I love self hosting useful apps. I wish finding more things was easier. Right now I self host a jellyfin server and home assistant. When I learned a subscription for home security was $75/mo I said “there has to be something out there” and there was. I pay the developer their $6/mo even though everything works without it.
Jellyfin has been amazing for physical media backups. It’s nice to experience old VHSes and DVDs in a user friendly way.
nginx-proxy becomes almost a must have if you have multiple services and prefer remembering domain names instead of port numbers https://github.com/nginx-proxy/nginx-proxy
Most people will use nginx-proxy [0] or Traefik [1] for front ending home labs with LetsEncrypt certs... Beyond that people will protect them with things like Tailscale [2], Cloudflare Tunnels [3] or even just mTLS [4] for protected access.
Home labbing today has a lot of amazing software and it's hard to keep up!
And as for dashboarding [5] on top of all this there are a lot of options.
Also, for those new to the game who want an easier way to approach take a look at Tipi [6].
That doesn't sound like a bad idea, but it's just as easy to create a bunch of LXC containers with their own MAC address and IP for me (and thus own hostname per service).
Heck you can even cobble stuff together with Home Assistants and various door/window/presence/water/humidity sensors. I was able to build a notification system when doors, windows, or fence gates are open. Same with panic buttons that alert my SO if any of us need assistance when putting kids to bed without whipping out the phones.
All of that can be loaded into HASS using a $26 Sonoff Zigbee dongle and various Zigbee devices like Aqara and others.
ADT; there’s a program through my employer where employees get deals and so I made first contact with them. I chatted with a salesperson who walked me through a sign up process before I could ask any questions (I made contact saying I wanted to inquire about services and then said we couldn’t talk until he collected all my information).
He said normally it’s $100/mo but with this deal, it’s $75/mo.
No thanks. $900/yr to $1200/yr + installation fee for home security kinda stinks. I was told the equipment wouldn’t work if I didn’t have the subscription.
I’m sure I was taken for a ride too, being told false information (the equipment really wouldn’t work? It’s really $75/mo?). I indeed felt like I was being treated like a mark. At the end I said delete my information but honestly I doubt they did. But who cares because now I got myself into this pretty fun world of home automation and security through Home Assistant and self hosting.
I've been using Plex (connecting via Tailscale) with their Plexamp music player.
It's been working pretty well, but I might have to give this a try to compare. Although, it's not clear from the GitHub README or the Apple App Store listing if the mobile app allows you to download music for offline listening.
Also using Plex and Plexamp, and very happy with that combo. Curious about why talescale is needed - I'm on a static IP, but I believe Plex also provides a forwarding service (?)
I think you were talking about Blackcandy in the second paragraph, but just to be clear, Plexamp does allow downloading for offline listening.
It's free, extremely easy (not that port forwarding is complicated) and you don't need to port forward.
I point DNS records on my personal domain to tailscale IPs so it some subdomains can only be accessed when connected to tailscale, I can do app.mydomain.com etc without exposing anything online.
- Cloudflare tunnel for public access
- Tailscale for private use and sharing over WebDAV
- Nextcloud for general file management
- Jellyfin for music and video streaming
Nextcloud's WebDAV has issues with filenames or at least how it works. A large amount of files in non-'standard' characters wouldn't show up, so Ampache/Subsonic wouldn't work. This is why I tried Jellyfin.
I tried this (among a bunch of others) about a year ago and landed on Gonic[1] for the server and Supersonic[2] on PC and Amperfy[3] on mobile. Yes it's a few different tools to maintain (plus beets etc), but it's the ideal set of features etc for me.
Self-hosting has been fun and I've started experimenting with local LLMs to build playlists which is helping discoverability.. or more /rediscovering/ artists that I haven't listened to in a while
I didn’t need a web client and Gonic shows the actual directory layout for the folder API. I have a few albums that requires gapless playback and most web players can’t accommodate them. My music library layout is mostly ‘collection/album-key/track-key.ext’ where album-key is something that uniquely identifies the album and make it easy to search for. For my main collection it’s’artist - year - album’ while for others it can be just ‘year - album’. Gonic shows the same layout to clients.
I have chosen jelly over it because of the way navi stores music. I prefer to organize music in folders myself, and tag them with picard. Jelly then just shows everything nicely with 0 configuration.
+1 for navidrome.
I’ve had better luck with the play:Sub app (iOS).
I think it’s important that these servers use a common API (subsonic), but it seems like the slickest apps are always targeted to one specific backend (plexamp, finamp, prism music).
I did try Navidrome and used it for a while.. I honestly don't remember why I switched but I suspect the reason was probably more related to the client I was using at the same (Submariner on macOS) than the server-side.
I have both Gonic and MPD on my home server (an old mac mini running debian). It's connected directly via optical to my AVR and MPD can be controlled with the Rigelian app on my iPhone. Gonic is for Amperfy when I want to stream to the Homepod.
On my desk, I used to have a satellite instance of MPD for my desktop setup, but I copied over my library to an external drive and use that as my main instance (rsync to the server when I update it). I rarely play from my laptop (I control the others instead). but could use either the satellite config, a subsonic client, or a quick sshfs mount.
And for offline sessions, I have a DAP with a 512GB card and most of my collection.
+1 to Amperfy, I use it with the Music app on my Nextcloud. The App Store version is a bit barebones last I checked but the Testflight version feels like a completely different app, it’s just like Apple Music but self-hosted. Kind of like Apollo felt like an app Apple would make.
I'm hyped about Amperfy but it doesn't have gapless playback which is a hard must for me. Last time I checked, anyway. Looks like it's been committed recently though: https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy/issues/96
Also it seems transcoding is mp3 only, whereas play:Sub can use (and seems to default to using) OPUS which is better in every conceivable way.
Edit: Trying gapless with the TestFlight - seems to work, however, it doesn't change the displayed track.
OK, I will ask. I presume you purchased all those music files that you host on that certain server, didn’t you? I will also assume that there is no tool that lets you acquire music MP3s (or some appropriate file type which is non-audiophile listenable) the Linux ISO way (without having to hunt them songs one by one), right? I am talking about someone already having a Spotify/apple music playlists/likes/favourites.
Also, these self hosted music services mean — no new music reco/discover, right? Not necessarily a bad thing. I was curious. Never done this.
How is the cost/spec need of this self hosting like? Does it have to be stand alone or it can live with other things like maybe an archiving/bookmarking service and small self hosted utilities like that (of course not all being used at once).
>OK, I will ask. I presume you purchased all those music files that you host on that certain server, didn’t you?
I self-host my music streaming with Plex, and I'll go ahead and admit to you that no -- not all of my music is paid for.
>Also, these self hosted music services mean — no new music reco/discover, right?
I've discovered more music, and more interesting music, through my Plex server in 6 months than I have on Spotify/Apple music in 6+ years. On the site where I get my music, I have downloaded thousands of albums - 75+% of which I have never heard in my life. I did this by downloading albums I liked, and then snatching all related albums on top, and then snatching all the albums collected by people who like the albums I like, and so on. And so I now have a collection of music all relatively close to my taste but FULL of stuff I've never heard in my life.
On top of that, this site also has ways to follow users and has a way to see albums that they enjoy. It has a top 10 board of the most popular albums on the site that day/month/year.
Then, on the Plex side, Plexamp (which I stream with) has many many ways to start "stations". "Time travel radio", Decade radio, Style (genre), Mood ("Ambitious radio", "Cerebral radio", "Passionate radio", etc.) and more such as algo-DJs with specific styles.
It's all much higher quality mechanisms for discovery than payola-weighted streaming algorithms and "curated" playlists.
Self hosted music service doesn't necessarily imply new music discovery problems, because a lot of people still discover music the old non-algorithmic way, by being interested in certain genres, studying labels and artists and going through their albums, adding to their collection what they would love to hear again. Buying and owning the song/album somehow brings me more satisfaction than paying a monthly fee for a song library where I won't even listen to 99% of the tracks. Regarding the cost – it is most certainly magnitudes cheaper than renting music from spotify or apple music, but it is ofc more expensive in terms of attention.
For some people music is a hobby — looking for new stuff, buying and sorting it is their passion.
The worst thing you could do to me is tell me that I pay $5 a month and the rest of my musical journey is solved and gets decided by a corporate algorithm that pays emerging musicians and niche artists a starving wage.
Not OP, but gonic is very lightweight and takes little resources. It lives on a machine that serves a few websites and also hosts my photos with photoprism (by far the most resource intensive service on this server). It's a basic N100 machine with 8GB RAM.
As for my music, although I own a physical copy of most of it that I bought legally, I downloaded almost everything through bittorrent as is easier than ripping CDs.
A sizable part of my collection consists of things I was unable to buy because it's unavailable here or unavailable at all, though. Some albums I received from friends. I don't feel guilty about it, to be clear.
Bandcamp has a massive amount of _legal_ free / zero cost / €1 per album music if you spend the time digging. As a hobby DJ I really enjoy the digging aspect!
Please don't be so quick to assume all music is pirated by those with large audio collections.
Buying new tracks like when I was still using iTunes would be nice. Bandcamp comes close but I don't mind the extra step of downloading the zip file and running my script to have it in my music server. Where I also have plenty of digitalized CDs that I own.
Spec-wise, start cheap and upgrade the CPU/RAM when you hit limits. It's not like you'll use all those services at the same time. My home containers all run on a recently purchased HP Mini G2 that I upgraded from a 6100 to a 8-core 6700 and the RAM is an odd 24GB. It even has a rarely used minecraft server. Docker containers are bundled into proxmox instances per user or whatever makes the most sense.
You don't do music discovery by blogs, music journalism, word of mouth, genre databases and so on? You're fully subservient to some algo an ad corp is using?
As for purchasing, many artists give away their works (e.g. "name your price") or don't deserve payment but should be archived and studied anyway (e.g. nazis, billionaires and so on). It's probably not that hard to build a Bandcamp crawler that fetches name-your-price-albums from specific genre tags.
For a few clients and simple browsing you can run an audio cast off a router or cheap SoC.
I have tried every music playing option under the sun for the last 15 years and am now happily back to creating playlists on my computer and periodically dragging them to my phone's local storage. There is still no better overall experience.
Storage costs being what they are now, I'm just syncthing'ing my entire mp3 collection to my phone now. According to syncthing it's 27.9GB, and while I'm sure there are people out there with another factor of magnitude more, a 512GB SD micro card, where the value sweet spot appears to currently reside, is ~$38 now. You can stick a lot of music on your phone now. At 256kb/s or so that's roughly half-a-year straight of music [1]; if you really just can't cut your collection down to that, well, I mean, you can nearly get the full year straight for $90 or so now, and I'm sure 2TB will be along shortly. We're not that many exponential doublings away from you being able to store enough music to last your entire life on your phone.
Assuming your phone still takes an SD card, of course. I get the whole "push into the cloud" thing but SD card prices have been consistently running ahead of cloud storage options and bandwidth plans for a while now; it's kind of amusing that it's the high end phones that lack this option. It's nice to be able to slam music, movies, entire seasons of TV on to my phone without it interfering with the main OS space.
Sam here. I used to have huge library of MP3 tracks to listen while driving, but as car multimedia systems evolve, now I pull music videos from youtube and enjoy "selfhosted" VH1 (for those who know). Too sad modern VH1 is a shadow of it's past, broadcasting stupid shows instead of great music (please allow me to be a grumpy uncle here).
This approach requires way lot more space (even if I pull videos in 1024x768, which is my car multimedia system resolution). For now it's just a plenty of SD cards, will see how it is going to change.
I’ve been searching for services that host personal music collections, but there doesn’t seem to be much available. I came across a product called Vox [1], which I might try. There are also plenty of self-hosted projects of varying quality (but I hadn’t seen Black Candy before).
I'd like a service where I can upload a large folder of MP3s, and it would help organize them into albums, perform useful processing like ReplayGain normalization, BPM and key analysis, etc. It should also have a good playlist manager and player for desktop and mobile.
Some existing services allow you to add your own music files, like MP3s, but this often feels like a second-class citizen. Services like SoundCloud are focused more on social interactions, which I don’t really need.
Have I missed any services like this?
There's some growing dissatisfaction around algorithm-driven music services like Spotify. Also, these services carry the risk of music disappearing for various reasons. I think a service allowing curation of own MP3 collections could appeal a significant fraction of all music lovers out there.
1. Self-hosted web server with local file system access to your media.
2. One HTML page that I will generate for you. This page will contain a media player and a play list of your media files.
With this approach the solution is ridiculously simple, but you are at the mercy of the client device web browser for media codec/container support. For audio this is not so restricting but for video this is really restricting.
Navidrome has worked well for me for the last couple years. My collection (~80 GB) is pre-organized FLAC but Navidrome will transcode to MP3 if needed. I use Substreamer on Android to connect to it (Airsonic API/protocol) or the WebUI at home or work.
Just the right balance of simplicity and features for me.
if not for the work requirement, at 80gb you could likely do what I do: use syncthing to make there be a full copy of the files on your phone. I've got a media terminal, my laptop, and my phone each keeping each other up to date. it's never broken or been frustrating. it works offline perfectly.
I use iBroadcast[0], it's a service dedicated exactly for this. Costs me a bit each year but I've felt it worth it. There's some differences to organising in iTunes like the handling of compilation albums that I'm not so fond of but you can see how it works on the free tier.
The browser client only does 128 kbps streaming but their mobile client can set the streaming quality (I have it at 256, max is 320) and I'm working on my own PWA client using their API that I've also set to 256, which would work on both mobile and desktop.
You can also set the browser client to stream the original file directly but browsers don't play most of my formats like ALAC so it just doesn't play anything then.
From the "outside" this looks like such a strange product. The landing page is very obscure and, together with the name of the service, I would automatically think this is a super old school product (being generous) or some sort of weird scam (being overly critical). There are no docs or pictures or any further description of what the product looks like, I guess the authors expect people to sign up to see (it is free! :-).
Other than that, I wonder how they address their costs [0]. It seems free accounts have unlimited uploads. Anyway, I guess I'll have to give this a try to learn more about it.
EDIT: I found some pics by clicking in their facebook page, which in turn links to a news page [1] (...).
EDIT: This product is fascinating. Seems like they've been around for 12 years, have a bunch of loyal users, and support their product (?) via reddit (at minimal approve of the reddit channel since they link to it themselves!). I wish we could know more about the team behind it. Related: [2].
Most self-hosted services metadata is only as good as the metadata on your audio files. I think using something like MusicBrainz Picard or beets to tag your media well is required, along with making sure that all files of a given album are in the same folder. (Plex has what seems like strict file naming conventions for music, but really all you need to do is make sure each album has all its files in one folder).
If you're interested in something more automated than having to use a program to tag your media, then I'm not sure what a good option is. Most people that don't use streaming services and have a digital music collection are tech-savy and don't mind going through the extra effort of tagging the media.
So here is my question, or one of them, as someone starting this whole journey: exactly what metadata do you want outside of artist, song title, album title? Because I can see there's a lot to be had. Embedded album covers, subgenre tagging, synchronized lyrics ... hyperlinks to Discogs and MusicBrainz, maybe? Tempo in BPM? Key?
ID3v2.3 or IDv2.4? Can you even do that to FLAC? And where do you get that metadata, using what tools?
I just don't want to be the guy who has to re-rip three thousand CDs because he did his workflow in a lazy or careless manner.
I’ve been wanting the same thing for a while now too. I’ve thought about trying to build it myself but the thought of requiring users to manage their own library seems too niche. A hosted, music-focused Plex competitor sounds awesome but also not sustainable. Surely the majority of those users who care about managing their music library are also happier owning their storage too, no?
Storage is tricky... I know how to self-host software and get storage but I find it too much of a hassle to do it for me only, so I just have a folder in a google drive, which I need to migrate from soonish.
Why do you think a Plex competitor would not be sustainable?
Huge shout out to astiga which I've used for a year and a half. It'll run a streaming service for you out of cloud storage (eg s3, but also stuff like dropbox or google drive).
I'd love to self host but have a toddler and not much time, so astiga is a great "take my money and do it for me" kind of service!
Large microsd cards are very cheap these days. Using all this cloud stuff seems like a waste of multiple resources. And if you ever don't have a good connection then it's worthless. I've given stuff like this a try and only found it worth it on internal networks.
How reliable are they? I've had a couple of cards that I was playing music off mysteriously wipe themselves over the past year so I've subconsciously labelled SD cards as unsafe for long term storage.
Is this common or was I just unlucky?
> if you ever don't have a good connection then it's worthless
Here in Vietnam, internet is more stable even than electricity. We can be in the middle of a typhoon, trees and roofs being destroyed, no power for several days, and mobile data never even drops in speed.
A lot of talk here about different solutions. I wonder if there's a universal interoperable standard for self hosted music streaming these days? I'm still using the old Logitech Media Server (with some physical Squeezeboxen), but something a bit more featureful would be great. Especially with good indexing and search. And if it could interoperate so I could choose different clients and server, and wouldn't be tied to that software.
OpenSubsonic (https://opensubsonic.netlify.app) is the closest. It's a collaborative effort to extend and modernize the Subsonic API, which had become a sort of de-facto standard API. Navidrome, Gonic, LMS (Lightweight Music Server, not Lyrion/Logitech), and other servers implement the API, and Supersonic, Symfonium, and other clients consume it. (And it's backward compatible with the original Subsonic, so older Subsonic clients will work, just not support all the new features that have been added.
+100 for Lyrion. I have been running it for over 20 years from back in the slimserver days. I also was a huge iPeng app fan until I installed the newer "Material Skin" plugin. If you have not used it yet, I highly recommend you check it out. I use the HTML5 interface full time over the iPeng app on my mobile for controlling the house/music selection. Also the "AirPlay Bridge" and "Chromecast bridge" plugins allow me to use my homepod devices/AppleTV's and Google Nest Hub devices as speakers which expanded my audio experience. There is also a host of ESP32 dac+amp devices and raspberry pi devices that you can use a players, its endless!
Not so much a planned standard, but Airsonic is about the closest thing. Many servers, clients, and third party tools are airsonic compatible. Navidrome, the current server I'm using is compatible for instance.
If you’re willing to pay for proprietary software, I’ve been incredibly happy with Roon for music organization. Handles 99% of albums I add without an issue, great multi-room support, best suggestions of any existing service (Rest in peace Google Play Music). They added remote streaming a few years ago and it’s all I use now.
That's some serious price. If you're a professional music maker and need top-of-the-line audio production software, Ableton 12 Suite is ~600 EUR, and that's for making music, not consuming.
I have friends that use Roon and say it's great, and has some nice features for room-based EQ, however I want to spend £0/mo standing cost (all extra goes to bandcamp).
You can control the playback via a phone if you need to play music through a Linux system though.
Music playback via a PC isn’t really what Roon seems to be going for though, so much as allowing you to control music playback through proper audio systems via a PC or other device.
Readit News
Jellyfin has been amazing for physical media backups. It’s nice to experience old VHSes and DVDs in a user friendly way.
Home labbing today has a lot of amazing software and it's hard to keep up!
And as for dashboarding [5] on top of all this there are a lot of options.
Also, for those new to the game who want an easier way to approach take a look at Tipi [6].
[0] https://nginxproxymanager.com/ [1] https://traefik.io/traefik/ [2] https://tailscale.com [3] https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections... [4] https://smallstep.com/blog/build-a-tiny-ca-with-raspberry-pi... [5] https://selfh.st/apps/?tag=Dashboard [6] https://runtipi.io/
Can I ask what it was you found?
All of that can be loaded into HASS using a $26 Sonoff Zigbee dongle and various Zigbee devices like Aqara and others.
He said normally it’s $100/mo but with this deal, it’s $75/mo.
No thanks. $900/yr to $1200/yr + installation fee for home security kinda stinks. I was told the equipment wouldn’t work if I didn’t have the subscription.
I’m sure I was taken for a ride too, being told false information (the equipment really wouldn’t work? It’s really $75/mo?). I indeed felt like I was being treated like a mark. At the end I said delete my information but honestly I doubt they did. But who cares because now I got myself into this pretty fun world of home automation and security through Home Assistant and self hosting.
It's been working pretty well, but I might have to give this a try to compare. Although, it's not clear from the GitHub README or the Apple App Store listing if the mobile app allows you to download music for offline listening.
I think you were talking about Blackcandy in the second paragraph, but just to be clear, Plexamp does allow downloading for offline listening.
I point DNS records on my personal domain to tailscale IPs so it some subdomains can only be accessed when connected to tailscale, I can do app.mydomain.com etc without exposing anything online.
Nextcloud's WebDAV has issues with filenames or at least how it works. A large amount of files in non-'standard' characters wouldn't show up, so Ampache/Subsonic wouldn't work. This is why I tried Jellyfin.
https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp
Deleted Comment
Self-hosting has been fun and I've started experimenting with local LLMs to build playlists which is helping discoverability.. or more /rediscovering/ artists that I haven't listened to in a while
[1] https://github.com/sentriz/gonic/ [2] https://github.com/dweymouth/supersonic [3] https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy
My stack [2] is: navidrome (music - subsonic server) substreamer (app) beets (music organization) EAC (audio cd ripping) audiobookshelf (audiobooks)
Most important part of navidrome are smart playlists[3], with these I didn't need AI support just yet...
1: https://www.navidrome.org/
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40470630
3: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/issues/1417
I also use Lidarr for PVR needs
I think it’s important that these servers use a common API (subsonic), but it seems like the slickest apps are always targeted to one specific backend (plexamp, finamp, prism music).
On my desk, I used to have a satellite instance of MPD for my desktop setup, but I copied over my library to an external drive and use that as my main instance (rsync to the server when I update it). I rarely play from my laptop (I control the others instead). but could use either the satellite config, a subsonic client, or a quick sshfs mount.
And for offline sessions, I have a DAP with a 512GB card and most of my collection.
On Android I've been using Symfonium which is fantastic. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.symfonik.m...
[1] https://discogs-data-dumps.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/index....
Also it seems transcoding is mp3 only, whereas play:Sub can use (and seems to default to using) OPUS which is better in every conceivable way.
Edit: Trying gapless with the TestFlight - seems to work, however, it doesn't change the displayed track.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
Also, these self hosted music services mean — no new music reco/discover, right? Not necessarily a bad thing. I was curious. Never done this.
How is the cost/spec need of this self hosting like? Does it have to be stand alone or it can live with other things like maybe an archiving/bookmarking service and small self hosted utilities like that (of course not all being used at once).
I self-host my music streaming with Plex, and I'll go ahead and admit to you that no -- not all of my music is paid for.
>Also, these self hosted music services mean — no new music reco/discover, right?
I've discovered more music, and more interesting music, through my Plex server in 6 months than I have on Spotify/Apple music in 6+ years. On the site where I get my music, I have downloaded thousands of albums - 75+% of which I have never heard in my life. I did this by downloading albums I liked, and then snatching all related albums on top, and then snatching all the albums collected by people who like the albums I like, and so on. And so I now have a collection of music all relatively close to my taste but FULL of stuff I've never heard in my life.
On top of that, this site also has ways to follow users and has a way to see albums that they enjoy. It has a top 10 board of the most popular albums on the site that day/month/year.
Then, on the Plex side, Plexamp (which I stream with) has many many ways to start "stations". "Time travel radio", Decade radio, Style (genre), Mood ("Ambitious radio", "Cerebral radio", "Passionate radio", etc.) and more such as algo-DJs with specific styles.
It's all much higher quality mechanisms for discovery than payola-weighted streaming algorithms and "curated" playlists.
The worst thing you could do to me is tell me that I pay $5 a month and the rest of my musical journey is solved and gets decided by a corporate algorithm that pays emerging musicians and niche artists a starving wage.
As for my music, although I own a physical copy of most of it that I bought legally, I downloaded almost everything through bittorrent as is easier than ripping CDs.
A sizable part of my collection consists of things I was unable to buy because it's unavailable here or unavailable at all, though. Some albums I received from friends. I don't feel guilty about it, to be clear.
Please don't be so quick to assume all music is pirated by those with large audio collections.
Spec-wise, start cheap and upgrade the CPU/RAM when you hit limits. It's not like you'll use all those services at the same time. My home containers all run on a recently purchased HP Mini G2 that I upgraded from a 6100 to a 8-core 6700 and the RAM is an odd 24GB. It even has a rarely used minecraft server. Docker containers are bundled into proxmox instances per user or whatever makes the most sense.
Sure they can do. Mine gets suggestions from lastfm.
> How is the cost/spec need of this self hosting like?
Mine is a raspberrypi4 on my local network, probably less than 20€ of electricity per year. Hosts other things...
As for purchasing, many artists give away their works (e.g. "name your price") or don't deserve payment but should be archived and studied anyway (e.g. nazis, billionaires and so on). It's probably not that hard to build a Bandcamp crawler that fetches name-your-price-albums from specific genre tags.
For a few clients and simple browsing you can run an audio cast off a router or cheap SoC.
Assuming your phone still takes an SD card, of course. I get the whole "push into the cloud" thing but SD card prices have been consistently running ahead of cloud storage options and bandwidth plans for a while now; it's kind of amusing that it's the high end phones that lack this option. It's nice to be able to slam music, movies, entire seasons of TV on to my phone without it interfering with the main OS space.
[1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=512GB+%2F+256kilobits%2...
https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-androi...
This approach requires way lot more space (even if I pull videos in 1024x768, which is my car multimedia system resolution). For now it's just a plenty of SD cards, will see how it is going to change.
I'd like a service where I can upload a large folder of MP3s, and it would help organize them into albums, perform useful processing like ReplayGain normalization, BPM and key analysis, etc. It should also have a good playlist manager and player for desktop and mobile.
Some existing services allow you to add your own music files, like MP3s, but this often feels like a second-class citizen. Services like SoundCloud are focused more on social interactions, which I don’t really need.
Have I missed any services like this?
There's some growing dissatisfaction around algorithm-driven music services like Spotify. Also, these services carry the risk of music disappearing for various reasons. I think a service allowing curation of own MP3 collections could appeal a significant fraction of all music lovers out there.
--
1: https://vox.rocks/
1. Self-hosted web server with local file system access to your media.
2. One HTML page that I will generate for you. This page will contain a media player and a play list of your media files.
With this approach the solution is ridiculously simple, but you are at the mercy of the client device web browser for media codec/container support. For audio this is not so restricting but for video this is really restricting.
The application that generates that one HTML page for you is this: https://github.com/prettydiff/mp3-master-list
It is a Node.js application and you will need to run npm install in the application directory before the other commands will work.
Enjoy!
Just the right balance of simplicity and features for me.
The browser client only does 128 kbps streaming but their mobile client can set the streaming quality (I have it at 256, max is 320) and I'm working on my own PWA client using their API that I've also set to 256, which would work on both mobile and desktop.
You can also set the browser client to stream the original file directly but browsers don't play most of my formats like ALAC so it just doesn't play anything then.
[0] https://ibroadcast.com/
From the "outside" this looks like such a strange product. The landing page is very obscure and, together with the name of the service, I would automatically think this is a super old school product (being generous) or some sort of weird scam (being overly critical). There are no docs or pictures or any further description of what the product looks like, I guess the authors expect people to sign up to see (it is free! :-).
Other than that, I wonder how they address their costs [0]. It seems free accounts have unlimited uploads. Anyway, I guess I'll have to give this a try to learn more about it.
EDIT: I found some pics by clicking in their facebook page, which in turn links to a news page [1] (...).
EDIT: This product is fascinating. Seems like they've been around for 12 years, have a bunch of loyal users, and support their product (?) via reddit (at minimal approve of the reddit channel since they link to it themselves!). I wish we could know more about the team behind it. Related: [2].
--
0: https://www.ibroadcast.com/premium/
1: https://ibroadcast.com/news/
2: https://www.reddit.com/r/ibroadcast/comments/1d1iaht/is_ibro...
If you're interested in something more automated than having to use a program to tag your media, then I'm not sure what a good option is. Most people that don't use streaming services and have a digital music collection are tech-savy and don't mind going through the extra effort of tagging the media.
ID3v2.3 or IDv2.4? Can you even do that to FLAC? And where do you get that metadata, using what tools?
I just don't want to be the guy who has to re-rip three thousand CDs because he did his workflow in a lazy or careless manner.
Why do you think a Plex competitor would not be sustainable?
I'd love to self host but have a toddler and not much time, so astiga is a great "take my money and do it for me" kind of service!
[0] https://asti.ga
Then just run navidrome using docker-compose or microk8s
Dead Comment
How reliable are they? I've had a couple of cards that I was playing music off mysteriously wipe themselves over the past year so I've subconsciously labelled SD cards as unsafe for long term storage.
Is this common or was I just unlucky?
> if you ever don't have a good connection then it's worthless
Here in Vietnam, internet is more stable even than electricity. We can be in the middle of a typhoon, trees and roofs being destroyed, no power for several days, and mobile data never even drops in speed.
Deleted Comment
For reference:
- https://lyrion.org/
- https://github.com/LMS-Community/slimserver
I stick with that family because I don’t want to have to change apps (I use play:sub on iOS)
Music playback via a PC isn’t really what Roon seems to be going for though, so much as allowing you to control music playback through proper audio systems via a PC or other device.