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
Replacing any of the paid-for recommendation services is hard in my experience (I loved the Google Music recommendation engine, RIP). Anyways you sort of have two paths of travel to intertwine if you want to stay away from The Big Boys™:
(a) Find independent streaming sites like SomaFM, Big Sonic Heaven and DKFM ([1], amongst many others) which fit your genres as they routinely have “new tracks weekend” besides the broad exposure you get to hearing bands you’ve never heard as the volunteer DJs rotate their preferences. These are your old school original Shoutcast / Icecast streams run solely on donations, there are a lot of them out there for every genre.
(b) Look into something like https://audiomack.com/ - I don’t use it (maybe I should!) but it “feels like” it might be a fit for your needs based on your OP details. Maybe not, at least give it a glance and see what’s going on with it as it does look interesting. Something else might catch your eye at: https://bandcampalternative.com/
[1] some sites from various genres:
(I loved the Google Music recommendation engine, RIP)
This will never cease to sting. Google Play Music was so good.
I uploaded giga upon gigabytes of well-curated (tags, etc.) songs - the max was 400MB per file so you could just about fit a 1 hour DJ session into that as a single “song” as well. The desktop app was complete garbage but you could eventually get your entire MP3 collection uploaded as a massive recommendation seed for the engine to use “more like this!”. Or put 30 songs into a playlist and then say “make me a radio station based on these 30 songs.” and next thing you new you had a 500 long tracks playlist of similar music. sigh those were the good days.
Unfortunately it had a lot of internal track mis-labeling problems; a number of my saved playlists got destroyed when the conversion to YTM happened as the two services could not agree on what a given song was, so YTM thoughtfully made a mess of it. (as well as GM having songs YTM did not, so all those just disappeared too). This soured me on ever adopting YTM and pushed me back to Shoutcast/Icecast solutions.
I know this isn’t a self hostable app and just a alternative client that pulls music from youtube and uses song recommendations from spotify, but I switched to Spotube. It has some bugs, but hey it’s written in flutter and I know flutter so I’m able to contribute.
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.
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.
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…
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.
Nextcloud + Nextcloud Music App is also a good solution. The app supports subsonic too, so it can be used with a few different apps.
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
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.
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.
One thing navidrome cannot do is to have different music available per user. A workaround for that is yo host multiple instances using docker and have them access different folders for music but that’s obviously not ideal.
I used to live Spotify. Now it’s algorithms and podcasts being pushed. Their app has gone to shit.
Good luck doing a simple thing like… shuffling by artist. Such a mess.
Love Plexamp though.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Ampwall? https://ampwall.com/
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.
Simplest is to use syncthing and just sync everything to your phone but this won’t cover a lot of your use cases and is probably best for a one user experience.
Lidarr for new music + a subsonic server such as gonic will cover a lot of what you need. The idea is to find and download music(lidarr+dl client) and run your own streaming server(gonic or other implementations). On mobile you use an app which supports the subsonic protocol (such as substreamer or tempo) too listen. You can also just use jellyfin server + it’s client, but AFAIK, the music experience is not as good.
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.
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.
