Yeah, as a big music fan I have always been disappointed in Embys music functionality. I followed the discussions around this on there site and I was a bit disappointed by the response. They were getting the same feedback around how bad it is and it should be revamped or even have a dedicated app just for music and they just dismissed it basically saying we’ll it can be something we may do later on but dont hold your breath and that they believe it works fine the way it is and dont agree it will help.

Luckily I really didnt care to use it for music anyway. I already had a Subsonic (now Navidrome) server for that. It would have been nice for a few things, but ultimately it was fine. The cool part is the android app Symfonium is the best music app I have ever used and it connects to all the servers to pull data. I obviously still use navidrome, but I could just pull from emby as well with it.

Dam thats what I thought. Emby has something similar but doesnt force you to use it so I don’t.

Years ago I decided to go with Emby over Plex only because at the time plex didnt support kodi integration and I enjoyed using that at the time for my front-end user experience. Within 6 months they started supporting it and I was upset since I did want to go with plex. Lately I feel like I made the perfect decision. It’s gotta be close to 10 years now and I paid one $100 lifetime fee for Emby and still use it everyday along with some family and friends I gave access to. Also gotta remember I dont believe jellyfin was even an option at that time. I tried it not to long ago and although it was fine, I actually think I liked emby a little more.

As for the remote access, how do they block it? Do they not allow you to setup your own remote connection that does not involve plex? Thats how I do it, I do not use emby connect to make it easier to go through them I just setup my own domain, use ddns, and configure the ports I want exposed and thats it. If plex doesnt allow that then thats already crazy, if they do and even thats now blocked then thats even crazier.

Emby may be simpler, and i heard about plex having a music AI feature that I was actually jealous of, but overall it just works and not paying anything in forever will always be my preferred method over awful monthly subscriptions anyday.

Lol dont complain to much. You could be like me were i only have 1 option and although they just now released fiber earlier this year, im not paying the price for it. I’ve been stuck on 200mbps down and 30mbps up for years now and I’m paying as much if not more than people a few towns over that get 1gb. Also my ISP has no plan that allows over that upload speed no matter what plan you pick.

As someone who only used the stock synology app and has always wanted to try something else, what features and things does this do better? I am close to trying it out just to see. Im sure it will solve my 1 big issue where I can’t control the location of photos that default to my application storage, which is pretty small, instead of my actual storage array.

Now I am confused. Those are not fiber cables. They are regular ethernet ones. No light is in them. If you’re talking about fiber in general, then that would make more sense.

Ok, I figured, but you never know.

Wait really? I’ve never heard this before. How or why does this matter at all?

I use navidrome for hosting my music but for your ask I was also thinking funkwhale is exactly the thing you were asking for.

Thankfully, we never lost data, but we have had the controller die a few times through the years on a few servers before. Thankfully we had great support and the part was same day delivered to us to replace and the 2nd time was a Dell server which we also get the part same day and a tech to come replace it for us.

We avoided buying servers with this going forward. At this point, we really only have VM’s and only a handful of physical servers anymore, so it’s not even a concern.

I just use a domain name through name cheap, which includes ddns. I cant think of anything else that I do at home that isn’t taken care of locally.

Sadly, it may not be an option for a lot of people, but on the fortinet firewall you can make policies and set up geoblocking.

Synology with Emby (do not use the connect service they offer) running behind my fortinet firewall. DDNS with my own domain name and ssl cert. Open 1 custom port (not 443) for it, and that’s it. Geoblock every country but my own, which basically eliminated all random traffic that was hitting hit. I’ve been running it this way for 5 years now and have no issues to report.

I am also using Navidrome and Symfonium. It’s about as good as local library playback can get! Thanks for a new one to try Feishin, never heard of it before. I have tried setting up Lidarr, but I never got it to grab stuff and rename it to what i like, so I stopped. I’m sure I probably could, but I didn’t want to spend the time trying.

My current setup is grab from Orpheus or redacted, run it through program generically called tagscanner (been using it for years and love it) then drop everything into musicbrainz Picard with custom setup to only grab genres for everything and will attach up to 5 different ones. From there, i move everything to the music library by artist and subfolder for albums. Once there, i load Musicbee, which is my pc app of choice because of the customization and audio playback quality. Once there, if any album art is missing, it’s easily discoverable and then loaded into navidrome.

The hardest part was discovering that I should organize properly after a decade of collecting music, and it took months to reorganize and tag everything properly. I had to do that once more with genres. Once I figured out how to automate that and would take chunks at a time and have it do it over days, which also took months. It’s been about 10 years of me doing it this way and has worked great if not a bit tedious.

I honestly don’t have too much to back up, so I run one full backup job every Sunday for different directories I care about. They run a check on the directory and only back up any changes or new files. I don’t have the space to backup everything, so I only take the smaller stuff and most important. The backup software also allows live monitoring if I enable it, so some of my jobs I have that turned on since I didn’t see any reason not to. I reuse the NAS drives that report errors that I replace with new ones to save on money. So far, so good.

Backup software is Bvckup2, and reddit was a huge fan of it years ago, so I gave it a try. It was super cheap for a lifetime license at the time, and it’s super lightweight. Sorry, there is no Linux version.

I learned this the hard way as well… I did a big OS update on mine once and it broke almost every application running on it. Docker worked perfectly still. I transferred everything I could to Docker after that.

I use a combo of Roku and Firesticks through the house. Since I have a raspberry pi with pihole on it all the ads and telemetry is blocked, or at least majority of it is.

I used to use Subsonic, but it’s become too outdated for me sadly. I switched to a fork Navidrome which updates a few times a year and enjoy the improvements it’s been providing. I use it with the mobile app Symfonium and love that they are both improving the API to add additional features and options over what Subsonic offered. I run it on my Synology in Docker so you should have no issues either.

https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome

Everything I do is manual, I don’t really have duplicates unless I get singles then get the album once it releases. Even then, unless the single comes with extra bonus tracks (seems to be a lost past time, never see this anymore) I will delete the singles after.

Here is the forum post I originally found years ago to setup music picard to tag multiple genres, which is the only setup that I have that took extra effort and not just use out of the box defaults.

https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=35975.0

I have a library that’s been growing for about 20 years now. I don’t think I got too serious until around 2009, which is when I discovered music servers to host my library and quickly realized how bad its structure was. It took years of me getting folders done correctly followed by then working on tags. Automation scared me to much since the results were not always 100%. Once it was done I have kept a system to keep it that way the best I can.

So for me once I get new content I use the app tagscanner to edit everything to the way I like, then I drop them into music Picard were I found a tutorial online a few years ago to set it up to just edit music genres. I found the one thing I never got right was music genres so finding this tool was incredible. Took months to run large sections of the library though. Now I got every track labeled with up to 5 genre tags. Once that is done I change folder names to what I want, drop them into my music directory folder which is root > artist > album (don’t care about year since it’s tagged). Scan music into my musicbee app and if any are missing covers I right click and tell it to find them. Then do a scan with navidrome to add it all there.