Edit: Also please tell me if a meme is even allowed as the thumbnail for the post in this community - just feels like it gets some of my current desperation across :D
Since the last time I posted here sharing my new home server, I’ve gotten a little more acquainted with the services I’m using. After getting acquisition of shows and movies sorted, I ventured into music (streaming).
As many here, I’m used to using streaming services for music, ie. Spotify or YouTube Music. Naturally, I tried a similar approach by setting up my Arr stack to feed its music into Jellyfin where the music is picked up by Symfonium. I tried it out for a couple days and liked it quite a bit since it keeps my phone clean of “unnecessary” data but I still retain access to music. Unfortunately, the way I acquire my music limits my selection quite a bit unless I venture into torrenting, which I’d prefer not to. So unless I figure out a safe way to torrent on my server, I’m stuck with getting access to a very limited selection of artists and albums.
In addition to that limitation, there’s also the files formats of the music. Most of the music I’ve downloaded was only available in FLAC, which is awesome if you’ve got the bandwidth and data plan for playback, but for me it means that I spend 3GB of data for a day of streaming music which is just not sustainable.
In comparison, I can set up a Revanced version of Spotify in addition to my Revanced YT Music to get access to all the music I could want. Unfortunately, that comes with the caveat of still being tied to the companies I’m trying to get rid of - albeit not financially anymore, but I’m still sharing my data.
Ultimately, I’m not sure what to do. What I love about self-hosting is the independence from all the companies we’re being fucked over by in all kinds of imaginable ways. But if it’s free, outside my sharing data with them, can I really compete?
I’d be interested in hearing your opinions and thoughts on this. How did you solve music streaming with your build?
I tend not to sail the Sea’s very often. I generally prefer to buy the albums or borrow them from my friends or the local library, rip them to Flac and then stream them to my phone using either Jellyfin or Navidrome. When I just want a radio station, I’ll open up Spotify. Many years ago, I had a collection of online radio stations I’d listen to, but over time they either closed their public streams and required an dedicated app or died off completely.
On your data bandwidth issue, both Jellyfin and Navidrome support on demand transcoding and can stream any bitrate you might want. There are options for it both in the web app and in most of the phone clients I’ve run across. I generally have my phone apps set to 96k MP3 as I can’t really hear a difference most of the time, at least not with the headphones I have in combo with the background noise that is generally around me and my preexisting hearing damage. Most folks can’t tell a difference between CD’s and a 128k mp3.
As for torrenting, I can say that you will probably want a paid VPN running AND active any time your torrent software is running. Beyond that I would recommend you check out !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com for more information.