I don't want streaming music, I just want to stream my music
coryd.dev
coryd.dev
Here's my site. You can try it for free: https://inter.tube
It supports almost all of Subsonic (highly recommend play:Sub on iOS). FLAC works. I never re-encode your songs, they are kept byte-for-byte. It doesn't support Last.fm (yet?) but I don't think it would be too hard to add. It respects metadata tags. There are still some glitches, and the web player kind of sucks. You can (batch) edit metadata on the web but it does not change the file, just the web/API interfaces.
To be honest I have mostly lost motivation to work on this, but I was aiming at exactly the pain points the author of this article describes. Send me an email (profile) or tweet/comment if you think it's worth pursuing again.
https://github.com/web-scrobbler/web-scrobbler/
assuming the UI expresses meta data in an easily scrapable way.
Currently I have exactly 2 customers, who are pretty much friends helping me test. The good news is the site is optimized for being set-it-and-forget-it (all serverless arch) so just having one customer is enough to break even.
Have a really small demo tier or a demo account, say with public domain classical and jazz standards, just something basic.
The demo tier could be phone number based, then a write once system, let's say 100mb ... something really token.
You could even have a few sample tunes everyone gets by default. Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin is in public domain for instance as are say, the rags of Scott Joplin, Debussy's Deux Arabesques, etc.
If that doesn't onboard people then have a no-hassles 7 day refund. If someone gives you money but then decides they don't want it, have it built in the interface they can back out for 100% money back in 7 days.
"Free 2 week demo. No credit card needed. [Try it now]"
"Register" is too committal ... try things like "get started" or "try it out" - more action, result and experience oriented.
Lastly on the technicals, look into https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaSessio...
this will allow you to navigate through things when listening over bluetooth using the media buttons. I'm sorry for the rather advanced example but here's how I use it to navigate through hierarchy with double and triple tapping: https://github.com/kristopolous/music-explorer/blob/master/w...
> "Register" is too committal ...
I actually didn't notice the "No credit card needed" until I had written a long explanation :-)
That is how hard the "Free demo" has been abused to snag my credit card, so maybe experiment with some variations as long as it doesn't delay launch :-D (FWIW: personally, with my background and as a non-native speaker, "register" doesn't sound as scary as "Free 2 weeks demo".)
There's other ways. "Upgrade to a paid account if you like it" works. "Upgrade" implies work. "Paid" implies the work is paying. Thus the thing you're currently engaging with doesn't need payment.
You can also call it "Free tier" which has "14 day expiration" as a stipulation.
There's no best practice here because it's dependent on the product, value proposition, where you are in the funnel and who the customer is. They'll perform differently and counterintuitively and most frustratingly, change over time (because the context of the relationship between your prospect and product is always dynamic)
The truths that do hold are,
1. Make it sound casual
2. Avoid hustle language
3. Give an easy exit strategy
4. Make it clear and direct
I don't think I'm your customer here.
I think the parting advice I can give is <all products are relationships>. The interface and experience defines this relationship. We shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us or the interface sets the terms of the engagement or the medium is the message. It's been stated a myriad of ways.
I kinda hated "Selling the invisible" by Harry Beckwith but out of the 100 or so marketing and product development books I've read, I think, for you in particular, a weekend paging through that book might really help you here. You have to read it as an analogy of how to design software of course.
I could be wrong about this, but aren’t individual performances of these works still protected? If I record an album of works by Debussy that performance isn’t in the public domain and couldn’t be used as sample tracks.
If the performer doesn't mind and the work is public domain then it's an easy path
For example, here's the famous Waldstein by Beethoven performed explicitly as a free and open recording
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ludwig_van_Beethov...
Funny apocryphal story about that song. For a long time I had got in my head that was extremely disruptive for the time. I envisioned men with powdered wigs running distressfully throughout the aisles as he plays the work for the first time as their wives fan themselves and couch faint in the seats.
I still think that every time I hear it and I think it's hilarious to imagine European high society losing their composure over this sonata. This and Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 are ridiculously close to modern music structure. That's a 110bpm breakbeat done with violins you're hearing.
https://www.gardnermuseum.org/experience/music
These are recordings of live performances by a variety of musicians from a long lasting podcast series.
Licence
https://www.gardnermuseum.org/organization/rights-reproducti...
and scroll down.
https://musopen.org/music/performer/isabella-stewart-gardner...
I've just discovered that the ISGM library has been uploaded to musopen.org which is good as the ISGM Web page has a pretty basic search function.
Once I started adding a bit more "flair" to it, things got traction. I'm not talking a complete redesign, but I too had to go back to capitalizing words, adding color, and caring about the "experience" for the market I was aiming to capture.
I hated it, I still do, but I hate it less after seeing success with the changes I was willing to concede on. Just sayin'.
Did you ever try to promote it in Hydrogenaudio? Is "the" music enthusiasts forum.
It's a cool project nonetheless. I'd love to be proven wrong.
edit: I may have found a bug? I uploaded multiple remixes of a song and it only shows the original version. I don't see a way to see what raw files are being stored, which I think would be incredibly helpful.
edit2: Oh, I guess it just generally isn't properly showing new songs atm. Ah, well. I'll try again later.
Being in the same market, and being frustrated my service isn't even mentioned on this page despite being mentioned in the OP, I'm interested: how would _you_ find out about this? Would you search for it? Would you expect to see it advertised somewhere?
Also, I a smaller plan would be welcome, I pay $2 to google for 100GB, I would welcome it here too.
BTW I should also mention that if you don't pay after the trial, it never actually locks you out. I haven't coded that part yet and it I feel bad about charging for buggy software so it's more of a donation at the moment. So feel free to use it for free and contribute if you like it later on.
PS: I hate Sonos, but I am locked in :)
Great project!
But at the very least I'm going to try it out. Looks great from the outside.
HN comments: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2914779>
This is how a technically inclined but maybe less so than your current users may see this: Like its a kind of Dropbox? With folders and whatnot? But with a Music player App to play the music on various devices, which will stream the music from that drop box?
So it’s like a Spotify, except it takes the music from this drop box like thing instead of their server? For which operating systems do u have music player apps? Android, iOS, windows, macOS, Linux? What do these apps look like, where’s the link to those apps?
How do I upload data, via the website? Or is there another app? How about some screen shots to see how it’s uploaded and then played?
Inter.tube let’s you easily store your music collection in your own cloud and listen to it on all your devices. It's kind of like Dropbox, but focused on storing and streaming music. You can upload files (mp3, Flac, …) from your browser, and you can listen to your music either with your browser or via music apps. We don’t have our own native music playing App. You can use any music playing app that supports an open protocol called “Subsonic”. There are Subsonic apps for various OSs, including Android and iOS. See our list of recommended apps [here].
I am wondering about the legal part. Because the users store licensed files on your server, then you "distribute" it back to them, could it be any licensing problem?
I assume it could also be solved by encrypting the file, so you only store encrypted files on your server, and only the user/owner of that song can decode it.
No more than storing your legally-archived CDs on <insert cloud storage service>, I would imagine.
IANAL, of course, but intuitively there shouldn't be any issues as long as the songs aren't made available to anyone other than the user who uploaded it.
1. put your CD in your computer
2. our website recognizes the CD
3. we grant you listening access to songs on that CD (without actually ripping/uploading)
They got sued and lost:
>Judge Jed S. Rakoff, in the case UMG v. MP3.com, ruled in favor of the record labels against MP3.com and the service on the copyright law provision of "making mechanical copies for commercial use without permission from the copyright owner."
MP3Tunes 'won' in principle but they were liable for ignoring DMCA takedown notices and seeding the service with unauthorized copies of music.
> First, it established DMCA safe harbor protection for online locker services, potentially granting them "broad immunity from copyright liability". Second, it endorsed data deduplication, which allows cloud music services to more efficiently allocate storage and reduce the amount of space needed per user.
I would be curious to know why the rulings were different. If anything it seems like MP3.com provided stronger guarantees that their users legally owned the songs by requiring them to insert a CD.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._MP3Tu...
Good job!
Its backed on an RPI-4 NAS I built, running the plex arm linux code. I have another RPI-3 in the living room as a headless music source to an amp. In the past I've used HDMI to VGA+audio splitters to scatter output to devices. This is my music, on my disks, under my control. I own these rips, the bits are mine. I keep the discs behind them on the shelves just in case but I haven't opened a CD case in nearly a decade.
Plex isn't perfect, but its pretty good. plexamp is available when you take subscription, and periodically plex offer lifetime buy deals, which I leapt on.
Jellyfin is [edit: not - it's from emby] another variant of the same codebase (forked)
I also paid for tidal. I don't like these music rental schemes, I like to own my CDs and rip but for exploration, finding what you don't know, its really useful and unlike some of the other choices, its owned by musos. I think at some level its still greenwashing the truly awful world of A&R/IPR on music, but if anyone has to get payola here, it might as well be musicians.
I'll probably be waiting another few more years before I have an M1 for my home server.
1. Public DNS entry gives jump box IP. With some http forwarding the Letsencrypt flow initiated from the internal Jellyfin server.
2. My Wireguard server (running on the jump box) runs dnsmasq and answers DNS queries for wireguard clients with the wireguard IP for the Jellyfin server.
3. DNS server on the home network gives those internal clients the local IP.
Works great now; obviously not plug and play but I had fun setting it up.
It works quite well. Each family member has their own 'Library', since we all have very different taste in music, plus an 'All Library' that includes everything. We can also stream movies and tv shows I own and have ripped.
The clients are OK. We are mostly using Finamp for music playback.
I like knowing my music is always available to me, can't be removed, and is always the same version (I don't necessarily want a new remastered version)
I never used Plex because it creeped me out. Maybe I misunderstood something but it seemed like it was needlessly phoning home.
I feel like they had a boom early in the pandemic and then just completely flamed out. Now I feel like support is terrible across the board - It's not just jellyfin that sucks on Roku, so does Netflix/Hulu, and don't even get me started with channels just entirely disappearing because of developer disagreements and licensing.
That said - Jellyfin really sucks on Roku. The android tv version of the app is miles better.
That's what Plex does: it has server apps and client apps.
It is a nice feature for low bandwidth applications. Say a VPN to your phone, or a friends house who has crappy internet. If I remember correctly there were a lot of clients also for TV's which have absolute rubbish CPU power and no local storage (for holding metadata). Also the centrally managed metadata is nice when you have more than one client. You can get the same effect with KODI and using a DB like mysql or mariadb. But it is sort of finicky to setup correctly.
I personally use KODI as I do not need that particular streaming feature. Also it is broken with ISO's which is one of my major use cases.
* Pay $15/month for a VPS (whatbox in my case).
* whatbox has a notion of first class apps, including Plex. Click a button in their GUI to install it.
* drag and drop your music using whatbox's GUI file browser
That's it.
Getting that down to $5-10 would be worth it for most who aren't into the social aspect of music services.
People claim to want it, but they put a very low monetary value on it. No new business can survive on $3 a month subscriptions.
~35 - 36 USD a year? Depends on what's going on and the volume. Probably no support or paid per incident support.
No one wanting to self-stream will pay that, so then you would need to look for investment to stay alive until you have scale.
The completely different order of magnitude endpoint I was thinking of is much more like the sort of 'streamed remote file storage as a service' (using off the shelf tech and software with a tiny bit of maybe custom glue) and almost zero support; with you get what you pay for levels of congestion and peek usage pains as potential problems to complain to that greedy last mile ISP you were forced to use because it was cable or barely better than dialup DSL.
Spotify has podcasts but literally has the worst UI for keeping up with podcasts. They make it as difficult as possible to find what you've already listened to and what you're currently listening to, outside of the last few played podcasts.
I've been trying to use Spotify for a few podcasts and the UX is just terrible.
I can't believe they spent millions of dollars getting Joe Rogan exclusively and then not invest a tiny bit in improving the podcast experience.
Here's a good guide on how to set up Plex for proper metadata with audiobooks: https://github.com/seanap/Plex-Audiobook-Guide
I use Android, iPadOS, Fedora Linux, MacOS and possibly in the future Windows (my last job required it, my next job might too) and unless the standard plex app supports audiobooks I doubt I'll find much consistency using native apps for each of those operating systems, if they even exist on all of them
I've heard good things about audiobookshelf [1] as a cross-platform alternative, but it is pretty early in development.
In general, I think a dedicated app for the content of interest typically works better than a general media server like Plex or Jellyfin. The same applies to books (Calibre/Calibre Web) and comics/manga (Komga).
That's not really a satisfying solution - you're missing out on the metadata matching features of the system. But it does get you there.
There's another app, audiobookshelf[1], that does this better. There's a server component analogous to plex server, as well as a web app or a mobile app for playback. The user experience is way better, but organizing the audio files is rather a pain.
I just spent 5min browsing their website and I still have no idea how much it costs, or whether they offer cloud storage or I need to install a media server application on my NAS at home. And how come they can offer "free movies"? Could anyone explain what their business model looks like? The website looks rather sketchy…
For enthusiasts, it can also catalogue and offer a portal for your local media collection. That is also free.
The Plex Pass is not free. It offers some neat customization features for the app, plus hardware transcoding of media which I suspect is the reason most people pay for it.
So far, the biggest problem is simply learning how to find music again. Spotify was too convenient for discovery.
But, I've been happily streaming my collection for a couple of months now, and removing Spotify and the radio has gotten rid of most of the last remaining advertising vectors in my life. It's nice. I very much enjoy knowing that I own and control my media and the data about my usage of it. There will never be ads or a creepy business model. If something goes wrong and knocks the server offline, I have my music cached on my phone.
I wish this were more accessible to everyone. Setting up a public-facing server, or even a private one with a VPN tunnel is too much hassle for the average person. It's so very worth it though. Owning your own services is so liberating
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.symfonik.m...
I subscribe to the odd free service. Fallback to my cd/ripped collection that is large. But I am totally bored with it.
Moved to radio mixes via SoundCloud and mixcloud and advert free stations. Which is pretty satisfying but for bookmarking, that requires interruption.
Too bad it's not really OK to mention them by name, but if you dig a bit, you can find them.
Most of the time, you only need to listen to music on your phone or your computer, right? My main collection (mostly FLAC) is on a NAS with RAID.
But then I've got some scripts that maintain a copy of that collection, except converted to MP3 at a variable bitrate [1]. I just store the entirety of it on my phone. It's 107GB.
Adding a new album to my phone is as simple as using a SMB app to copy from my NAS.
Now when I'm stuck in traffic under a tunnel, or driving through the country, my music keeps playing!
[1] - a variable bitrate (VBR) keeps a smaller file size but pretty decent sound quality. it just lowers the bitrate when there's silence or simple sounds, where a high bitrate isn't required.
I totally do too. And we're not alone. I not only ripped all my old CDs to FLAC (which I use both as archive/backup and source) but I still buy CDs. Nobody want CDs anymore, so I just buy them used. And then I rip them. And then the CDs go into a box in the garage/shed.
My car doesn't take FLAC files but it's got its own storage so I convert the FLAC to 320 kbps MP3s. I don't bother "streaming" from my phone (which I rarely have with me anyway): the music is directly in the car's SSD.
At home I play the FLAC files directly.
I have a 1TB sdcard in my phone that has a mirror of my 600GB+ library. I use Foobar2000 on my phone because it's easy to just pin my Music folder from the filesystem and navigate through the folders. Just about every other music player out there seems to be designed around importing tags into a library, which I don't like.
You’re definitely not alone. I’ve been collecting MP3s since they first began, choosing 1-2 songs a night to leave downloading over dialup. I still have ever MP3 I ever downloaded short of deleting the files from that period where you’d download a song on IRC and it’d be something else named wrong on purpose.
I do use Apple Music for my family/kids, but my MP3 collection is one of my prized possessions and the basis of nearly all my daily music listening.
A lot of artists lose money touring. It’s difficult as hell for the majority of working musicians to make a living. If you appreciate them, buy their media, back a Patreon if they’ve got one, etc. Sure, see them live and buy some merch if you can, but that’s not a substitute for also buying their music.
Literly i have music on all day everyday. I have different styles for different moods, times of the day, emotions. When you listen at that rate, you either love repeats or you spend your whole life looking for the next song. Curating a playlist is most of the battle.
Apple music, if you keep your own music, has completely gone off the rails for me this last year.
I couldn't sync for ages because it told me my device was full, it had just lost it's handle on the music, none of the syncing options would add or remove anything, eventually, the other night, I went into the settings for the music app and manually deleted everything and resynced and it finally started working again!
But then, 12 hours later after sync completes (Same as you, around 100GB of music), I discover the album artwork is completely messed up, almost no albums have the correct artwork, they've all been swapped around at random, all albums have the same artwork for all tracks, just that they're completely the wrong ones.
Checking the apple forums, it seems this is not uncommon, and has been happening for a year. I did actually notice that one or 2 albums were wrong but put it down to slight glitch I could live with, but having them all wrong is infuriating, I recognise many albums by their covers and it helps browsing to pick something out.
I really loved iTunes, especially for automatically storing the music in a nice structured directory format. I tried apple music briefly when it first came out, and the first thing it did was to screw up albums, splitting up compilations, getting the wrong editions of albums and started downgrading all my unencoded music, put me off for life, I'm quite happy managing it myself and don't have to fear losing favourite albums due to licensing issues.
Then I have my set of playlists that I either sync to the phone, or set of SD/USB cards to plug into the car.
I am not keen in losing my audio collection to some subscription service.
Movies is another matter, it is most throw away content anyway besides some jewels, and for those, DVD/Blue-Ray. Just in case, someone makes the comparisasion with Netflix and friends.
And on that note, how many recordings have been revisited? Can they improve them from re-masters, have they been, are they, or is that all a con to get you to buy them again?
Yes. I have / had been doing this for years, and just want to sing high praises of mp3fs[1], assuming some kind of Linux or macOS machine. It solves this problem in a way that I think more people should know about!
I only ever listen in the car. I create playlists that I can vocalise so that Siri can pick them up and play them so I can listen to stuff hands free. It's a pretty good system.
The only real issue is the iPhone can sync to only one mac/library, and you can't do the reverse which is sync your library from your phone back to a mac or Windows or Linux. I can't imagine a good solution for this without redesigning the interface to upload your music is like copying to another filesystem -- but Apple doesn't want you thinking about filesystems anymore.
I started seriously curating my digital collection whenever the Creative Nomad media player came out. Haven’t ditched physical media, though - I like to have a physical copy in addition to digital.
I only take a subset of the collection with me in the car, but I don’t spend much time driving anyway.
I have a pile of CDs and my plan was to do that. Now I wonder if some are any good or if the metal coating has degraded. Some are nearly 40 years old!
[0] https://music.youtube.com/channel/UCdrA9E1ir8pDttg7vTqrSxQ
I remember thinking how disappointed I was when I moved from Microsoft's Zune to play music. Now I'd be happy just to get play music back
Supposedly Jellyfin is pretty good now, but that wasn't an option at the time and I've been comfortable with Emby.
Also, no real form of changing country for suggestions.
[0] https://www.navidrome.org/
The second issue isn't specifically a "Navidrome" problem, but every iOS and Mac desktop client I've used(and I've tried _every_ one that Navidrome lists on their site) attempts to load every song on load and basically becomes unusable.
I'm about two notches away from writing my own music streaming server. Navidrone is barely functional for me...and falls under software I hate, but there are no better options.
I’ve been happy with Clementine, but I wish it didn’t have that many features - going to give strawberry a spin.
I host mine on a Digital Ocean VPS with 1 core and 1GB of RAM, syncing my music from my home PC to DO Spaces storage with rclone. Works perfectly
I highly recommend Symphonium as an Android client. It is receiving constant updates, highly polished, has an offline mode, Android Auto support, and so much more.
For playing music in the living room i use an Ikea Sonos (Symfonisk bookshelf) and the standard Sonos app connecting to the collection via smb.
For the car i transfered (most of) the collection to a sd card. Makes it also it's onw backup :)
I could also use Spotify since the kids love it, but i don't really use it that much myself.
We feel your pain! We are in the same position as you and this is exactly why we exist! We scrobble to Last.fm, have native apps for iOS and Android, a web based player for the computer, and tons of device support in one form or another – Chromecast, Alexa, Roku, Apple TV, Android TV, and more! Our core, free service gives you unlimited access to all your music, device support, and no limitations on uploading, recommendations, nor playlists. On top of that, we are always improving our recommendation system, which recommends only music inside your own library. We never modify your original files, and we never change your metadata. Give us a try – it costs nothing but a bit of your time – and we hope we can fill that void in your music addiction.
Rock on!
The iBroadcast Team
Also, I couldn't find a list of plans on your website - it's just a bunch of "sign up" links, but I would prefer to see what exactly you're offering before I sign up for anything (even if it's free).
This seems to have the details you want.
Also have been having a hard time figuring out where to plug in the headphones, like, a really hard time.
It has an active community and a variety of very useful plugins. Heck, I use it as a Spotify frontend as well.
Just make sure to use the material UI plug-in linked above, a lot of people get bumped out with the built in ui upon first install.
The LMS music directory is managed by git-annex. I use git-annex to sync music to my computer for playing locally with mpd and to make new music I rip from CDs available to LMS.
For me, the greatest unsung innovation was the car USB player. That took it from the 10 CD's or so to basically whatever I want, however I want.
As for streaming my music, I was an MPD user for years, but the client/server experience was often fiddly. Once I discovered mstream (one very good web interface, no client/server separation, honors folders) I never had to look back.
Amen. I only need my music on my phone with earbuds, and in the car. So I copied it all to a 128GB USB stick, which sounds better and is less finicky than bluetooth. If I add a new song or album to the master library on my computer, I just pull the USB stick and rsync it.
The only problem is the Tesla USB music player has a terrible UI, but I set it to play random songs from my library and that's usually good enough.
If you've spent all of the time and effort to put your audio collection on local storage that's also encrypted and mirrored, you are the audiophile audience!
Roon is a great option. I don't really understand OP's objection? Roon supports over 800 different playback devices in addition to software so it's pretty unlikely you don't already have something that supports it.
The catalogue is a work of art - incredibly detailed information about every artist and album, lyrics for most. I know a lot of other streaming services have good info about the things in their catalogue but, as has already been mentioned, these catalogues are volatile where Roon's catalogue doesn't carry the risk of being pruned at any time.
There are two main meanings of the word "audiophile". It can describe 1) a person whose music playing experience involves more than just the default music player app that shipped with their phone, and/or iTunes, and/or Spotify. It, much more commonly, also describes 2) a person who buys diamond-coated gold CAT-6 Ethernet cables, because they make the zeroes rounder and the ones straighter as the bits travel from their computer to their $2000 preamp, tuned to inject noise that makes the music sound just right.
OP is definitely 1), but I think they also want to make sure they're not confused with 2).
The hard upper limit is the equipment the mastering engineer used to listen to the track when mastering it. Even if your equipment can reproduce more detail, that's likely unwanted detail.
Something you'll frequently notice when listening to youtube shorts on a big home theater setup – a lot of wind noise below 80Hz which the author couldn’t notice, but which is deafening. The same, though more subtle, happens when listening to professionally mastered audio with an excessive audiophile setup.
If the track you are listening to was recorded in some teenager's bedroom on a crappy cassette deck, then it should sound as such. This is equally as important as being able to pick out the detail on a track that has been produced with all the latest state of the art equipment.
Music is fundamentally about communication of emotion that transcends language and the purpose of a good HiFi is to facilitate that communication.
However, when it comes to consuming things like video content, particularly that made for youtube, tiktok, etc. then it is probably unfaithful to even attempt to listen to it on a high-end system, just as you say. It's like eating MacDonald's in a michelin starred restaurant or scranning gourmee steak from a takeaway container while drunk on a street corner at three in the morning: context matters.
See also: https://hard-drive.net/hd/entertainment/100-gecs-song-blasti...
At the time, I slowly got rid of my handcrafted library and only too late did I realize my mistake.
For a web player, Navidrome is excellent. I use the play:Sub iOS app to access it on my phone and stream to my apple tv, which is connected to my audio stack. I also stream to my bose color link II bluetooth speakers.
I also subscribe to apple music via the family apple one plan. Generating a station based on a song usually leads to decent results, at least for jazz.
It no longer exists but if you search around there are other similar sites.
My solution is to have a pretty serious 20 GB/month data bundle, run Wireguard and some additional hackery so that the BubbleUPNP app on my phone can use multicast to discover some MiniDLNA/ReadyMedia containers running in my switchboard cabinet, and stream my collections that way.
A 512gb microsd might also cost you less than a few months of cell service at $50, and if that's not enough 1-1.5tb is also available these days (micron's 1.5tb i400 costs a whopping $550+; 1tb is more reasonable at ~$100 from SanDisk) if you need more, and 2tb has been announced by Kioxia.
Updating an SD card is something I considered, though my phone doesn't support that, and it ends up being fairly clunky to keep synchronized, and indexing 400 GB of FLACs and MP3s on a low-power low-memory device like a phone with storage as slow as an SD card is going to run a phone hot for a fair amount of time.
Why not using my smartphone? I don't carry it when doing sports, for instance (it's so uncomfortable).
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/hiy7gs/guide_to...
I hate Plex I hate the way it makes me reorganize everything and tag everything when all I want to do is go to the folder where the thing is and put it in my media player which is something that I can just you know do. I feel like a lot of you were thinking about this in very strange ways when you could be solving it with very simple ways
And what's the obsession about not using local storage? My phone has over a hundred gigs of storage. My computer has terabytes of storage. Laptops for years have had like 500 gig drives or more. Companies still sell digital audio players and some of them also have Bluetooth in fact a lot of them have audiophile quality Bluetooth.
But no you have to talk about things in terms of Rsync and S3 buckets because you're a fucking tech bro. You have to talk about things in terms of services and all this crap when you have the simple thing right in front of you. I don't mean to be like incredibly rude sounding about all of this but I see this topic come up so much and I feel like a lot of people can't see the forest for the trees when it comes how to handle their own home media. Music comes out of speakers. Music is contained inside of a digital audio file. Connect a device that plays a digital audio file to a speaker either through wireless or wired means and then you have... Music! It doesn't need to be streamed. If you need it in your car? You have a phone right? You have an AUX Jack? Plug in a usb-c sound card thingy to your phone if you need an AUX Jack on your phone cuz it doesn't have one and now you have the ability to wire your phone to the AUX Jack. Get a dedicated device if you don't want to do that. Again digital audio players still exist. Oh but you need to Scrobble all of your music that you ever play because you need a record of everything you've ever listened to... Good thing a lot of digital audio players just run Android and have players that have that functionality.
UPDATE: Also, sir, this is an Arby's.
- My phone doesn't have enough space to store all my music
- I don't know what I'm going to be wanting to listen to
- I don't want to carry a second device and have to keep it charged & synced
But I also can't be bothered to set up any of that tech bro stuff, so I just upload all my pirated city pop to my youtube music library and put up with the intentionally crappy interface.
So, streaming then?
I’d love to put music on my phone but apple doesn’t seem to want me to be able to — though, honestly, I haven’t checked out the Linux->iPhone thing in a while.
All my music is on my NAS and backed up. I use jellyfin + finamp (+ wireguard when not at home) to stream to my phone.
I have a dedicated mp3 player (fiio) that I also load part of my collection on for true offline and higher fidelity listening.
I can stream through jellyfin to my stereo.
I also have built a raspberry pi with an RFID reader. I have printed album covers onto rfid cards and have stacks of them you can flip through. If you place them them on my stereo, that album starts playing (it uses mpd to stream from my NAS). This was a fun project to turn my digital collection back into something physical and is a lot of fun when friends come over.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=boombox+on+shoulder&iar=images&iax...
Storing your media locally is fine, but you only have it when you're physically at your machine. To go portable you have to manage syncing files to an external device. Now you've got two libraries to manage.
Yes, we lived with this kind of thing since digital music existed, but it was a pain then and it's a pain now. Keeping one centralized library that any device can play from means less effort required to maintain the library.
Plus I can play my music in the car from my phone and never have to hear an annoying radio ad again.
It's far bigger of a pain for me to deal with streaming. I don't have an unlimited data plan so streaming on the go is right out.
Just copying whatever music I want to listen to on the go and playing it back locally is far simpler and easier than dealing with Plex/Jellyfin, hosting a server, managing a VPN, and all the other sysadmin nonsense.
Vinyl has outsold CD's in dollar terms for years now, and for the last several has sold more in raw units as well.
I was off by a year or two. Point still stands.
https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/
CD sales have declined, yes, but the perception is a bit skewed because CD sales dwarfed vinyl even in its best years.
Many indie labels that I enjoy discovering about, sell CDs after their concerts.
It is quite alive.
Whether you grab your MP3 off of local storage (eg: HDD), off of LAN storage (eg: NAS), or off of WAN storage (eg: Youtube), you're streaming.
I do however, still maintain a Spotify account for primarily non-English music, especially new releases, which seem incredibly difficult to find anywhere else.
The only real downside is navigating iTunes is a huge pain these days. Trying to explore the sub-genres they used to have kicks you back to the main store page. So you have to know which artist/album you're looking for.
It's a shame it's been so abandoned.
But I am faced with an even more interesting challenge: trying to do this for my mom and one of my ... technically-challenged friends. What I want for them is something like a Roku app that they can pick out some section of music that I've partitioned off or ripped for them and just let it go. My mom would like a Motown station and some Noisy Nineties as well; my friend would dig on the alternative eighties and probably a custom "ethereal" station with a hint of darkwave. Sure, I can rip 'em. Got a Python script that will transcode to high-end MP3s and renormalize the audio. But the part where I attach some directory and its files, or a playlist, or whatever, to something easy regular people can just navigate to, click click click, this seems to be kind of an interesting challenge.
And for me, I don't want to listen to, as Pictures for Sad Children would be paraphrased "Whatever is on Spotify ... played at a reasonable volume." I have some very rare, very weird stuff I would like to listen to at times. Rather than worry about licensing games, well, I'd like to listen to what I have. It isn't trivial, by any means.
They even have a lossless streaming service of sorts where you can upload your own playlist and then stream it wherever you want: https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Cloudplay
I've been using it for nearly 10 years and the devs have kept it functional, feature rich, and importantly it's avoided the gradual shitification which seems to infest a lot of modern music service/programs (ie. Spotify).
Also, their pricing is reasonable. Namely a yearly fee which - even if you don't pay it - their software still carries on working (a rarity these days).
I've used it pretty much most days for nearly 10+ years and it just works. I've never had it corrupt my massive digital music collection. I can tag something when i need to. LastFM works with it. And the interface has the highly usable old itunes-esq look/layout which is great if you're working on a desktop all day.
I also have a RaspPi and a MiniPC in other parts of the house, they both run Jriver and sync with my main library on my work PC. All playlists and ratings are sync, and if i change one it will update to the master library. And my licence allows as many installations of jriver as i want (another rarity these days).
For digital music, I have a setup with Beets and Plexamp. Plexamp is a seriously good player.
For my vinyl records, sometimes I record a selection of tunes just like a radio DJ would. I have a liquidsoap instance coupled with an icecast server serving all these mixes in a random fashion.
This way, I have both my radio station I can connect on (and share as well) and a streaming option with the choice of what I want to listen to. I love it.
My family members have an "MP3" folder in Nextcloud and when they add music, Funkwhale is set up to automatically scan their bind-mounts for change and add music.
Currently, the library has about 16000 MP3s (mostly bought, some ccby, some music from games I bought, some digitized audio-cds - I try to by MP3 from bandcamp, if available).
For multi-room-audio, I use Iris+Mopidy+Snapcast [2] as an alternative frontend to my Funkwhale library, via API.
https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522?hl=en
Not everything is available in a company's streaming catalog, even if you pay for it.
This is so strange to me. If I were going through the trouble of streaming my own files, the last thing I'd want is to have records of every file I played and when sent a bunch of third parties who will eagerly collect that data. Self-hosting should mean getting your data out of other people's hands because what you listen to, when, and how often, is none of their business.
For some people Spotify absolutely does not have good recommendations, at least that has been my experience
The old Discover tab/page was amazing for finding new albums, but they killed it for some reason.
My breaking point was when - as a premium subscriber already - Spotify insisted on promoting their family plan, Taylor Swift’s new album and whatever the flavor of the current week was via full-screen modal popups in the app with no way to prevent them. I asked support several times and was told they didn’t have a toggle.
I tried moving to Apple Music, but the discovery patterns in that app didn’t align with what I was looking for, and offline play has been nerfed so hard I can’t find any way to do it any more.
I’m now on Plex + Plexamp for music and happier for it.
Is it open/transparent? Okay, then they could just be lying.
How does it weigh things? There's no such thing as "objective" here.
Okay, from the outside, what's stopping me from "ddosing" fake streams from vps' or similar?
It strikes me as utterly naive to presume "fairness" here.
I'm saying this as someone who's seen a relatively long 'history' of what is popular in hip-hop as an example, and I think there are observable trends that go beyond mere "oh, the kids always like something different from the adults."
When I as a youngster had to defend hip-hop against my parents, I was able to reference the music itself, see, this comes from that tradition, this sound come from here, roots in African and Black American traditions, this rapper is actually a saxophonist and adopted his style from jazz etc. etc. Citations and sources and the like.
As I've found/seen in entirely too many music conversations today, the kids can't do that. As in, if I'm like "okay, this guy who sounds like he's JUST mumbling, what am I missing here? I'm open minded and used to these conversations, go."
Crickets when you get to this level. They can no longer rely on "But music always changes, why do you hate young people, blah blah."
It's not as well-integrated as it use to be in the Google Music days though.
Also the playback experience is painful and uploaded files are poorly supported across devices like Google Home, where it constantly wants to do playlists or mix in other music. I'm not sure Google Home even supported playback of uploads, though I abandoned the service shortly after the Play apps went away.
Would prefer to use a different solution than that from a huge corporate behemoth, but it works so well, isn't really worth it for me to switch.
I like to shuffle, then jump to an artist album if I come across one I haven't heard in a while. You think clicking the artists name would bring you to the artist, but it brings you the album, then there is no way to get to all music by that artist. Its not great. Searching seems to be a random chance it will show you "Apple music" and offer a subscription, even though I've turned that off in the preferences..
My time is short, I only have one mac left to load music onto the cloud service.
The initial goal was only to support music. But users told me how they love using it for audiobooks! So many new features were added like preserving progress, playback speed, the ability to see total media duration in a folder, add files to a queue, the ability to add files directly from the web, etc.
Now, there are rumors circulating that Google might kill Google Podcasts (for the second time!). As someone who loves listening to podcasts, this time I decided to go ahead and pre-emptively add podcast support to MusicSync.
Please give it a try and let me know what you guys think.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.ashishb.an...
Pros:
- Very reliable
- Very performant
- Works well with large collections
- Trivial setup
- FOSS
- Small featureset
- Infrequent updates
- No official iOS client (there is a third party client however)
Why did I do it? Kind of stupid actually. I wanted to listen to the same music that I listen to on my laptop, but on my phone. Overkill? Probably, but 100% cool.
It lets you stream from a nice desktop server product, JRiver Media Center [0], and it's sole purpose is to be an audio client to JRiver Media Center. It's main focus is on being lightweight and reliably streaming from your home server even on long drives, when your connection may be less than reliable.
Nowadays, I use Roon for the same purpose (specifically Roon ARC). It's not cheap, but I was already using Roon for home to easily find and manage music across my own collection and streaming services, and then play it back on many devices in my home. It takes a bit of work to get running there is a cost, so it's definitely a bit of an investment, but it generally does exactly what I want it to do and I spend my time using it rather than fighting it.
It has a quality Winamp-like media player and offers a lossless digital locker as a subscription.
Plus it does BS2B which is a nice thing to have.
Install Navidrome (subsonic-compatible music streaming server), nginx for https, mount a storage box as a network drive to both VPS and your PC, and you're all set.
Just drag and drop music straight from your laptop to the network drive, and you can listen to it with both web ui or any number of subsonic clients (Symphonium is probably the best for Android).
The only thing that's missing is discovery and recommendation. Navidrome supports scrobbling to last.fm and listenbrainz, but so far I wasn't successfull with getting good recommendations from both of these.
Does anyone have ideas on how to implement this, save for exporting my own data and developing own recommendation system?
Seedboxen are great if you want high space (low guaranteed reliability?) VPS.
For £5 pcm will get you 2TB, 4TB total bandwidth and enough CPU to saturate the 1gig connection.
Perfect for something like this. You probably won't get transcoding.
Qobuz subscription for streaming and discovery, and I buy an album for keeps as a celebration of every payday - there's no nicer feeling than owning your own media!
Disclaimer: I work in HiFi so may be a little biased towards the audiophile lifestyle.
I was really annoyed by Sonos forcing obsolescence of their products. Their "S1" app doesn't work too well anymore. Roon gave a new life to my Sonos devices and they are first-class citizens again.
So if you want to stream your music, Roon is a good way to do it. Yes, you need to run the "roon core" somewhere, but that's not a very high bar, and it gives you the ability to play your music anywhere using your phone (with the RoonARC app).
While I'm mostly content with my collection, there are many gaps particularly from bands that only have one or two songs that I like. I did the 90-day Spotify trial in January and set up my ultimate favorite song list (minus Neil Young) of about 1900 songs. Maybe I'll try to add the missing songs to my library but at $10 a month it might not be worth the time.
> Transfer your music library Bring all your music with you! Sign up for free and transfer your music to Napster today from another streaming service.
[0] https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/audio_station
Regarding iOS - agree, you're left with any Subsonic compatible iOS app.
A home streamer with removable SSDs (it's a streamer, SSDs are actually always used in read mode) looks more convincing to me.
Omnia mea mecum porto.
https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2021/12/01/1920 (see bottom of post)
It's not impossible, either, as the ancient Turtlebeach Audiotron could do just that.
P.S. I'd also pay for a Roku app that can read and display PDF files.
If I didn't care about tracking or privacy, I would use it every day because its the best in music recommendations.
My Buffalo network drive also supports custom iTunes libraries which can be used. Here is another kind of setup:
https://www.techradar.com/how-to/software/applications/how-t...
Strike 1, you have to play using playlists, and even if you choose to randomly play "all your music", it caps their playlist at something like 500 songs (can't remember exactly) so it didn't do the one primary use case of "play a random song from my library".
Strike 2, even in that subset of l my music, the playlist randomiser was super broken. I have no idea why, but the random distribution was anything but. Super grouped bias toward some songs over and over again...
I finally found a docker music server called koel which has a playlist generator that just works for my use case. the playlist it generates is still capped, but the list is actually a reasonable random distribution.
As a musician or rights holder the streaming services are pretty bad in terms of getting paid. But as a consumer we are spoiled to death with ease of music access.
Just replace the 20,000 or so links to archive.org music with local links to your songs and you will have a streaming service with only your music and unlimited skips!
It's a paid service that seems fairly well polished with apps for different platforms, including mobile.
Wondering if anyone's using it and what the feedback is.
Edit: I do love Spotify, however, since I've been able to listen to so much more music than ever, but I resent that they can, and have, pulled music from their selection.
Transfer all your flacs to opus, with playlists, upload and just use http. Build a web front end using GPT in 10 minutes.
Or, at least this is my understanding of it – that they've prioritized serving audio FAST, rather than waiting an extra second for the higher bitrate to buffer. I find it absolutely infuriating and can't un-notice it. For some reason, it seems to behave the same if the bandwidth/latency is great or poor, or whether files are cached or not.
I don't use other services, but never experience this with any other player (including my own Navidrome setup), even if the files are the exact same.
Surely I can't be the only one who's noticed?
You seem to have a novel solution. Maybe you can refine it and turn it into some sort of online service or consulting business.
Both of them are surprisingly good in a lot of ways, but also...kind of ugly. Not enough so to not use them, but I wish these two apps had the same UI polish that some of the other first-party Synology apps have.
Daap client. Eg rhythmbox or iTunes, the creatively named "DAAP" from fdroid, looks like there's a few for ios.
Owntone is great to drive your airplay speakers in your house (shairport-sync or whatever) daap client let's you stream that one, organised, curated, source of truth collection on the local network - which wireguard provides to you even when you're far, far away. Last.fm in you're into that (I'm not).
Better than any subscription service because it's yours.
If you want something else, figure it out.
> maybe I'm just out of touch.
Anything’s possible.
That being said, if you're trying stream your collection on the road (over your phone/at work/on a trip) it has to get more complicated than that. I'm not putting my shares on the public internet without a secure intermediary in some sort of streaming server. I used Gnump3d for that many years ago, but simply have settled for the 200 gigs of music on my phone's SD card since. I can't consider living with only 200 gigs of music such a hardship that I would be willing to set a new, possibly insecure thing up.
edit: Aiming ports towards the internet has been a job for me off and on, and the responsibility for keeping things updated yet also protecting against the new dangers potentially presented by each new update is something that I need a significant reward for.