Since the last time I posted here sharing my new home server, I’ve gotten a little more acquainted with the services I’m using. After getting acquisition of shows and movies sorted, I ventured into music (streaming).
As many here, I’m used to using streaming services for music, ie. Spotify or YouTube Music. Naturally, I tried a similar approach by setting up my Arr stack to feed its music into Jellyfin where the music is picked up by Symfonium. I tried it out for a couple days and liked it quite a bit since it keeps my phone clean of “unnecessary” data but I still retain access to music. Unfortunately, the way I acquire my music limits my selection quite a bit unless I venture into torrenting, which I’d prefer not to. So unless I figure out a safe way to torrent on my server, I’m stuck with getting access to a very limited selection of artists and albums.
In addition to that limitation, there’s also the files formats of the music. Most of the music I’ve downloaded was only available in FLAC, which is awesome if you’ve got the bandwidth and data plan for playback, but for me it means that I spend 3GB of data for a day of streaming music which is just not sustainable.
In comparison, I can set up a Revanced version of Spotify in addition to my Revanced YT Music to get access to all the music I could want. Unfortunately, that comes with the caveat of still being tied to the companies I’m trying to get rid of - albeit not financially anymore, but I’m still sharing my data.
Ultimately, I’m not sure what to do. What I love about self-hosting is the independence from all the companies we’re being fucked over by in all kinds of imaginable ways. But if it’s free, outside my sharing data with them, can I really compete?
I’d be interested in hearing your opinions and thoughts on this. How did you solve music streaming with your build?
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Honestly? I just used PipePipe to download the songs I wanted as MP3 and saved em to USB. This a step above basic caveman shit lol. I suppose I could have gone real 2003, gone to the library, ripped em manually too.
In any case, as with all self hosting decisions, there has to come a point where you consider quality over quantity.
Great, you have 10,000 songs. How many of those do you actually listen to? 30? 100? 300? How much is enough? Because if the answer is 10,000…what do you have to give up to get that? Clearly, if you’re uncomfortable with online music hosting, at some point, you need to bail. But how can you keep things fresh?
I have a crazy idea one day that I will use my self hosted LLMs (namely self hosted ACE-Step 1.5) to create my own filler play list, mixed with actual songs I enjoy (say, 350ish, high fidelity tracks). The rough idea -
- point LLM at MP3 folder
- it randomly selects a song to play
- creates AI based DJ that introduces those tracks as part of “station identity”
- Additionally, have the AI based DJ read “local news” (based on my RSS feeds) every <n> songs.
- All of this blended into the generated station flow
I can see this whole thing being tunable too (mostly AI filler stuff, akin to LoFi girl, balanced mix, mostly my library and AI DJ etc).
I’m doing other LLM based shit right now, but I can 100% see myself doing this out of pure “Fuck it, why not”.
A 10,000 song library can be smaller than a AAA game install these days. The point of a large library is not necessarily to listen to it all, but can be to just listen to what you want when you want. I mean, do what you like, but I work from home full time and listen to music for most of it so it suits me.
spotify and google will figure out a way to block modded apps eventually.
nobody can take your home server and its content away from you
In a dystopic future, somewhere…
Chilling out listening to some music
BANG!
“Put your hands up! No sudden moves!”
“But, but…”
“We tracked down self-hosting activities, and we’re confiscating everything and taking you to jail”Bum music off of Spotify and save up for a home server in the meantime, got it.
Today servers can be nothing more than a $50 nuc from eBay with a larger drive in it, or an external one.
My server today is an old Small Form Factor Dell. It has no problem running VMWare ESXi, with multiple Windows and Linux VMs, ripping DVDs, converting videos and streaming, all at the same time.
The issue now is storage is getting pretty damn expensive
Yeah, I got 4 used 2TB hard drives on Amazon back in early 2024 with a $100 gift card and still had a few bucks left over, and now I see that you basically can’t find a single 2TB drive lower than $70…
I wish I started my homelab sooner…
Poor quality no los dos?
I used to use YouTube music revanced, but at some point it asked me to verify my age to listen to a song my rage against the machine, and that was the last straw. I uninstalled YouTube music, took a dusty raspberry pi 5 from a shelf where it’d been sitting for like half a year and connected it to my router with an Ethernet cable. Then I installed qbittorrent (headless) and mounted its downloads under the
musiccategory (it stores the downloads in separate directories, depending on the torrent’s category) into Navidrome. I also have Prowlarr installed for easier searches of indexers. So far I have an 80GB library of music. I try to keep the size down by downloading 320kbps mp3s where possible.I use the Symfonium app, it was totally worth the 4.50€, I’d be willing to pay more honestly. On desktop I use Feishin.
I also have Listenbrainz set up as a scrobbler on Navidrome. The stats are pretty cool.
So in theory I’d be down to use torrents again if they weren’t as unsafe as I’m told they are. Do you use a VPN or do you just download away? What’s your setup look like in general?
Symfonium is awesome, I can agree with you for sure. I’d also be down to pay the price for it.
Slovenian ISPs don’t give a shit about piracy, so I don’t use a VPN. I did, however, decide against running the setup in Germany on my netcup VPS because they’re really strict about piracy.
I use Traefik as a reverse proxy in my setup and I run everything in docker containers (managed with docker compose). Would you like me to share my configs as well? (I ask just so that I don’t waste my time gathering them and making sure I didn’t share API keys or something :P )
why not both?
I have a very similar experience, I still use Spotify and YT to discover new music, but I then torrent it (or find it on soulseek) to keep my jellyfin collection growing. I also buy off bandcamp since that’s pretty convenient to fill in my favorite albums.
The only problem with something like Revanced is that it can go away at literally any time. It could be shut down tomorrow and you’d lose access to everything it provides. That’s fine, or at least tolerable, if you ALSO have something self-hosted you can rely on in case that happens. If you don’t have downloaded music self-hosted, then you’re totally relying on Revanced permanently and you lose everything if it goes away. Maybe for something like music that’s an acceptable risk, but you have to consider it and decide where it is an acceptable risk. What are you going to do if those services you’re relying on go away?
Self-hosting, like you said, is about the independence, and the knowledge that once it’s up and running on your own hardware, it won’t just go away on its own, and it can’t just get “shut down” unless you choose to. You might not need that for every service you rely on, but there are probably at least some you would struggle without, and those are things you should consider self-hosting. The more you think about it, and the more comfortable you get with it, the more likely you’ll decide other things are important enough to self-host after all.
That’s a neat summary of the entire self-hosting philosophy, I’d say.
there is a hidden button called bandcamp, idk where you can get music to stream maybe api server that use your free ytmusic and spotify solutions)
You’re in the selfhosted community, surely you know what sort of answer you’re going to get. If you just need to hear it, selfhost!
Bought a home server, threw at it an HDD and installed jellyfin. Now I buy my music from bandcamp or rip my own cds (yup, I’m buying cd’s back too) and haven’t logged to spotify ever since.
Can’t be happier.
Self hosting for things I care to keep around, streaming to get new download ideas and for stuff where hosting everything would be too much.
For movies and shows I find myself some Linux ISOs.
Music, I get from Bandcamp if available and if not, there are very good Tidal downloaders out there. Tidal also doubles as my “I want to check out this song” service.Soulseek has far more music on it than you can typically find on free public torrent sites.
Just a heads up.
i started with lidarr and very, very quickly stripped that our for just slskd
Same here. Lidarr had trouble finding most of the stuff I was looking for. I wish I had some kind of automation like the are stack for slskd. Maybe I try soularr that promises that, whenever I feel like exploring this part of the sea.
Tubiferry plugin for lidarr.
I don’t use most of the software you mention, but converting FLAC to other formats is pretty easy. E.g. with ffmpeg you’d say
ffmpeg -i somesong.flac -o somesong.mp3or similarly for other formats. There are more options to control the output bit rates and that sort of thing.
Ive been trying to get rid of YouTube for over a year now, but haven’t found a solution im happy with so still sticking with revanced YouTube.
Got rid of Spotify 2 years ago and self host navidrome and it’s perfect for me. I use dsub2000 on my android and feishin on my Linux desktop pc.
I’m UK based, so fairly strict internet laws and I torrent to supplement my owned media. I don’t use flac, I’m sure if I tried I could hear the difference from 192kbit MP3, but honestly I don’t care. 192kbit or similar mp3’s are more than good enough for me.
Self hosting costs money. Hardware setup initially is expensive, both in money and time and effort. It’s only a solution if you believe there is a problem that needs fixing.
For me it’s well worth it for music. Video not so much, not yet anyway. I listen to the same songs 100s of times, but videos only once or maybe twice at most.
Convert from FLAC to mp3, and get a docker image of a torrent service with built in vpn support.
