx or other reverse proxy for https support (it also has an option built-in for https, I think). No need for wireguard, unless you're already using it for other things. If necessary, it can also do transcoding for you.
A 512gb microsd might also cost you less than a few months of cell service at $50, and if that's not enough 1-1.5tb is also available these days (micron's 1.5tb i400 costs a whopping $550+; 1tb is more reasonable at ~$100 from SanDisk) if you need more, and 2tb has been announced by Kioxia.
Thanks – I need the UPNP server to stream to other devices in the home too, and BubbleUPNP server is strangely not a UPNP server, according to their website. I'm actually about 99% happy with ReadyMedia (it should serve larger album art, and have some way of browsing recently added media), and also use the Wireguard to keep other services off the public internet, it gives me a lot of peace of mind to have a smaller attack surface that way.
Updating an SD card is something I considered, though my phone doesn't support that, and it ends up being fairly clunky to keep synchronized, and indexing 400 GB of FLACs and MP3s on a low-power low-memory device like a phone with storage as slow as an SD card is going to run a phone hot for a fair amount of time.
BubbleUPnP server is (asking other things) an authenticated DLNA proxy, for exposing your server to the internet. It works alongside a server like readymedia, rather than replacing it. It's unfortunate, imo, since I'd love to have a DLNA server that exposed my cloud storage and media library together, like the BubbleUPnP Android app is capable of doing, but without needing to have an Android device in the mix.
I'm also out of touch, and so naturally I use mpd on my little home "server" (Guix System on rockpro64). It serves me well, though sometimes I wished for a more convenient way to tag or rate music.
I've built a whole UI around it that does that. But it's old and insecure, if you want it I can fish up an installable copy but you'd have to isolate it from the internet.
What's so hard about copying the music that you know you're going to be wanting to listen to to whatever device that you're going to have with you and then just listening to it? Why does it have to be streamed? If you have everything on an NAS then just use Windows file share and go to that folder and drag it to your foobar 2000 on your computer. If you're out and about and you want access to all of this then set up a VPN server on your router that also has encryption so and then set up VPN client on your phone or whatever and then connect in to your home network when you're out and about and then you can access your home storage...
I hate Plex I hate the way it makes me reorganize everything and tag everything when all I want to do is go to the folder where the thing is and put it in my media player which is something that I can just you know do. I feel like a lot of you were thinking about this in very strange ways when you could be solving it with very simple ways
And what's the obsession about not using local storage? My phone has over a hundred gigs of storage. My computer has terabytes of storage. Laptops for years have had like 500 gig drives or more. Companies still sell digital audio players and some of them also have Bluetooth in fact a lot of them have audiophile quality Bluetooth.
But no you have to talk about things in terms of Rsync and S3 buckets because you're a fucking tech bro. You have to talk about things in terms of services and all this crap when you have the simple thing right in front of you. I don't mean to be like incredibly rude sounding about all of this but I see this topic come up so much and I feel like a lot of people can't see the forest for the trees when it comes how to handle their own home media. Music comes out of speakers. Music is contained inside of a digital audio file. Connect a device that plays a digital audio file to a speaker either through wireless or wired means and then you have... Music! It doesn't need to be streamed. If you need it in your car? You have a phone right? You have an AUX Jack? Plug in a usb-c sound card thingy to your phone if you need an AUX Jack on your phone cuz it doesn't have one and now you have the ability to wire your phone to the AUX Jack. Get a dedicated device if you don't want to do that. Again digital audio players still exist. Oh but you need to Scrobble all of your music that you ever play because you need a record of everything you've ever listened to... Good thing a lot of digital audio players just run Android and have players that have that functionality.
> If you're out and about and you want access to all of this then set up a VPN server on your router that also has encryption so and then set up VPN client on your phone or whatever and then connect in to your home network when you're out and about and then you can access your home storage...
So, streaming then?
I’d love to put music on my phone but apple doesn’t seem to want me to be able to — though, honestly, I haven’t checked out the Linux->iPhone thing in a while.
Speaking sincerely as someone who loved carrying their whole music library on an iPod back in the day:
- My phone doesn't have enough space to store all my music
- I don't know what I'm going to be wanting to listen to
- I don't want to carry a second device and have to keep it charged & synced
But I also can't be bothered to set up any of that tech bro stuff, so I just upload all my pirated city pop to my youtube music library and put up with the intentionally crappy interface.
I have carefully curated my music collection for a few decades now. I am very specific in how I listen to music. I listen to full albums and want them to be gapless. I get really frustrated at the smallest glitch, hiccup, or buffer.
All my music is on my NAS and backed up. I use jellyfin + finamp (+ wireguard when not at home) to stream to my phone.
I have a dedicated mp3 player (fiio) that I also load part of my collection on for true offline and higher fidelity listening.
I can stream through jellyfin to my stereo.
I also have built a raspberry pi with an RFID reader. I have printed album covers onto rfid cards and have stacks of them you can flip through. If you place them them on my stereo, that album starts playing (it uses mpd to stream from my NAS). This was a fun project to turn my digital collection back into something physical and is a lot of fun when friends come over.
I like this method as well but boxing up my computer and carrying it around with me is a little unwieldy. Plus, the headphone cable is really short and if I move my head too quickly it gets yanked out of the back.
It's certainly an option, but it lacks the flexibility most people have come to expect.
Storing your media locally is fine, but you only have it when you're physically at your machine. To go portable you have to manage syncing files to an external device. Now you've got two libraries to manage.
Yes, we lived with this kind of thing since digital music existed, but it was a pain then and it's a pain now. Keeping one centralized library that any device can play from means less effort required to maintain the library.
Plus I can play my music in the car from my phone and never have to hear an annoying radio ad again.
>To go portable you have to manage syncing files to an external device. Now you've got two libraries to manage.
Just copying whatever music I want to listen to on the go and playing it back locally is far simpler and easier than dealing with Plex/Jellyfin, hosting a server, managing a VPN, and all the other sysadmin nonsense.
I sync all my music to my phone. It's really not a big deal. But I'm not the type of person who is constantly discovering and adding new music, so I don't sync very often.
It's far bigger of a pain for me to deal with streaming. I don't have an unlimited data plan so streaming on the go is right out.
This is even assuming physical media exists to rip in the first place. Plenty of smaller labels these days only do vinyl and streaming. CD is a dead format.
CDs are the current punkest physical format. They are cheaper to produce than cassettes even. You can listen to them in your car. CDs are not dead to serious music collectors, and are in some ways superior to vinyl (not in the dynamic range department, however).
Not cheaper for very short runs. I know friends who will put out cassettes with as few as 10 copies. CD production doesn't get cheaper until you're talking larger quantities (like 100+).
When anyone talks about streaming music or video they are talking about downloading it as they're watching it. You are hallucinating a definition that no one uses. Try to understand the context if you can.
Chiming in as a happy Plex lifetime pass user, using it for my FLAC music library as well as other media.
I do however, still maintain a Spotify account for primarily non-English music, especially new releases, which seem incredibly difficult to find anywhere else.
I find that iTunes has the largest access to non-English music, making it very easy to find and buy (compared to having to import the album or single and ripping it), even easier than pirating for a lot of these albums which get zero support outside of hyper niche and exclusive trackers.
The only real downside is navigating iTunes is a huge pain these days. Trying to explore the sub-genres they used to have kicks you back to the main store page. So you have to know which artist/album you're looking for.
I’m the complete opposite. My own music bores me to tears and makes my stomach hurt because I’ve listened to it so many times. Spotify’s Discover Weekly changed my life. Nothing else compares.
Yes. I am about to embark upon Phase I of the Great Ripping. I'm not sure how it will go. (If anyone knows how to get an disc autoloader like the Nimbie NB21 or its ilk to play nice with Exact Audio Copy, let me know)
But I am faced with an even more interesting challenge: trying to do this for my mom and one of my ... technically-challenged friends. What I want for them is something like a Roku app that they can pick out some section of music that I've partitioned off or ripped for them and just let it go. My mom would like a Motown station and some Noisy Nineties as well; my friend would dig on the alternative eighties and probably a custom "ethereal" station with a hint of darkwave. Sure, I can rip 'em. Got a Python script that will transcode to high-end MP3s and renormalize the audio. But the part where I attach some directory and its files, or a playlist, or whatever, to something easy regular people can just navigate to, click click click, this seems to be kind of an interesting challenge.
And for me, I don't want to listen to, as Pictures for Sad Children would be paraphrased "Whatever is on Spotify ... played at a reasonable volume." I have some very rare, very weird stuff I would like to listen to at times. Rather than worry about licensing games, well, I'd like to listen to what I have. It isn't trivial, by any means.
I can't believe no one has mentioned it but Jriver is a damn fine feature rich media which has been developed by a dedicated team for years: https://www.jriver.com/
They even have a lossless streaming service of sorts where you can upload your own playlist and then stream it wherever you want: https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Cloudplay
I've been using it for nearly 10 years and the devs have kept it functional, feature rich, and importantly it's avoided the gradual shitification which seems to infest a lot of modern music service/programs (ie. Spotify).
Also, their pricing is reasonable. Namely a yearly fee which - even if you don't pay it - their software still carries on working (a rarity these days).
I've used it pretty much most days for nearly 10+ years and it just works. I've never had it corrupt my massive digital music collection. I can tag something when i need to. LastFM works with it. And the interface has the highly usable old itunes-esq look/layout which is great if you're working on a desktop all day.
I also have a RaspPi and a MiniPC in other parts of the house, they both run Jriver and sync with my main library on my work PC. All playlists and ratings are sync, and if i change one it will update to the master library. And my licence allows as many installations of jriver as i want (another rarity these days).
For digital music, I have a setup with Beets and Plexamp. Plexamp is a seriously good player.
For my vinyl records, sometimes I record a selection of tunes just like a radio DJ would. I have a liquidsoap instance coupled with an icecast server serving all these mixes in a random fashion.
This way, I have both my radio station I can connect on (and share as well) and a streaming option with the choice of what I want to listen to. I love it.
I use Funkwhale [1] internally. It is such a beautiful designed interface and it makes listening to my music fun again. Funkwhale also honors a carefully curated music collection (I use MusicBrainz); my MP3s are mounted read-only; I can share my Music with family-members; it is Album-focused, which is more in line with my listening habits (I don't want a random stream of different artists, I like to listen to a single album, the way artists arranged their tracks etc.); although, I do use playlists sometimes.
My family members have an "MP3" folder in Nextcloud and when they add music, Funkwhale is set up to automatically scan their bind-mounts for change and add music.
Currently, the library has about 16000 MP3s (mostly bought, some ccby, some music from games I bought, some digitized audio-cds - I try to by MP3 from bandcamp, if available).
For multi-room-audio, I use Iris+Mopidy+Snapcast [2] as an alternative frontend to my Funkwhale library, via API.
you can upload to youtube music (100,000 song limit though). the interface sucks (SO much worse than google music which google killed) and is filled with dark patterns.
I finally found a good enough replacement for Google Music in koel. It's a tiny server that runs in a docker container and it does anything that I cared about, which admittedly isn't overly complicated.
This is why I had to return my iPhone and go back to Android, there was no possible way to get my music library onto my phone with a linux computer. The only way it seems to work is if you have a Mac or Windows PC and iTunes.
Not everything is available in a company's streaming catalog, even if you pay for it.
You can self-host something like Navidrome/Ampache and use a subsonic app like Amperfy https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy and download your whole library (or cache as you go along playing tracks).
> Plex scrobbles to Last.fm from the server, auto-populates artist metadata, does a stellar job matching similar artists and building playlists from your own collection....The metadata is defined the way I've elected to define it and it's available via an rclone mount to Google Drive.
This is so strange to me. If I were going through the trouble of streaming my own files, the last thing I'd want is to have records of every file I played and when sent a bunch of third parties who will eagerly collect that data. Self-hosting should mean getting your data out of other people's hands because what you listen to, when, and how often, is none of their business.
I have a little script that takes keywords, queries YouTube's search, and starts playing through the results. It's a similar experience to listening to an actual radio station, complete with non-music and the occasional ad that I let through (and I filter out the excessively long "n-hour remixes"), although I can also skip to the next result and "change the channel", but most of the time it's just a background in the shop while doing other stuff. It logs what it played, so I can go back and "cache" anything I liked for future playback.
I very much hate them. I know I'm going be the old man yelling at clouds on this one, but I genuinely believe that algorithms are garbage "curators" and no substitute for individual humans (DJs, radio show people) with taste, because algos can (and will) be gamed.
There is no human with music tastes as specific as mine besides me. But an algo can take all of my listening history and recommend whole genres I didn't even know about. I don't think Spotify's is one that can be gamed.
"Serving you things you, an individual, like" and so-called "conspiracy theories" are in no way incompatible.
I'm saying this as someone who's seen a relatively long 'history' of what is popular in hip-hop as an example, and I think there are observable trends that go beyond mere "oh, the kids always like something different from the adults."
You're right, which is why I (as a music nerd) have gone out of my way to ensure that it's more than that. In a nutshell, here's why, despite every reason not to, one could still believe me.
When I as a youngster had to defend hip-hop against my parents, I was able to reference the music itself, see, this comes from that tradition, this sound come from here, roots in African and Black American traditions, this rapper is actually a saxophonist and adopted his style from jazz etc. etc. Citations and sources and the like.
As I've found/seen in entirely too many music conversations today, the kids can't do that. As in, if I'm like "okay, this guy who sounds like he's JUST mumbling, what am I missing here? I'm open minded and used to these conversations, go."
Crickets when you get to this level. They can no longer rely on "But music always changes, why do you hate young people, blah blah."
I’m not the author, but I’ve gone down the same path as them (Plex + ripped CDs.)
My breaking point was when - as a premium subscriber already - Spotify insisted on promoting their family plan, Taylor Swift’s new album and whatever the flavor of the current week was via full-screen modal popups in the app with no way to prevent them. I asked support several times and was told they didn’t have a toggle.
I tried moving to Apple Music, but the discovery patterns in that app didn’t align with what I was looking for, and offline play has been nerfed so hard I can’t find any way to do it any more.
I’m now on Plex + Plexamp for music and happier for it.
I'm not sure about other people, but I hate Spotify's recommendations, and I think it's because my unit of music discovery is albums, not tracks. The Daily Discovery playlist is just randomly selected tracks, and I can't even listen to that. It's too scattered and doesn't go deep enough.
The old Discover tab/page was amazing for finding new albums, but they killed it for some reason.
Perhaps this is more what you are looking for: throw together a playlist with a particular "vibe". Doesn't have to be large, 5-10 tracks works fine. Either switch on enhanced and look at the suggestions, or use the separate section for suggested additions at the bottom. Add the ones that fit the vibe, reject the rest. Repeat. I've found that it mines niches particulary well and discovers new tracks much more effeectively than the pre-canned discover playlists, or daily suggestions.
My favorite band's presence on streaming consists of a greatest hits compilation (and I believe the same is true of their back catalogue on digital stores). I have their CDs but they've also retired so I imagine they'll never have a meaningful digital/streaming presence. Any recommendations from streaming services have a blind spot for them.
You gotta work with the algo. Sometimes if you only listen to one genre for a while it gets stuck in a rut. It does get annoying when it keeps playing the same song I've only listened to once and then skipped every other time.
This post made me wonder whether they quietly removed the feature. It's still there though. All my uploaded music from the Google music days is still there and there is still an option to upload new stuff.
It's not as well-integrated as it use to be in the Google Music days though.
It's incredibly painful to do this with a large library, as they've stopped supporting the desktop uploader. It's all drag-and-drop uploads, so it's not easy to keep it in sync with a folder of music.
Also the playback experience is painful and uploaded files are poorly supported across devices like Google Home, where it constantly wants to do playlists or mix in other music. I'm not sure Google Home even supported playback of uploads, though I abandoned the service shortly after the Play apps went away.
Exactly right. I'm very confused by all this because I literally stream music from friends and local bands that I've uploaded to my personal YouTube Music account.
I know the OP said iTunes Match wasn't working for him because iTunes would change his meta data, but I use it for streaming my own and purchased content (works great) and also have changed the meta data on a bunch of albums. It works really well 99% of the time.
Yeah, he is right that for some albums, iTunes does mess up my meta data, but at least for me, it's the exception instead of the rule.
Would prefer to use a different solution than that from a huge corporate behemoth, but it works so well, isn't really worth it for me to switch.
It works pretty well, I use it but its not a great experience navigating and searching on the iphone.
I like to shuffle, then jump to an artist album if I come across one I haven't heard in a while. You think clicking the artists name would bring you to the artist, but it brings you the album, then there is no way to get to all music by that artist. Its not great. Searching seems to be a random chance it will show you "Apple music" and offer a subscription, even though I've turned that off in the preferences..
My time is short, I only have one mac left to load music onto the cloud service.
I used to use iTunes Match. It'll change more than just metadata, I've had instances where album tracks were swapped out for their clean versions. I've dropped it in favor of a self hosted version I can ensure won't muck with my music.
This is why I am building a Subsonic/Plex/Navidrome replacement, which I've called Coral. My goal is to provide a simple, commercial streaming service-like experience, while fixing every little issue that's bothered me on the other apps. There will be web and desktop apps from day 1 with native mobile apps coming a bit later. I'll be writing a lot more about it in the coming weeks, so let me know if you'd like to know more. I'm aiming to open-source it next month.
After the demise of Google Play Music a few years back, I built a replacement for myself. If I had offered an option to store music, someone would have to bear the cost. Either I would have to make a product that eventually monetizes (or shuts down) or I'll have to make it a paid product making it out of reach for the masses. So, I decided that users should be able to use their cloud storage (Google Drive) to store their music. This keeps my cloud costs to a minimum.
The initial goal was only to support music. But users told me how they love using it for audiobooks! So many new features were added like preserving progress, playback speed, the ability to see total media duration in a folder, add files to a queue, the ability to add files directly from the web, etc.
Now, there are rumors circulating that Google might kill Google Podcasts (for the second time!). As someone who loves listening to podcasts, this time I decided to go ahead and pre-emptively add podcast support to MusicSync.
Please give it a try and let me know what you guys think.
I built my own "music streamer" for this. Basically takes any folder as an argument and recursively goes down and sucks up all music files and serves them via a web interface with the standard player controls and UI you would expect. Does everything I ever wanted and more.
Why did I do it? Kind of stupid actually. I wanted to listen to the same music that I listen to on my laptop, but on my phone. Overkill? Probably, but 100% cool.
This is an underrated feature of Apple Music that few people seem to know about. Everyone I talk to about streaming music is shocked that I use Apple Music, and even when I describe the feature they say "oh yeah Spotify can do that"... but it can't. It seems poorly marketed and quite misunderstood, but I also think most people don't see much if any value in it anymore.
I have a music library on my home server that I use mopidy to play via the iris plugin integrated into my home assistant UI. It plays over Snapcast which streams over the network to multiple devices in the home with independent volume control. I can fire up the Snapcast client in my phone to get it going there as well, which does work over vpn if I'm away, though I generally just fire up the files from my phones SD card for out-of-home listening. I recently started using whipper on Linux to extract audio from craigslist cds.
Anyone else uses foobar2000 external SQLite tags to manage the collection and needs to occasionally sync to the phone? How do you preserve the tags after the files were moved to the phone? The perfect solution would be to bake in the tags and art when copying, but I am not aware of tools that support this. Maybe I should write my own sync tool.
Amazon used to offer exactly that kind of service. You could upload your own music files or get them automatically when your purchased an album (digitally or physically), then play them from a web player or locally installed client app. It worked great, so of course they killed it and now you can only listen to music they license/allow streaming.
This was different, Amazon allowed you to upload any of your own music and stream it from them. You didn't have to buy the music from them, it could have been old mp3s you downloaded from Napster ages ago for example.
It lets you stream from a nice desktop server product, JRiver Media Center [0], and it's sole purpose is to be an audio client to JRiver Media Center. It's main focus is on being lightweight and reliably streaming from your home server even on long drives, when your connection may be less than reliable.
I use Navidrome (https://www.navidrome.org/docs/getting-started/). Works great for my needs; on iOS I have the "play:Sub" app but it will work with any Subsonic clients, or just a web browser.
Way back in the early 2000's, I homebrewed a simple server to stream audio from my home PC via Windows Media Services (IIRC). It featured a web app to allow me to create the playlist. It let me listen to my own music at work without having to copy files, even with the limited bandwidth of my home DSL connection.
Nowadays, I use Roon for the same purpose (specifically Roon ARC). It's not cheap, but I was already using Roon for home to easily find and manage music across my own collection and streaming services, and then play it back on many devices in my home. It takes a bit of work to get running there is a cost, so it's definitely a bit of an investment, but it generally does exactly what I want it to do and I spend my time using it rather than fighting it.
About 8 bucks a month gives you a single-code Hetzner vps + 1TB of their storage box.
Install Navidrome (subsonic-compatible music streaming server), nginx for https, mount a storage box as a network drive to both VPS and your PC, and you're all set.
Just drag and drop music straight from your laptop to the network drive, and you can listen to it with both web ui or any number of subsonic clients (Symphonium is probably the best for Android).
The only thing that's missing is discovery and recommendation. Navidrome supports scrobbling to last.fm and listenbrainz, but so far I wasn't successfull with getting good recommendations from both of these.
Does anyone have ideas on how to implement this, save for exporting my own data and developing own recommendation system?
I wonder wether some markets are just dead after a while. As in, all things that can be done have been done in all permutations, there might even be software generated plenty, and the product being eternal living, just never fades. Maybe releasing new music, movies, games one day will become the same thing. Without artifical scarcity, some markets will just die, just a computer being able to entertain tailored to the audience, with all tools, not needing a connection just a seed.
I wonder what happens, if a ChatGPT version specialized on Art downstream, just becomes the computer of startrek, capable to visualize all and everything on the holodeck without the need for artists.
I run Roon on my Synology and couldn't be happier. Finally a service where I pay for the software being developed and I'm not a product. Works very well and doesn't try to sell me new crap all the time.
Same here except I run Roon on my homeserver with unRAID. The last thing I remember them trying to "up-sell" me on was their new "RoonARC" app which I now use all the time as it just allows remote streaming of my own music. The multiroom support with Roon is also very well implemented - I can move the music I'm listening to between rooms as I move throught the house or I can play the same music in multiple rooms simultaneously.
Qobuz subscription for streaming and discovery, and I buy an album for keeps as a celebration of every payday - there's no nicer feeling than owning your own media!
Disclaimer: I work in HiFi so may be a little biased towards the audiophile lifestyle.
I should probably add that here is nothing "audiophiley" about Roon, in fact that label may be hurting the software and the business. It's just… well, a streaming service for your music. And it works really well.
I was really annoyed by Sonos forcing obsolescence of their products. Their "S1" app doesn't work too well anymore. Roon gave a new life to my Sonos devices and they are first-class citizens again.
So if you want to stream your music, Roon is a good way to do it. Yes, you need to run the "roon core" somewhere, but that's not a very high bar, and it gives you the ability to play your music anywhere using your phone (with the RoonARC app).
And if you don't use Play Services on your mobile device there are Android apps available:
Gelli & Finamp for a Jellyfin server and Ultrasonic & Subtracks for a Subsonic server.
I was in this camp too until January. I have nearly 20k of fairly well tagged and curated mp3s. They consume 85Gb and easily fits on an SD card.
While I'm mostly content with my collection, there are many gaps particularly from bands that only have one or two songs that I like. I did the 90-day Spotify trial in January and set up my ultimate favorite song list (minus Neil Young) of about 1900 songs. Maybe I'll try to add the missing songs to my library but at $10 a month it might not be worth the time.
I love streaming music ( I subscribe to YouTube Premium). I get to listen to music I couldn't afford to when I was young (except when visiting friends or borrowing cassettes from the public library). I also am very eclectic - while prog rock was my first love, I am enjoying jazz, my wife loved classical and our kids all excelled in that, and have also learned about world music. Having access to libraries of music that really can't be plumbed for only $18 Aussie a month for my family as well is great
Also have YT Premium and wind up just using YT Music to listen to music. It’s not the best UI, but I can find most anything I’m looking for on it. It’s a little dirty but gets the job done.
I stopped listening to music entirely when Grooveshark up and died. There's probably entire bands that I've forgotten because I relied entirely on their playlists.
Synology Audio Station [0] should be a good replacement for Apple Music and Other streaming apps. Their iOS and Android DS Audio apps are quite good. You can even access your Synology NAS remotely so that should tick quite a few boxes.
I built this small node app that serves up a directory, I'm running that on my storage machine and it allows me to listen to my music from anywhere. There's also an Android client, bot so far, it's been in "review" for Play for about two months.. https://github.com/DusteDdk/dstream
I probably think badly and therefore I cannot understand the logic "first upload your files to the service, then pay the service for access to your files." It is especially difficult to understand when an SSD with a capacity of about 240 gigabytes costs as much as a couple of months of access to the service.
A home streamer with removable SSDs (it's a streamer, SSDs are actually always used in read mode) looks more convincing to me.
Chalk me up as another happy PlexAmp user. I haven't yet cancelled iTunes Match because, well... inertia, I guess, but I have a destkop "now playing" display into which I shoehorned PlexAmp recently:
I don't understand why every digital music player cannot read shared files over a LAN, you have to set up a "server" for it to see them. Why do I need a server? Why can't it just read the !@#$%^&* files? After all, if I put the files on a usb stick it can read/play them.
It's not impossible, either, as the ancient Turtlebeach Audiotron could do just that.
P.S. I'd also pay for a Roku app that can read and display PDF files.
I think there’s an app on Apple TV that can play files over smb. VLC does thats as well. I have macs and can play anything from my diy nas over smb as well. But I use Logitech Media Server, because I can control it from my phone, my tablet and my computers. And play through almost every speaker I have (airplay).
I have a synolgy nas and they have DS Audio that lets me stream my nearly 200 gigs of music anywhere in the world. I’ve had this for the past decade so when streaming music became a thing, yeah why would I bother. It’s pretty great butni wish they’d update the DS Audio app; it lacks a proper eq for one and the Ux could use a refresh (esp lack of dark mode, the white background at night is pretty annoying).
All I want the do is have DS audio play a random playlist of my music and it was garbage.
Strike 1, you have to play using playlists, and even if you choose to randomly play "all your music", it caps their playlist at something like 500 songs (can't remember exactly) so it didn't do the one primary use case of "play a random song from my library".
Strike 2, even in that subset of l my music, the playlist randomiser was super broken. I have no idea why, but the random distribution was anything but. Super grouped bias toward some songs over and over again...
I finally found a docker music server called koel which has a playlist generator that just works for my use case. the playlist it generates is still capped, but the list is actually a reasonable random distribution.
I find it somewhat amusing that people have a problem with music streaming services as a consumer. Listening to any song you want is basically free, or for $10/mo you can listen in high quality and curate and download your playlists.
As a musician or rights holder the streaming services are pretty bad in terms of getting paid. But as a consumer we are spoiled to death with ease of music access.
Just replace the 20,000 or so links to archive.org music with local links to your songs and you will have a streaming service with only your music and unlimited skips!
Unfortunately foobar seems to have a hard time with some albums using freedb. It is an excellent application tho I'm always happy to see people mention it.
I store my music on a QNAP NAS. I can listen to it from everywhere either with the provided web app or on my phone with the QMusic mobile app. Both do their job. I like that you have a basic rating/tagging function, which however is stored in an internal database instead of the file metadata. You can also directly delete files.
I feel like there's a lot of meaning hidden in the word "streaming" that I don't fully understand. Surely every player under the sun can play back from a network location? What actually is this "streaming" thing? If we could fully describe the problem maybe it would be easier to come up with a solution.
I spent a few hours one day screwing around with coreaudio and icecast on my mac and got it so with a command I could redirect current sound output to a stream that I could seamlessly pick up on from my phone. If I added a layer of remote controls you'd get a central streaming service between devices with free hand off.
I have plex server running on my NAS, but started running Jellyfin and the Gelli app from f-droid to do this. Plexamp seemed like a great option, too, but it's hard to beat foss.
Edit: I do love Spotify, however, since I've been able to listen to so much more music than ever, but I resent that they can, and have, pulled music from their selection.
I was dissatisfied with this whole situation for a long time. At the moment I just sync my library to my phone with syncthing and play with musicolet (which I saw recommended here on HN at some point). It's simple and it works. I'm 90% less frustrated with trying to listen to music.
While I understand the sentiment in the article and this thread. Streaming services like Spotify have unparalleled recommendation and discovery systems. Even if I were to store my music locally, how would I discover new ones to add to my playlist?
My inclination has always been to reach for Last.fm that lists related artists gleaned from fan listening patterns — beyond that I've always enjoyed tracing bands manually based on the members of bands I like, their side projects, labels that put out releases I like consistently and so forth. For smaller acts that are absent from or not featured by Spotify their recommendations usually fall flat.
Technical aspects aside, I don't see how it can compete in cost comparing with something like Spotify. If you host it by yourself and pay for the rights of the music, I can see it costing more than 10 times for the same content.
Storage is dirt cheap and I already ripped my CD collection more than a decade before Spotify started up. Besides that half the stuff I have isn't on Spotify to begin with.
I mean, if you listen to the same few old things over and over again, sure. I listen to dozens of new releases a month...and that's not even counting back catalog.
There's one thing I cannot stand about the Apple streaming platform: the first one or two seconds of a song seem to be served at a lower bitrate, making any powerful intro hits/notes basically get a low-pass filter applied.
Or, at least this is my understanding of it – that they've prioritized serving audio FAST, rather than waiting an extra second for the higher bitrate to buffer. I find it absolutely infuriating and can't un-notice it. For some reason, it seems to behave the same if the bandwidth/latency is great or poor, or whether files are cached or not.
I don't use other services, but never experience this with any other player (including my own Navidrome setup), even if the files are the exact same.
I don't want to stream any music, I just want to carry my curated polytaxonomic music collection around with me. Wireless to my headset or wired if I want, an SD card can hold plenty.
Yup, Plex is the way to go for me too. I use plexamp as my client and it's been a wonderful experience. Really love the sonic analysis features, especially the guest DJs.
I use "DS Audio", the web/native app that comes with Synology home NAS. It works pretty well. Probably not as well as Plex or Jellyfin. Has anyone used both?
I came here to say this as well. Synology's Video Station app is also decent.
Both of them are surprisingly good in a lot of ways, but also...kind of ugly. Not enough so to not use them, but I wish these two apps had the same UI polish that some of the other first-party Synology apps have.
Quick memory check: Wasn't there a time when you could upload files you bought to your spotify library if Spotify didn't have the rights to broadcast them?
Daap client. Eg rhythmbox or iTunes, the creatively named "DAAP" from fdroid, looks like there's a few for ios.
Owntone is great to drive your airplay speakers in your house (shairport-sync or whatever) daap client let's you stream that one, organised, curated, source of truth collection on the local network - which wireguard provides to you even when you're far, far away. Last.fm in you're into that (I'm not).
Better than any subscription service because it's yours.
Always seemed as simple as that to me, but I've also never understood the need for specialized NAS software. And all I want out of NAS hardware is a box with a bunch of bays and a board with a bunch of ports/slots.
That being said, if you're trying stream your collection on the road (over your phone/at work/on a trip) it has to get more complicated than that. I'm not putting my shares on the public internet without a secure intermediary in some sort of streaming server. I used Gnump3d for that many years ago, but simply have settled for the 200 gigs of music on my phone's SD card since. I can't consider living with only 200 gigs of music such a hardship that I would be willing to set a new, possibly insecure thing up.
edit: Aiming ports towards the internet has been a job for me off and on, and the responsibility for keeping things updated yet also protecting against the new dangers potentially presented by each new update is something that I need a significant reward for.
Yea, a networked Linux box serving an NFS mount has worked perfectly for me for a good 20 years. Never felt the need for anything more complicated. Works for movies, too.
Here's my site. You can try it for free: https://inter.tube
It supports almost all of Subsonic (highly recommend play:Sub on iOS). FLAC works. I never re-encode your songs, they are kept byte-for-byte. It doesn't support Last.fm (yet?) but I don't think it would be too hard to add. It respects metadata tags. There are still some glitches, and the web player kind of sucks. You can (batch) edit metadata on the web but it does not change the file, just the web/API interfaces.
To be honest I have mostly lost motivation to work on this, but I was aiming at exactly the pain points the author of this article describes. Send me an email (profile) or tweet/comment if you think it's worth pursuing again.