Edit: Also please tell me if a meme is even allowed as the thumbnail for the post in this community - just feels like it gets some of my current desperation across :D
Since the last time I posted here sharing my new home server, I’ve gotten a little more acquainted with the services I’m using. After getting acquisition of shows and movies sorted, I ventured into music (streaming).
As many here, I’m used to using streaming services for music, ie. Spotify or YouTube Music. Naturally, I tried a similar approach by setting up my Arr stack to feed its music into Jellyfin where the music is picked up by Symfonium. I tried it out for a couple days and liked it quite a bit since it keeps my phone clean of “unnecessary” data but I still retain access to music. Unfortunately, the way I acquire my music limits my selection quite a bit unless I venture into torrenting, which I’d prefer not to. So unless I figure out a safe way to torrent on my server, I’m stuck with getting access to a very limited selection of artists and albums.
In addition to that limitation, there’s also the files formats of the music. Most of the music I’ve downloaded was only available in FLAC, which is awesome if you’ve got the bandwidth and data plan for playback, but for me it means that I spend 3GB of data for a day of streaming music which is just not sustainable.
In comparison, I can set up a Revanced version of Spotify in addition to my Revanced YT Music to get access to all the music I could want. Unfortunately, that comes with the caveat of still being tied to the companies I’m trying to get rid of - albeit not financially anymore, but I’m still sharing my data.
Ultimately, I’m not sure what to do. What I love about self-hosting is the independence from all the companies we’re being fucked over by in all kinds of imaginable ways. But if it’s free, outside my sharing data with them, can I really compete?
I’d be interested in hearing your opinions and thoughts on this. How did you solve music streaming with your build?
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Either way, just remember to support artists when you can. Bandcamp Friday is one of the best ways I know of to fund artists in exchange for FLACs that you can legally listen to however you want to.
But I was a broke student in the heydays of torrenting, so I’m not judging using any means necessary to listen to music.
Personally, I ripped my CDs to MP3S, and convert anything I downloaded to MP3, as well. I’m no audiophile, so I really can’t tell the difference when listening; the difference is only noticeable when I look at my storage and bandwidth.
I wrote an application which runs on my server and monitors my favorites on Tidal/Deezer/Qobuz. It downloads them in bulk whenever I have a premium account with one of them. Usually I purchase a month of premium every few months, at which point I get nice clean FLACs for local use.
The FLACs are moved to Jellyfin and I stream them using Finamp, which also supports transcoding, so I keep 128 kbps Opus files for offline playback and stream the raw FLAC files when bandwidth is no concern.
I have amassed a huge music library over the last decades, so even if all streaming websites go under tomorrow, I have enough music locally to last me a lifetime.
I listen to a LOT of music - basically most of the day when I’m not on a call.
I don’t follow the mainstream so never had a spotify account, and am really listening either to radio-browser.info or a few channels on youtube that I sponsor, which link to the artists on bandcamp, where I buy the music I like.
To your point on bandwidth, I try to store music at the highest quality I can get, but then transcode to players.
I did try mp3fs to live transcode files to my phone in the past, but didn’t use it much in the end.
I’ve torrented some music in the past, but TBH, I find it in different places easier nowadays.
I used to find some interesting stuff with Napalm FTP indexer - but be very careful with direct connections to random FTP servers.
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.
Convert from FLAC to mp3, and get a docker image of a torrent service with built in vpn support.
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.
Soulseek has far more music on it than you can typically find on free public torrent sites.
Just a heads up.
Leeching off corporations’ infrastructures for free is a noble endeavor and everyone should do it.
Network traffic, unique accesses, etc are metrics used by investors and media to measure their success, so we’re still contributing to it, and also, we’re preventing alternatives from gaining more fame, so getting rid of corporations should always be the preferred path
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.
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
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
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”
I’ve got both.
Jellyfin with high quality for the things that I want to listen all the time.
Newpipe for on demand things.
I am with you on the whole not wanting to use torrents. And also kinda have similar issue. I try to buy my stuff, but its becoming harder and harder avoid DRM.
There is a benefit though in not having a huge library, I am not paralyzed with choice and I am more intentional with listening to my music. Almost like the good old days, taking a tape and sitting with my wired headphones next to a hi-fi system and “just” listening.
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.
i also only download flac files, and i keep them in my
~/music/losslessdirectory. i use picard to organize that, and wrote a bash script to keep a synchronized opus format copy in~/music/lossy. on my phone i use termux/ssh to rsync the lossy files to my phone and avoid streaming altogether. for reference, my lossless directory is 221gb, and lossy is 19gb.If you use something like Navidrome to host your own streaming service you can set up automatic transcoding and enable it on your phones streaming client (I use Symfonium). This way I can always access my whole library at any point with it not using too much of my mobile data. But my flac collection is quite big and even if transcoded completely I could not fit all of it on my phones internal storage.
Same almost. I have an ~800gb main library of mostly lossless files that I squash to around 150gb by transcoding to 196k or something opus that i put locally on my phone. I also strip embedded cover art which can save a stupid amount of space sometimes; relying on folder hierarchy with cover.jpg/png files. (Bitrate is pretty overkill for me so I may drop it to 128-160…)
I haven’t had the time to manage the tags properly on my reference library*, but my folder hierarchy encodes artist/album/title with optional years and track numbers. I wrote a linter script to check the structure, that every folder has a cover art image, and to warn about lossy formats not in directories suffixed with [lossy] (purely for documentation purposes; not used in script logic).
My transcode script generates tags from the folder and filenames, only copying genre tags if they exist and stripping everything else. Lossless files are transcoded while structure, art, and lossy files are copied. Then that result is synced to my mobile devices. So whenever I add music my workflow is to just name file folders properly and download or extract art then I just lint, transcode, and then resync.
*(Tags of my reference library don’t matter so much to me, but the squashed lib needs consistent tags for mobile apps for behave as I intend)
Do you have your scripts hosted somewhere? Sounds like a really cool idea!
I hadn’t bothered because it was mostly LLM slop I edited until it worked, so it’s specific and not robust. Just had to hack something together the night before I had to leave on a trip… Haven’t had time to tag my music properly, so I’m still using it. The magic sauce is just ffmpeg and the mutagen Python lib.
