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?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
[Thread #263 for this comm, first seen 29th Apr 2026, 17:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Use Navidrome for music and transcode mp3 streaming. Done and dusted.
That’s a different problem than access to music which I’ll leave up to you. But I’ll note that music exists out of the sphere of corporate dominance. And by that I mean, artists that self publish.
I find it interesting how quickly one abandons the principle struggle central to the meme on this post. Like, “I use Linux and don’t give corporations a dime but I LOVE Jay-z”
I’ve seen so many people suggest that that I’m honestly ashamed I just didn’t know Jellyfin and Navidrome could do that. I guess the file sizes are sorted then.
The thing is, what I’m using is good shows and movies but music isn’t that much of a focus. Maybe if I used a different indexer that’s “dedicated” to music, that’d not be a problem. So that leaves me with torrenting or Soulseek, the former of which I have experience with, but it’s unsafe unless you use a VPN, and the latter of which I don’t and don’t know how to set up on my server (yet) because I don’t know how Docker, containers and whatnot work. CasaOS is very user-friendly like that, but I don’t really know how to import or deploy programs in general. That’s what made even make the post in the first palfe because I felt stuck, not knowing how to proceed now. Falling back to year-long habits is just easier instead of overcoming challenges and growing with them is the gist of it.
I agree. I guess growing up in capitalism, it’s justdifficult to outright abandon every single habit you’ve built up overnight. It takes time and patience and as long you’re aware of it and try to move in a good direction, that’s good enough for me.
-arr stack is your friend. Read up on VPN kill switch. Isolate via docker networking. Run unbound DNS resolvers with dnssec.
What time is it? Key question of the movement
Grayjay is a nice alternative.
I guess Revanced and by extension Morphe offer that too as you get access to the perks of YT Premium and can just download the music you want to listen to offline. Sure, it’s still tied to the app itself and the jailbreak working but so is Grayjay, isn’t it?
Grayjay is more like a “insert any plugin from any website and we’ll make it work” app. You just enter your YouTube/Twitch/Kick/SoundCloud/Crunchyroll/Bilibili account and boom, no ads, full anonymity, and download whatever you want.
I went with jellyfin. Got 10 gigs free from box and Mount it with rclone.
If you have less than 10 GB of music, this is best. If you have TB of music, maybe not
Mp3 collections never stopped being cool, you just have to invest some time into it
Don’t use revanced. The backbone of the dev team moved to morphs now, and so do other modders that used to dev using revanced.
There was a bunch of drama that’s worthy for Lemmy but stuck in reddit that I don’t care to bring here.
It got easier to patch things in some ways, but having known how to do it “the complex way” with vanced and revanced before I feel like some is lost in translation.
But overall it’s a lot better with morphe, the patches against megacorps efforts to block access comes quicker than revanced, and the YouTube minimum app requirement now moved up
Alright, I’ll give this a shot. What’s the harm in keep using Revanced, I’m wondering tho? Vulnerabilities that may not be patched out? Or is it just about the lack of features/overall functionality if new patches are rolled out slower/not at all?
From what I can see in both subreddits, it’s mostly buggy and failed patching as far as I can see for those sticking with revanced.
I’m unsure on vulnerabilities but if the recommended app version is old enough or not working on bypassing using newer versions, I’m sure is not good.
Also I forgot to mention this previously but in revanced aubreddit the mention of morphe is a subreddit bannable offence. At least that’s what the morphe fans are saying. Personally the ones egging on revanced is childish but I can and can’t properly vouch.
A bit of my history of how I knew all these
I started to use URV (I think that stands for universal revanced) because that took base revanced manager and added ways to easily use different patch repos. Back then it’s because I was still patching xitter app. So I already wasn’t using the revanced manager for a few weeks but still use their repo on that URV.
Then I saw a weird post in revanced sub about some dev tiff. A month from that post I somehow got to see a morphe post in the revanced sub so I tried morphe and stuck around a bit in morphe’s sub. That’s how I know what happened so I decided to trust the morphe guys.
Technical wise I just have no idea how differing they are. I just stick with the results I personally get.
Edit: oh my the tone of my two comments is night and day to me lol
Thanks for the detailed write-up. So far, I can’t tell there’s much of a difference outside the limited amount of apps you can patch - Revanced had a lot more to offer. Functionality-wise, they apps themselves seem identical, so I don’t really care which I use.
Alsp no worries about the tone of yours comments - came off fine :) and thanks again for the suggestion
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
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
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…
Fortunately I bought my storage just before the latest increase. I’ve just put my replacement cycle on pause until prices come down.
More risky for me but fortunately I have 3 local copies of everything.
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 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 do both.
The music I like is in my collection. I pay for it where I can, but I’ll be honest some of it is pirated because I just can’t buy it anywhere.
I also use Opentune to listen to YouTube music without logging in to stream stuff like “lofi chillhop beats”.
I recently saw around here a music discovery service (self-hosted) I might try. Can’t remember the name…
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.
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.
why not both?
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.
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.
