Hello everyone I’ve been looking for a solution to replace Spotify, for me and my family. I already self-host some services, such as Jellyfin and Sonarr/Radarr For music however, my actual setup is the following :
- synchronize my music folder on my phone with my NAS
- download on the phone or on my computer However, I struggle with finding new music and having an easy way to add music.
From what I’ve read, Bandcamp could let me buy some music and add it to my collection (however all artists aren’t on bandcamp) There also seem to be a consensus around Navidrome for a music server.
But how can I set it up so that each member of my family has a separate account (with different musics in it), still discover new songs and easily add them? I’ve looked into Lidarr (not a lot I have to admit) but it seems like it’s mainly for downloading full albums, more than just songs. Is that the case?
TLDR: What self-hostable services can I use to replace Spotify, so that each member of my family has its own instance, recommendations and downloads?
Thank you in advance and sorry for my English
Lidarr is centered around full albums unless a song was released as a single, specifically it uses release-group on musicbrainz.
I run both jellyfin and Plex, and for the music app I think plexamp > finamp, but both work to sync between their respective instance. I haven’t tried anything else because I already had Plex pass for other things.
The Emby mobile music player is awful. For whatever reason it will play and show your history on the desktop/server side but it doesn’t keep track on the mobile app.
Plexamp seems to tick all the boxes, but yeah that plex pass requirement is a bit of a downer.
If you’re just looking for a source to acquire tracks, Qobuz works. Their mobile client is trash, but the serve quality and source files are great. Easy to migrate Spotify playlists over as well.
I use Jellyfin to host my music, and Finamp on my phone to browse and listen to it. Finamp supports downloads as well, so you can listen to your music offline and away from home. Pair that with a self-hosted VPN to access Jellyfin away from home and you’ve got most of your needs covered!
It’s not FOSS but Symfonium is by far the best music player for your Android. It has support for every self-hosted source concivable. I used to run Navidrome and I’m not using Jellyfin in the backend.
I put my music collection (40gb) on my phone, listen to it with musicolet. One of my playlists is 72 hours with no repeats, so I don’t get bored with the same music like the radio.
Jellyfin is pretty nice for music too. I use it with Finamp, an Android client.
Finamp is also on ios, making it a great solution for when you have several users across ecosystems. There are other Jellyfin music clients as well but I don’t know them
You can also point Navidrome at your music folder for web access which I prefer when using my laptop
The discovery problem is definitely the biggest challenge though. Lidarr is something but if you enable it with newsgroups you’ll generally only find more “notable” music. Anything on the more esoteric side is generally gonna be tougher.
You can integrate torrents and private trackers but if you’re anything like me you want to run all downloaded music through a mass tagging program like beets.io or picard to get stuff tagged according to musicbrainz so your library is consistent, which wrecks seeding, and private music trackers are generally pretty draconian about seeding. So then it’s either keep two copies of music, one to seed and one tagged, or hit and run everything and get banned, or just have a library with messy tags (which if you’re like me is just simply not an option). I currently do the two copies thing because it’s generally not that much space and once I hit a 2:1 ratio I get rid of it. In the instance the tags match 100% I point it at my library and permaseed. This is labor intensive though and everything else on my server is mostly automated
I have never figured out a way to integrate soulseek. This would probably be the optimal way as the library is almost as extensive as private trackers (sometimes more so), I can filter by quality (though sometimes flacs are transcodes with this way), there’s etiquette to not clog peoples queue but no real seeding rules, etc. but on my server soulseek runs in a vnc based docker and scripting that goes beyond my talent level
Lidarr, SpotSpot, Jellyfin (Symfonium for listening to music on my Android phone).
I use Spotify (web version) or Lidarr to look/search for the name of the albums for different artists and then download it with SpotSpot (consider pairing it with Gluetun). For me, this is perfect!
Edit: While on my computer, I’m using Feishin to listen to music from Jellyfin. I usually create the playlists from there.
I use a script I wrote that plays music from Bandcamp with probabilities based on liking/disliking songs and the albums Bandcamp recommends in association with the rated song. Wary about sharing it anywhere though as it’s definitely against the tos.
From my experience with sonarr and radarr, I thought lidarr would be great, but it’s garbage.
Bandcamp isn’t what it used to be, apparently there’s a better service for music now, I’m sorry I can’t recall the name.
Navidrome should serve you well for Spotify replacement. It uses the subsonic api, so you can use any app that supports that, and there are many.
Regarding sync phone with server, you might want some thing like synching or nextcloud with a local player on your phone. My music collection is 1.5TB, so I simply stream and have only a few select albums downloaded locally on the phone.
What’s garbage about it? It works great for me.
Well, you’re certainly in the minority.
If you follow lidarr’s methods on cataloguing your music, sure. But most of us have developed our own way to organize music and lidarr blows at handling these:
- concert albums
- bootleg
- international releases with different track listings than north american version
- custom mp3 fields
- certain artwork
- playlists
- cddb tagged music (yes, even pulling the music directly from a disc.)
- flac album-year and album-artist tags
- multi-disc albums
- electronic music
- vinyl music tagged with picard
And god forbid you give lidarr free reign on your collection, it will start renaming, re-downloading and replacing music, essentially destroying your collection.
The problem is that there really isn’t a standard way to categorize music, but lidarr wants to impose one.
Just adding my +1 for Lidarr being garbage. I’ve tried multiple times and it’s just unusable - I get that music is complex with releases, but Lidarr just seems to over complicate things.
Even with deemix and Lidarr (the Lidarr on steroids thing) it’s unusable.
My solution is to manually acquire files with soulseek and Deezer/deemix, then tag them with Picard and add them to Plex. I have Plexamp and all my family have their own accounts.
Exactly! Get music, tag with Picard, least work.
I don’t really blame Lidarr devs, though. Music is a difficult problem to solve because the media itself is too loosely standardised. And with good reason; everyone’s workflow with music is different.
Bandcamp isn’t what it used to be, apparently there’s a better service for music now, I’m sorry I can’t recall the name.
artcore? https://www.artcore.com/
or formaviva? https://formaviva.com/
(though I still like bandcamp)
Ampwall? https://ampwall.com/
Yeah, I want to say, Bandcamp was sold to a new company last year but so far, it’s pretty much the same as before. I can see someome saying they have some beef with them, but I still use them fairly often, to support lesser known bands when I can. And they schedule special Friday events where they don’t collect any fees - all music sold on those days goes straight to the artists. Sooo much better than the evil Spotify.
I would love to know of a good alternative to Bandcamp, but don’t rule it out entirely, IMO.
I really would love something like Amie Street before Amazon bought it to kill it. I got so much great music on there for pennies which then led me to buy more and more from those artists. My problem is I need to hear a song a few times before it digs into my soul. And preferably not when I’m paying too close attention to the technical aspects so it can hit me more emotionally. So just having a 10-30 second preview or just hearing it one time is never going to be enough to hook me on an artist. Also, cheaper b-sides since it was demand based meant I was much more likely to hear more of their music and get more invested in the artist.
There’s also qobuz. They have a streaming service, but you can also straight up buy a lot of albums and download them drm free.
I use lidarr + jellyfin + symfonium (android), and that works for me. I mainly listen to full albums, and don’t play around with playlists or recommendations though. I get flac quality and lyrics, remote access to my home-lab via VPN (no offline sync), Android Auto support…
So as you noticed there isn’t a one size fits all solution.
You are correct in that bandcamp allows you to buy songs and albums from artists, but not every artist is on the platform. I cycle between Quobuz, HDTracks, or other alternatives (wink, wink)
Navidrome is good for sharing one library, in my experience. It expects one library that a bunch of users can then interact with. This does meet your requirements of seperate stats and downloads per user however you will have access to your family’s music just like they will have access to yours.
You could try out funkwhale, which is similar but expects multiple libraries. So you can have a library of just your music and same with your family members, this will allow duplicate tracks. I will caution that funkwhale is, in my experience, not easy to get setup. I would personally recommend navidrome as it is very easy to setup annd use. As others mentioned, it uses the subsonic api under the hood so any subsonic client can access your navidrome libary. I use Feishen on desktop and symphonium on mobile.
You also mention syncing music folders between devices, this might get tricky. But you can setup a rsync services to ssh to your phone and then migrate tracks to your library. But personally I would recommend just trying to only download your music to your NAS so you can skip this annoyance. You can setup Lidarr which is sonarr/radarr but for music. However music piracy is not what it was 10 years ago, and I struggle to have lidarr autopull albums, but thats also because I try to use flac which is not as common either.
Finally you mention recommendations, for me the only option is ListenBrainz. You can setup a musicbrainz account, it is an open source music metadata platform, and then use that login for ListenBrainz, which is a tracking and recommendation engine. You can directly plug in that api to navidrome to have it sync all of your listens.
In summary, my recommendation is to only download music to your nas, setup navidrome for library sharing, (you can download from navidrome), and then setup lidarr for albums. Finally for individual tracks look into deemix, if you only want mp3 then it’s just free downloads.
Please feel free to reply or message for any clarifications.
Thank you for your detailed answer ! I have one more question : it seems that deemix uses only the Deezer servers. Is there someway to have a downloader that looks for tracks on Spotify or YouTube as well? Because sometimes the songs aren’t available (or the metadata is terrible)
No deemix only picks from deezer, but It seems to have song parity with spotify. Or rather I haven’t found a song on spotify that wasn’t in deezer.
As far as metadata, I use picard to autopopulate meta data from musicbrainz. My typical workflow is find something in deemix, download it and put it in a staging directory, then have lidarr import, trackname fix, and metadata fix, and then finally have navidrome scan the final folder and make the music accessible.
This is the best and most cohesive answer.
I use all these things mentioned with a deezer hifi subscription and deemix running as a lidarr addon, that way all i have to do it select an artist on lidarr and boom ive got their discography in minutes.
As for discovery, listenbrainz is a great tool to see what other people with similar taste listen to and it makes potential playlists for you.
HOWEVER, i can not recommend enough just downloading entire collections of artists you like or full albums instead of single songs and hitting shuffle. I have discovered so much new music for me thats been out for years by artists i love that i didnt know existed. This is what lidarr does really well in terms of the collecting music.
Symfonium is also an amazing app for using your navidrome server bar none. All the customisation and features it offer are just so much better than any streaming service app by miles and miles.
Good luck!
I’m ashamed to admit I never considered hooking deemix into lidarr, that is pure genious.
I’d also second collecting whole discographies, a lot of ‘one hit wonders’ have surprisingly deep catalogs that are full of really great tunes.
If you change to the plugin branch of lidarr you can add it and away you go. Much better than torrents or usenet and then you can also integrate soulseek via another plugin for anything not on deezer (very little anyway)
what’s the reason the plugin is not in the main branch? Are there possible issues with the plugin branch? (data loss?) Is there a plan for the plugins option to become part of main branch in the future? (i don’t want to break running things if a bit of patience for features would do just fine)
As far as i understand it, its a seperate dev branch and plugins arent intended to be introduced to the main branch.
Its exactly the same otherwise and when i swapped i didnt have to reimport any music etc.
Been working much better than the containers you can get like lidarr-on-steroids because they dont get updated nearly enough whereas i can keep both my lidarr and deemix containers up to date.
imo today it’s a lot easier through the old channels to pull flac than mp3.
Bandcamp to buy albums but if you really need a streaming service similar to spotify, Tidal offers better quality and gives at least 3x more to artists.
Go to local “art in the park”, music nights, and other such local events and listen to the band playing. Unless you live in a very rural area there is likely many many bands playing someplace every day around you. When you hear something you life find the band and ask how to get their music. If they sell CDs buy one - buy one even if you only accept the music but don’t like it just to support the idea that CDs are not dead.
I use syncthing and poweramp.
Not FOSS, but something I’ve been considering is Roon. I switched to Tidal from Spotify (which is a legit improvement imho)
They have a self hostable option and the idea is to mix your personal library, Tidal, Quobuz, and recommendation engines into one app.
I saw this recommended in another thread, but if I read correctly you need not only the roon subscription but also the Tidal/Qobuz one right ? Each of those being around 15$/month, that’s starting to be a bit too much for me I think
Absolutely, it’s expensive. Definitely better to share it with family and friends to equalize the cost.
I only consider it because I listen to a ton of music, my university degree was music, and I spend a lot of money on music generally.
And check for each music service their offered music. I’ve checked out tidal actually today with one of those export playlist tools and about 10% of my (honestly: niche) music wasn’t available.
