Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative(coppolaemilio.com) |
Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative(coppolaemilio.com) |
I use Spotify the same way I managed my music on Windows media player, creating my own playlists of various genre's and years. What Spotify allows me to do is find the music I want straight away rather than finding a way to procure it.
I can do all of that and not have to self host anything.
It helped me when I tested out Apple Music for a few months and I noticed it's absolutely not working as well for me.
I settled on Plex + Plexamp instead. I'm mostly satisfied, but there are some rough edges like Chromecast and web playback.
For Jeff: https://archive.is/waAv5 (who also stars in the article)
Owntone has my library to play in my house through shairpoint-sync driven amps & speakers in different rooms. (Synced perfectly and seamlessly - your ears can really tell too).
That same Owntone installation over wireguard using http stream in my phone/laptop browser when I'm not home.
Owntone & airplay2 is absolutely first rate.
Owntone http streaming is plenty good enough for me.
(Owntone also works great with your spotify subscription if you do that).
The music from my computer is synchronized to my smartphone with syncthing.
No server needed.
It works well but it's something I'll revisit at some point as I do like the idea of one central library with shared playlists etc.
In fact, I haven't been able to even make a playlist on Sonos, it's baffling.
I really don't want to restructure my library just for Jellyfin, so I basically can't use it.
Musicbrainz Picard is great for normalizing metadata for music files/albums, maybe give that a shot.
This isn't even to mention the numerous features that Spotify has which are difficult or impossible to replicate on self-hosting. The "radio" feature, song recommendations, the DJ, AI playlists, stations, automatic playlist enhancement, social features, Canvas... the list goes on. And of course I never have to worry about managing a library of mp3 files. When an artist I like drops a new album, it'll be on Spotify at 12:00am exactly and work perfectly. This isn't possible with self-hosting.
When you look at it this way, the chance to pay 6 bucks a month to get all these extra features and ignore the headache of self-hosting is a no-brainer.
I respect the author's self hosted journey and encourage everyone to go down that path.
I ditched Plex when they came out with a FAST [1] service which was thoroughly pizzled [2] for me. I switched to Jellyfin which I struggled with in so many ways, the terrible XBOX client which was a degraded version of the web client was the worse but Jellyfin's poor metadata handling was part of it.
Last summer I spent a lot of time in a room in our rental house where I tried (and failed) to gentle a feral cat and wound up watching a lot of Tubi and came to the conclusion that FAST wasn't so bad and gave Plex another chance when I rebuilt my home server and I can say I'm highly satisfied.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_ad-supported_streaming_te...
[2] https://scatter.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/thoroughly-pizzled-...
https://listenbrainz.org/my/recommendations
https://www.last.fm/player/station/user/{username}/recommend...
Honestly that's about 90% of what my homelab does.
I have a few hobby sites that handle music and always wondered For those curious: https://carlos-a-diez.com/music/
>... near-instantaneous access anywhere in the world to every song ever...
Nobody needs this. You think you do, but nobody needs everything everywhere all at once. If being wholly unwilling to wait "a single second" isn't sarcasm, then... yeesh.
My point is this: I spend over 100,000 minutes per year listening to music. Any unnecessary friction in the experience is therefore extremely frustrating and has a disproportionate effect on my life. In all my experience self-hosting, it adds a certain level of friction that just isn't worth it considering how much time I spend listening.
I am not hostile to self-hosting in other cases. I am very satisfied with my self-hosted Plex server, for example. But I don't spend 30% of my waking hours watching TV.
The fact also is that the vast majority of us don't have a requirement to be able to access our media from anywhere in the world. Most people aren't traveling the world on a regular basis, they stay in one area except for maybe an occasional vacation.
> And of course I never have to worry about managing a library of mp3 files. When an artist I like drops a new album, it'll be on Spotify at 12:00am exactly and work perfectly. This isn't possible with self-hosting.
If that's important to you, then indeed self-hosting will never be able to match it. But for me at least, my music listening has been 95% static since about 20 years ago. On occasion I hear something new that I add to the collection, but for the most part I listen to the same music I did some time ago. Paying $6/mo to Spotify just to listen to the same things I already have in my collection would be a gross waste of money. So for me it's the exact opposite: self hosting is a no-brainer because I simply would not get any value for my $6/mo.
I don't travel internationally often at all. But when I do, access to my music becomes all the more important.
There's plenty I can do about it. If Spotify decides to "pull the plug" on a song or artist I like, it's my prerogative to switch providers or decide to self-host. I'm not locked into a lifetime serfdom with them, and it's not like the files will magically vanish from the internet once Spotify decides not to host them.
> who will willfully consume the most crappy audio codec
I listen to 99% of my music through Bluetooth on AirPods, so 320kbps is perfectly fine for my use case. If I was someone who cared deeply about audio quality, I would switch to a competing service with HiFi.
> hundreds of millions of clueless subscribers, such as yourself
At least try to be respectful.
E.g. lately I have been listening to more classical, and the musicianship between different performances of the same piece varies widely. It is very nice to be able to quickly explore a few different albums before I find the one I like (also to study the differences). In the Olden Days I would hogged the headphones at the music store... or, more likely, not make my own decision and purchase based on reviews and name recognition.
On the other hand, I of course never actually purchase albums anymore. ("somewhat ethical")
Hosting my own, even though it appeals a lot to me on principle, just would be either too costly to maintain legally (buying new music) or too cumbersome illegally (torrenting any music I want to listen to).
I guess if someone is really into music, they will spend a lot of time on finding new music, and will be inclined to spend more money on the hobby too. But for casual listeners like me, it's far too convenient to simple select a song on Spotify and click "play radio" and get an unending playlist of new songs.
None of that is a problem with the Apple Music app, so it's 100% a Spotify problem.
Also, Music sometimes disappears from my playlists.
I recall a commercial from the 90s that sort of poked fun at this exact idea, as being laughably farfetched and "sci-fi".
You're damn right I'm happy.
I'm much better off using free software than having copies of proprietary software on my shelf and the train is much cheaper than the car insurance.
Or artists could sell the music directly at a fair price (no streaming service but vinyl or downloads). Or more people could go to concerts
Either way, consumers need to pay more before all good artists can make ends meet. The (comparatively) pocket change that many of them get from streaming won't be enough even if Spotify turns into a non-profit and improves payout from 70% of their income to 99.9% of their income
Most consumers seem to disagree, judging by the reactions to Spotify's recent price increase in the netherlands (even though the increase was lower than inflation or median income growth). With the money simply not being on the table unless you get lucky and get massively popular, there is no realistic alternative, but some options feel more fair than others. I could totally see myself doing music as a hobby and seeing what I can sell on Bandcamp rather than supporting Google and having them/Youtube stream my music to people
Notably, the Plex vulnerability had been patched in May 2020—approximately 75 versions prior to the breach. The compromise occurred because the engineer hadn’t updated their Plex software. While the flaw was in Plex, the breach underscores the critical importance of timely software updates and robust security practices. https://www.wired.com/story/lastpass-engineer-breach-securit...
Why is this bad?
I will, im just wondering, would only the link to the source article been better/acceptable here?
I dont' get the hate for AI replies if they're on topic and generated by a human tbh, but ill respect it since its not first time seeing this i guess
In short: other posters want to hear from you, not from an AI. AI written posts aren't actually valuable (we can all dump stuff into the AI just fine). If you don't have much to say, it's fine to just share a link to the source you found.
ive now been in a place where that membership isnt that daunting. but im good, im not gonna have my music library held prisoner from me unless i cough up a monthly fee. its quite literally unusable if you arent paying. it also seems like they intentionally make their browser based version kinda trash... to make using it to block ads a less viable option(its been a while, not sure how true this currently is).
the jellyfin option is actually what ive settled on as well, ive been a bit lazy about setting up more functionality than just for my LAN, but i will get around to it. for now i just kinda plop junk on my phone and play it through vlc, which is certainly a lazy solution but its still feels freeing.
I have a decently sized library with my favorite albums and that's been sufficient for some time now. Every once in a while, I track new releases and explore new genres, then add the few that picked my interest to my library.
Intentionally is great for enjoying art (and YouTube is more than enough for mood music)
I didn't think Spotify had fanboy/fangirl followings, but based on your and others' comments, I stand corrected. What do I know!
If you own, you don't pay subscription and can use that money to buy. And in tenuous circumstances you have control.
If you subscribe, you don't pay money to buy massive library. But in tenuous circumstances you don't have control.
Everybody rates the risk of tenuous circumstances differently and so that affects the decision outcome.
There's absolutely no way in hell I'm going back to hoarding stupid ass CDs or MP3/FLAC files when I can legally have immediate access to tens of millions of titles. I have absolutely zero interest in the "owning" part but I understand some people would prefer it.
so if you decide you cant pay their monthly fee, you still have full access to your library of songs that you chose to own over the years, and are not subjected to the feeling of being a prisoner to their subscription model if you decide you cant afford it for x amount of time.
this feeling of being a prisoner is the absolute main driver of why i prefer non spotify solutions. i love the actual product otherwise. if i had not experienced the non subscribed version of what my account feels like, i think i would still happily be paying for spotify today.
A large part of my listening on YouTube Music is going to a particular song or band I like and clicking "Radio", which generates a playlist of similar sounding songs. You can then fine tune it with a filter i.e "Popular songs, deep cuts" or specific elements of the song "More emo", "Slow paced" etc. This exposes me to a lot of new music and keeps it fresh and if I'm lucky I'll discover a new artist or song to add to my rotations.
You lose that.
A lot of these services overtime build mixes which takes your listening habits and tries to categorize them into specific mixes made up of your existing library & new music.
I don't browse any music forums and so apart from my favourite bands, I have no idea on when artists I like release new albums and would not encounter them on a self hosted solution, etc.
Spotify "Radio" feature just tends to want to give me music I've already listened to over new music. Whatever algorithm they are using has waaaay overfit to what I have already liked.
There used to be curated playlists done by humans, now almost everything is "made for you by Spotify" playlists which, have the exact same issue as the radio stations, suddenly it's all the same music you've already been listening to, very little new music. If you want new music, you need to find a playlist made by a user instead.
However, if you expose the gods of the algorithm to a new artist, suddenly all the auto-generated feeds will try to include that band regardless of fit. Weird how these "social graph" systems tend to form and perpetuate bubbles.
On top of that, there are some weird shenanigans with meta-data. Listening to "foreign" bands may very easily taint the weekly mix with songs in a language you don't even understand and probably don't care about. An anecdata of course, I just looked at my "daily mix x", which appears to be in my local language, but with styles all over the place. Another mix contains mostly correctly turn of the century romantic pop.
I suspect the algorithm biases heavily on metadata so that it could be easily fed "albums/artists that publisher x paid to promote".
Btw, is there somewhere a search engine to know when a given [set of] track was played where, in the internet radio world?
The transition didn't start when they laid off Glenn MacDonald, but that sort of cemented it. They had already gutted curation before that and by this time you were far more likely to find people talking about AI in the halls than music. If you've never heard of Glenn, check out his book: "You Have Not Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music." Or his old online projects at https://everynoise.com/.
Their generated playlists are great, and they do a good job recommending playlists I’d like from other users as well. And while I hate the format, their music shorts actually give me consistently good music. I just hate that it’s in the TikTok swipe style.
This regular plays music I have never heard (both old and new).
In fact, things have never been as good as last.fm used to be when it hosted its own music.
My guess/conspiracy theory is that Spotify has cut deals with record companies that pay less on subsequent listens to a track so the repetitive radio algorithms are more profitable.
I don't want that. At all. It's algorithmic and there's nothing stopping artists and labels paying for placement in there. I don't want that.
I am a musician, and a DJ, and I've been digging deep through artist and label catalogues on my own for decades. The process of discovery via my preexisting routes is far more fruitful, enjoyable and rewarding than lazily letting an algorithm do the work.
But I like doing that. This works for me, not for others.
I half wonder if Spotify US is one of those harbingers of doom for the old web in the same way I think of Twitter and iPhone/SPAs/The Stream UI.
Another great way for discovering music I've found is just perusing Bandcamp, which is where I buy most of my music anyway. Love finding local artists, so I just put in some genre filters and the location filter. Found multiple great bands this way.
As for keeping abreast of new releases, Bandcamp is pretty good for that too. You can just follow artists and you get emails when new releases or merch or tours come around.
Fortunately they do have a "Discover playlist" that completely excludes music you've heard before. Unfortunately that's all you get. No way to e.g. say "play me reggae I haven't heard before", and it's only updated once a week.
So yeah... kinda shit. But still better than the alternative which as far as I remember from the 90s is to only listen to extremely well-known bands and find good news music like once a year.
The styles information that Plexamp has works really well and in my experience, as long as your library is large enough, works better than modern Spotify.
It was Spotify's degradation of their radio service and terrible "AI DJ" that finally got me off Spotify. Punishing them for platforming Joe Rogan was just icing.
First, the algorithm is opaque, so it can push stuff to you because the platform decide it has to get the spotlights. Maybe the label/producer/musician paid for it or whatever you want to imagine that is even worse. It is a well-known phenomenon that if some music is pushed to your ears, you'll end up appreciate it most often than not. This is how hits have been and are still made.
But even if the algorithm was not gamed at all, I still think it is a bad thing. It is not going to push you out of your comfort zone. Listening to new stuff is usually not pleasant at first. You will only "discover" things that are very similar to what you know and already enjoy.
If these recommendation algorithms were about food, they would "reason" like this: "Hey, you've really enjoyed this whole pack of M&M's, I'm sure you'll like this Kit-Kat bar now! Oh and you've had a glass of wine, what about trying out meth, it's pretty good too.". Do we really want our computers to reinforce such behavior?
Go to concerts, buy merch, buy albums on bandcamp (it has not enshittified too much yet apparently), donate money to artists; discover music through your friends and other humans recommending it. Recommend what you like to your friends. Cancel your Spotify subscription, none of that money is going to artists anyway. And use soulseek.
Let's take YT. In very simple terms, instead of taking a bold move and suggesting a few outliers (similar to differentiating the population as it's done in evolutionary algorithms), it takes an easy shot and, if I'm identified as male, suggests some videos with females with big breasts and other generic junk many people just click on autopilot. It works well for them because most people click and click and spend their days uselessly hooked and feel bad, but in my particular case I lose what I had earlier, i.e. suggestions of interesting bands (they still do happen but the selection is of much lower quality).
At least a fifth of my favorite songs look like cryptic gibberish to me, that would be nearly impossible to find as a download... I'm firmly vendor locked for that reason alone.
I do make regular exports, just in case my Spotify account ever disappears for whatever reason. That data is too valuable to risk losing it.
Depending on what you like, bandcamp makes it easy. You can follow any artist (which is also offered whenever you buy), and from then on get release notifications. But of course, what’s available differs by genre. For metal, most bands are on BC, except most Japanese artists and major label stuff.
I buy, download, and put the flacs on my Jellyfin server.
There are, of course, also piracy solutions for that, pretty sure the *arr stuff has automatic downloading per artist.
If everyone is this lazy about music discovery, then music suffers. I am not using “lazy” as a pejorative. There are people who just couldn’t be bothered and that’s fine. Music just isn’t that important to you. But if the people who deeply love music are corrupted by the ease and dopamine, it will deeply wound music as a whole.
My problem isn’t discovering new music, it is “discovering” my massive library. I love AM, but the fact that 3 of the five large icons taking up precious screen real estate are devoted to discovering music that Apple is paid to promote is infuriating.
I keep hearing this, I also read Mood Machine that says the same thing over and over again.
Yet, every week for years, thanks to Spotify I'm discovering artists that don't have the means to pay to be promoted in any way.
I'm not saying that I'm special or that I hacked the algo or that it's false that Spotify promotes artists that are paying to be promoted.
I'm just saying that, depending on how you consume (I'm using this verb on purpose) music on streaming platforms, you'll be more or less targeted by money-making thongs.
If you listen to the main playlists, they are basically 100% promotion based. But if you listen to a non-promoted artist's radio, you'll have far less promoted content.
That said: there's trade-offs. I don't browse music forums but I have in the past (when I had more time) & it's incredibly rewarding. I also get a lot more value from new music discovered through friends than through Spotify - there's something about intentionality that adds to the listening experience. I love when Spotify plays me a great song from an artist I've never heard, but I'm much more likely to seek out that artist on a personal recommendation.
Not everyone has the time, energy or expertise to host Jellyfin, but for those of us that do, there's probably room for both of the above listening experiences in our lives.
https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/how-am-i-supposed-to-find-new-...
Music Brainz provides this at https://test.listenbrainz.org/explore/fresh-releases/
There's also Music Butler: https://www.musicbutler.io/
LMS (Logitech now Lyrion) also has something similar in MusicIP (not as good as PlexAmp).
i think you can add plugins to jellyfin. maybe there is a last.fm plugin? i know of some other last.fm alternatives like maloja or libre.fm but i cant comment on how good they are
Napster / audio galaxy... I mean your own legal burned music with AI generating a radio playlist.
Frankly 99.9 of my music listening is stuff I already know and enjoy. But I still like to listen to new stuff often. So this kinda thing is perfect for me 99% of the time.
AudioBookShelf[1] is for audiobooks and podcasts.
For music I use
navidrome [2]
Substreamer [3]
1: https://www.audiobookshelf.org/
3: https://substreamerapp.com/
It is just crazy how easy it is to set this stuff up nowadays. I run both Navidrome and Jellyfin in docker containers. Then I use NordVPN Meshnet to securely connect to them outside of the home.
The experience is absolutely flawless. In Navidrome you can host an entire FLAC library and then transcode to Opus on the fly.
It's been over a year now and I have pretty much no issues whatsoever.
I highly highly recommend it
Edit - Opus not Opal!
I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions. The subscriptions really had gotten out of hand, it had gotten to about $200 (AUD) a month.
Quick napkin math is that I have cancelled about ~$150 a month worth of subscriptions so far. The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling at this point, but it's already paid for itself, so I will likely upgrade it to something much better later this year.
Currently I am in the process of replacing all the movie streaming services with Emby.
Spotify and Adobe lightroom is still on the todo list.
I will likely end up with Youtube, Fastmail and Borgbase being my remaining subscriptions once I am done.
- songs rated 5 stars which I haven’t listened to for at least 8 months¹
- songs rated 4 stars which I haven’t listened to for at least 16 months
- songs rated 3 stars which I haven’t listened to for at least 32 months
- the 20GB of least-played music
(there are some other strictures as well, like eliminating Christmas music and some music files I have in my library more for archival purposes than anything else, but this is a decent approximation).
This gives me a reasonably fresh selection of music and at least at the moment, with my daily sync habit, when I listen to a song it goes out of rotation for a while which could be anywhere from a week to years.
⸻
1. This was originally 6/12/24 months, but I ended up boosting that time frame as storage grew tight on my phone.
It's called "long time no see" and it includes any songs I've listened to more than 10 times but haven't listened to in the last year. I've been using the same music library for nearly two decades now, so it works really well for me. It's like a constantly rotating nostalgia playlist.
This article tells me how good Jellyfin is, but the music collection process is not here. Do you download them manually? Do you buy records?
I grew up downloading music into my PC and then transferring them to my SD card which I used in my phone. Once I had a Spotify, it was just... easier. I can discover music faster with the "song radio" feature in Spotify. I can find and listen to an album as soon as I come across it.
I'd absolutely love to have a better media player and "frontend" than Spotify but I haven't solved the collection part of it. What can be done there?
If you haven’t gone down the Plex path yet, don’t right now as the community and developers sort out their roadmap. Plex seems to be open to feedback, but a lot of us feel betrayed. They had open user testing for the new apps but they didn’t implement or fix any of the reported issues.
I do not mind the jankiness, since I can work around a lot of it with the API.
I do not even mind too much the Love Exposure bug:
Most users report it is the film whose artwork is used (definitely always was for me). One user mentions they get the art from "Love Exposure: The TV Show".
One of these days I am going to spin up a VM and try and work through a report case.
When we start getting the same splintering that we have with video (too many subscriptions to count), I'll dust off my old eyepatch and start sailing the seven seas... :(
How much storage, are you backing up your data elsewhere?
And what did it cost you, apart from time?
- Domain name - $3/year
- Cloudron free tier with two apps - free
- Wasabi for backups (Cloudron supports every cloud storage possible and Wasabi is not the cheapest, I just wanted to try it) - $7/m
- Hostinger VPS with 50GB of storage - $5/m
I will probably add more apps to Cloudron at which point I will have to pay $15/m. But I think it is worth it - you can install every possible app with one click and have single sign-on. I offered to split the service with some friends too which would make the economics even better.
For streaming I use Soma FM almost exclusively, everything else I curate myself.
I never had a problem discovering more music through good old forums and more recently, LLMs. Trying out their recommendations is a fun exercise on its own as some songs they recommend will be totally obscure, but mostly they are on point.
It's open-source, self-hosted, has various good plugins (eg: I have some Pandora stations I listen to, as well as my own music collection). You can synchronize music across multiple devices in your home (I just have 2).
Even though the physical devices (Squeezebox Touch, etc) are no longer sold, it's pretty easy to build one yourself with a raspberry pi.
It's one of those cases where a company created something great, and strongly-open-sourced it enough that the project can't die even though the new owners are not giving it the love it deserves.
So, I hope to keep using it for the rest of my days (:
Using traefik + tailscale + dns challenge with CloudFlare, I was able to self-host and make my services available only through the vpn without loosing HTTPS on all the subdomains. It's lovely!
I'm willing to learn but please try to be less condescending :)
Any suggestions for a tool that can clean up file names and tags, and apply some sort of genre categories? I've tried Picard, but the process seems too manual for such a large archive.
I'm looking through the android clients and none seem to fully embrace keeping the most played tracks on device ("offline mode"). Tempo[0] has in on the wip list, while StreamMusic straight removed in it the latest update[1], so as of now it looks like a pretty tough feature to get.
Listening to music in remote places is nice, and that was the main reason for paying for Spotify for me.
[0] https://github.com/CappielloAntonio/tempo#readme [1] https://music.aqzscn.cn/docs/versions/latest/
As a music server it has a few shortcomings (that can be fixed with contributed code - ATM this one is waaay down my TODO list so anyone that wants to step up - go for it, please) ..
It currently has non existent support of FullAlbum.flac with 'standard' TrackIndex.Cue track timing lists.
I ripped a lot of my early albums and CD's as single lossless FLAC (and APE and another format) files with track timings courtesy of either hand entry or the exactCD (?) database - there are many such rips out there is full album rips where popular for a good run of time.
Jellyfin sees these as single files, not as an album of tracks, and plays them as such with no track selection, next track, or resume.
Addressing this is on the github issues list.
Foobar2K and other music players have no issues with these files.
Symfonium is paid but appears to be one of the rare apps that is still thoughtfully created by somebody who actually uses it. The developer deserves the support.
1. Helped me take something I like or am super into at the time (band or song) and give me a playlist
2. actually suggested with a high hit rate something I didn't know about and it was available to play right now.
other streaming or stations just loop into what I already have which sucks. Side note that I'm into pretty niche non mainstream music such as Melodic Death Metal and Industrial so self hosting seems interesting but I also spend a good chunk of my time looking for more music. (Most of the bands I am really into only have sub-20k plays a month on Spotify).
I really miss Napster letting you browse people's music when you found someone who was also into things you liked - pure gold mine only second to a LAN party where you could dig through the file server.
If you are a bandcamp user, find people with similar purchases to you and follow them. It is a good way to browse for new albums based on people with similar tastes.
However navidrome at least supports lastfm via external Integration: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/external-integrations/
I never used it so I can't tell if this is what you're looking for or at least the right direction.
I'll give audiobookshelf a look!
There are other unofficial Clients (e.g. in flutter), but I tend to use audiobookshelf as streaming player paired with vlc to play downloaded offline files (the app is not so great here)
If your smartTV supports Subsonic API, it probably works, but if not, it's possible to point Jellyfin and Navidrome to the same audio directory.
I've been self-hosting for quite awhile now, and these days it's such a breeze.
> use NordVPN Meshnet to securely connect to them outside of the home
> host an entire FLAC library and then transcode to Opus on the fly.
i really have no idea what any of these words mean. Spotify's future is secure.
A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a way of securely connecting to your home network without exposing it to the world.
FLAC and Opus are audio formats. FLAC uses lossless compression and offers the best uncompressed quality while not being as huge as a broadcast wave (.wav) file. Opus is similar to an mp3, that means it is a lossy compression, but it sounds extremely good at small bit rates/with bad connections. The transcoding-on-the-fly-bit means the user opens up the private Navidrome website running in their home from the road and the Audio they play is compressed and sent over on the fly as they play it.
Self hosting sounds scary, but it is an essential skill nowadays and extremely useful. Things I self-host (besides websites) include a partskeeper instance which is essentially a stock keeping system for electronics parts, jellyfin as a netflix replacement for films and series, my mailserver (mailcow), paperless-ngx (hooked up to a scanner, allows automatic text-recognition and tagging of invoices, letters, etc.) and homeassistant (smart home).
That probably makes it appear like I have to spend all my free time on this, but it takes surprisingly little of my time to maintain this, with a lot of it running on a single Raspberry Pi.
Wow, I’ll get grandma to do it! Ha ha, just kidding, but I’ll try it myself. Ha ha, just kidding.
Honestly, I just want to scream “self-hosting isn’t going to happen, stop trying to make it happen.” I absolutely welcome the hobbyists doing this fun stuff in their free time, but the idea that they will ever win over ordinary users is total fantasy. And it’s accompanied by reality-denying stuff like how “you don’t need” feature X or Y. Sure, I long to go back to organising my own mp3 files like it’s 2002. And because you’re angry about corporate power, Spotify or whoever definitely provide no features of value to anyone! This is all pure mood affiliation.
Sorry. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad your setup works for you. But I think you are not using the word “easy” in the same way as most people.
Of course it's not as easy as signing up for Spotify/Netflix, but setting them up is easier than ever (even easier for tech people).
If you can read a README you can set up Navidrome and point it to your local library in 5 minutes.
The hardest to kick for me now is YouTube Premium.. And in AU it's like $33/month AUD, but I just can't stand ads.
Now I self host:
- Own Mastodon instance - Photos (Synology) - Videos (Synology) - Audio (Synology) - Storage (Minio) - Code/Build (Forejo) - Security (Synology)
My NAS is blocked from the internet, while web facing stuff is on a separate server (old dell workstation). And now have added a PI hole to another older dell box. My partner's laptop will be moving to Linux and will also be a Windows free household. I used Windows since 3.1, I liked it up until around Windows 7. I'm glad I've moved to Linux, but disappointed to see what has happened to Windows in general.
I want to self host more services for family, but the experience isn't there yet without quite a lot of work.
The tags #homelab and #selfhost are pretty decent to follow on Mastodon btw!
Any reason you're not just running network level AdGuard and Firefox with Ublock Origin to block all ads on your home network? Even just FF+UBO would block YouTube ads.
The selfhosted subreddit is also a really good resource to use for interesting things to run.
yt-dlp: a video downloaded. Originally designed for YouTube but supports a lot of sites. I suggest heavily aliasing this with options like sleep intervals, aria2, and make sure you download the user agent switcher. For YouTube you probably need to import cookies from a browser. But you'll be able to watch the videos without the ads.
Btrfs: it's a file system, like ext4 or ntfs. Has a lot of useful things like being able to create subvolumes, raid, cache drives (or volumes), quotas, snapshots, etc. Think anything that you'd do with zfs but it's been easier to use and it has a copy on write system that helps dedupe. You can also compress the file system! I use duperemover. If it finds dupes it replaces one file with a link (which btrfs natively supports). It'll hash the files so run it early and then set up a job (use a systemd timer)
Tailscale: take your network anywhere. God, tailscale is so fucking useful. You can even put it on a raspberry pi or your phones. It's nice to have it on an old phone which you can throw termux on and have a little server. I've used these to jump to another machine that has had issues where it could connect locally but not outside. You can also set up exit nodes so you can do things like push all your traffic through a vpn, make all your traffic use pihole, or just make it appear like you're somewhere else. You could use this to even make it effectively impossible for streaming services to know you're sharing an account. The data is going through whoever's house pays. If you get fancy you can set up rules to port specific traffic through specific locations but this is still a bit above my head. I just know it's possible. Unfortunately with iPhones you have less control. They can even break out of all this and you don't have full control. I need to get someone to explain more networking to me.
Systemd: it's annoying at first but damn there's so much to it that is helpful. Use systemctl edit to edit your service files. The ones that come with services like jellyfin aren't nearly as locked down as they should be (I intend to push to them in a few months). You should also use systemd mount for your drives. You need a companion automount file but your drives will go offline when not being used. This will really help with reducing energy costs. Be sure to note that there's even configs for you gpus. It also lets you control a systems resources. There's also nspawn and vmspawn. I wish these were a bit more popular because they can do everything docker can and more. Nspawn is a suped up chroot so you can really containerize things and even run different Linux flavors (I've even been play around with running an arm container on my x86 machine). Using machinectl you can enable these as services and even create triggers to spin up or down. There's also importctl so if you create an image (or someone else does) you can just pull that! Which kinda makes it easier than docker in many cases other than the fact that not many people have made images (or publicly available). Docker's big win is popularity but systemd has felt nicer in every other way (documentation sucks). There's so much more to systemd and that's why it's loved and hated. There's a reason it stuck, it just is too damn useful (don't forget to check out homectl too)
Ffmpeg: you probably know this one but it's also worth spending some time to learn it more and write some scripts. If you care more about storage I encode most stuff to av1 with nvenc. It's not archival but honestly I'm often getting 50% storage reductions and I can't tell the difference. Your source file probably wasn't archival grade anyways. Good enough for me. Hevc is also giving me good success.
There's a bunch of other little tools that help. For example, I have my main computer sitting behind my TV. If I'm working on it I'm in it via ssh. Otherwise games and movies are on the TV. I use ydotool as a keyboard and just made a shortcut on my iPhone and a trivial script on my Android so I can push commands that way and use a wireless mouse. There's kconnect but it's been more a hassle than help ime. I did the same for backing up photos on from my phones (they wake the drives first). Android can rsync but for iPhone I can't find a good free solution other than writing the hackiest shortcut you've seen (ssh in, check if file exists, if not then write. You can't rsync, the fucking thing will timeout and despite there being terminal emulators for iPhone you can't access your photos from them. I've found zero ways to link them and I'm upset). Check out things like fail2ban to jail users that do too many logins. You can also use nspawn to containerize these services, spin up and down, and between btrfs, homectl, and pam it is really easy to containerize users. You can mount their volumes on demand and get their accounts syncing across your intranet. It's kinda crazy what you can do.
My goal is to get some images so many of these things can start becoming plug and play. I'm getting close but obviously bigger priorities right now. I'd love help if anyone is interested. I'm not an expert in these domains so I'm sure I'm doing some things wrong but I'm learning a ton
Do you host this with docker? It is usually the pain-free approach
>I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions.
I have been doing the same for quite some time now but it's only recently I realized all these subscriptions services are just making rich richer. We should encourage self hosting as much as possible. I mean why should we pay huge corporations more money just for storage?
For anything else, I can also highly recommend using local or self-hosted software. Plenty of open source software has even exceeded proprietary alternatives in the last couple years.
In the first place why would that be a problem? If a company offers a good value and service for your money, isn’t it fair to compensate them for it? Does someone need to be compensated less just because they have been successful in the past providing good value for money? That would create weird or negative incentives.
Then, what’s the negative consequence of rich people getting richer? It’s not like the economy is a zero-sum game. The proportion of poor and extremely poor people has gone downhill in the last 200 years, while population has increased 8x (we’re probably around 10% of extreme poverty compared to +90%).
And then, there’s the lack of evidence of really rich people getting richer. How much of your money going to Spotify is really going to rich people compared to employees, artists, little shareholders? Maybe the impact of the earnings of Spotify is disproportionately helping normal citizens make a living compared to the very few big shareholders that are already rich.
What’s the alternative? Spending the same amount of money exclusively on Albums that probably bring a higher cut to big music companies and do not expose you to little or unknown artists? While at the same time you spend hours every month in the maintenance of your own music service while you could have used that time to help in some community projects or just earning more money to donate to causes impacting the extremely poor?
I’m really not sure at all that a subscription service like Spotify has any negative consequence for humankind.
If you run it 24/7 on a dedicated desktop with decent idle (i.e. no high power video card, low power CPU), it likely uses ~ 50W average. That gives an estimate of 0.05kW24hr30 = 36kWh, which would be in the range of $12/month at current australian electricity prices. If you have bad idle power usage (or somehow mostly active not idle), maybe you'd be looking at twice that. But for OP who was spending $xxx/month on subscriptions, it's a pretty negligible cost. If you really want to save this too, raspPi can do a lot of home server needs nowadays
There are also noise and light pollution issues if it's near a bedroom.
I upgraded my NAS to a recent Asustor a year ago and it changed my life. JellyFin for video works perfectly everywhere in my home, on any device, and it can also be accessed remotely, securely, with Tailscale, so if I'm in a hotel somewhere with my iPad it still works.
And my library is curated by me; it has classic movies and other movies I like, and zero fluff or random shows that I would never watch in a million years.
But self hosting doesn't stop here. Using Docker (via Portainer) I can publish any app in minutes, on either Apache or Nginx, securely with a Cloudflare tunnel (free) without ever exposing my home IP to the world.
This of course isn't as resilient as a proper server with a proper provider, but it's so much simpler and so much cheaper that for hobby projects it's largely good enough.
I have a ~10 years old desktop as my server (intel skylake and 24GB of RAM). I host about 20 services and the server is not loaded at all.
The services are the usual ones, nothing heavy such as LLMs, though
I started my home server for self hosting Immich, not only for the cost but because I like to have my images close to me.
I also recently replaced Lightroom with ON1, it's definitely not the same quality but, as hobbyist, it didn't make much sense to pay that much for me anymore. It was by far the most expensive subscription I had.
HTML spec for media is pretty amazing these days, no real excuses outside of time.
With rclone, you can also have a step to seamlessly encrypt the contents on the client side before sending to an external provider like B2.
I chose B2 because it is the most affordable option, but rclone supports many backends.
I would prefer to use a cloud backup solution that supports zfs send/receive, but they are a bit pricy. zfs.rent seems like a nice solution, but not sure using a US location is a great idea.
When it comes to supporting multiple media types (video/audiobooks/music/etc..) I prefer using a seperate solution for each that is focused on that use case instead of an all-in-one solution.
I am using audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts, so I really don't need that from my video solution.
I have configured Emby to keep the metadata in nfo files next to the videos, so I should be able to easily switch to something else if things change in the future.
It's a nightmare.
It's pretty easy to export the photos, you get them down organized by date and photos with edits are there both as the original and a "-edited" version. What is missing is the library organization.
I really want to get my library organization as well, it's very valuable to me, it's what has got the details of what photos was from what event. And I don't really know how to get that down. I am thinking I will have to scrape it from the webapp or something like that.
It's been left to last as it's both one of the cheaper subscriptions and a total nightmare to get out of.
As for what app to use when it's all down, Capture One or Darktable seems reasonable with a network attached drive.
I can click a button in Lidarr to auth with Spotify and automatically search usenet for every album of every artist I follow on spotify, download them all, and make them available in Jellyfin. It'll even monitor the spotify account and import new additions. Getting the whole stack set up is pretty much the exact opposite of plug and play, but once you have it all installed it's amazing how much becomes smooth sailing. 2K songs is nothing for this kind of stack.
I see where you are coming from but all that experience really tired me out. People say once you do it, it’s forever but is it? I appreciate it that some people can do it — no I really do — but maybe it’s not for everybody.
Then there are managed solutions — oh, I am sure there would be, there were and are for seedboxes as well but the good managed seedboxes sometimes would cost as much or half of my annual VPS cost in a month, yes 1:12 or so. Now I believe there’s nothing wrong with pricing a managed solution high but not all can afford it or are willing to afford it.
I really appreciate it though. Would you mind sharing a tutorial if you’ve saved one somewhere and what disk, CPU, and memory I am looking at for this? That would be very kind.
I tried syncing Lidarr with my Spotify account, but 95% of the downloads then where songs that I didn't care for.
And the artists and everyone who worked on it thank you very much for paying for an album/song instead of just paying a streaming subscription fee.
Fun fact: I bought an MP3 from a record label site in my country and the file was from songs.pk. Yup!
There you go - artists thanking me :)
Virtually all music, particularly modern music, is made available for free on YouTube. You can download it and it's yours.
For example, here's the official release of Taylor Swift's album "Evermore" for YouTube ("Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxrMpCMdYwk&list=OLAK5uy_m-v... . You should be able to pass the playlist to yt-dlp and automatically extract all the audio tracks.
I don't really want wholesale quantities of music, so I do this manually, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's tooling around for it.
This might work for your use case too, though if you're just using it to grab content, the artists won't get royalties..., then again that seems to be the same for Linux ISO sites.
My only complaint is that when I buy a bunch of songs my credit card gets charged a bunch of times (one for each artist/label) which has triggered fraud warning in the past, but I guess they do that to avoid the hassle of routing money to each artist in their own currency... It seems mildly customer unfriendly to me but in a world where people charge a can of coke to their credit card maybe not all that weird any more.
I avoid this by buying the virtual gift cards and redeeming them on my own account
Also, I find bandcamp's wishlist manager to be severely lacking. I use the wishlist as a queue of things I need to check out or have already checked out (and may not have liked). But, it isn't really meant for having 1000s of albums in there.
So, I wrote a wishlist manager [2][3], which lets you organize, comment, rate, and listen to your wishlist.
I spend a quite a bit on bandcamp, especially since many of the bands I listen to are only available on bandcamp (no streaming services!). While I am glad it hasn't been enshittified by the acquisitions, I do think there could be a few small UX improvements.
[1] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email...
Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything? e.g. Merge the artists 'Guns N Roses' and 'Guns and Roses' into the most correct one.
I can't justify the time to do it manually and feel like if I just wait long enough a turn-key AI solution will pop up.
I've recently started using Beets[1] to organize my music collection. It's a command line application that IMHO is not entirely intuitive to use at first. But once you get the hang of it, it works incredibly well.
[1]: https://beets.io/
MusicBrainz Picard ... one album at a time until you get the hang of it.
MP3Tag for manual cleanups and out of normal oddities, etc.
The whole reason I host plex is that I want an offline experience that I curate myself. The requirement for internet to authenticate and shoveling crapware in my face pushed me towards trying Jellyfin. The Jellyfin UI on TV and mobile is not as flashy and polished as Plex, but it is extremely functional and respects users choices.
Been a happy Jellyfin customer for years now though I only use it to organize and browse my library now. Actual playback is either MPV on PC or Kodi over NFS on TV. After trying many many players, these were the two I found best for respective platforms, nothing else even comes close.
I’m running the server in Docker and pretty lazy about updating it. Is that the side that changed? It looks like I’m running 1.27 and 1.41 is out now. Should I be sticking with what I have?
If internet goes out, DNS to my local services still works fine since it is being served directly from my pi.hole.
Plexamp sounds awful to me, trebly and thin. Googling around I found it was a common complaint.
It DOES handle multichannel audio well, though I don't think it can do Atmos natively.
I implemented an override of Stream in C# that can be passed directly to an HttpContext file response. This gives me range-based response support on top of cached S3 media blocks for free. The front-end uses ffmpeg to do a quick transcode on uploads to guarantee fast start of mp4 content in my html video elements.
The cool thing with having a reasonable sized cache is that you can switch to glacier infrequent access tier (i.e., the one intended for quarterly reporting) and save a lot of money on storage. The other fun bit is that it is shared across all clients on the LAN, so if someone watches a show before you, you'll just read it from local during your run through.
For me, I don't need a lot of fancy bullshit in a media solution. An un-styled web player that just works on my MacBook is pretty much the only client support I care about. My media library currently shows up as a monolithic <table> without any pagination. Time to first frame on an uncached video click is well under a second on a 1gbps fiber connection using 32 megabyte block size to US-EAST-1 from Texas.
What does this buy you? It seems like an object storage system would provide everything you need on its own.
It's not self hosted, more a middle-ground between rented Spotify and self hosted data sovereignty, but this is what we do at https://asti.ga . You store your music in some Internet-accessible storage, such as any S3 compatible endpoint, and Astiga connects and streams your library (and provides offline etc etc). AMA.
Desired pipeline is “Ingest->MusicBrainz->Object Storage (music bucket, write once read many)->Serve to various clients from middleware server (Jellyfin).”
cf YouTube when you watch one video on X that's outside of your normal viewing and RIP your homepage for the next few days until you've clicked "do not recommend" on enough videos to stop the flood of X and X-adjacent content.
That's a very old problem that people building recommendation systems solved 10 years ago.
Getting back to "I don't even want virtuous algorithmic recommendation"… I like jazz rock/fusion, especially when it has a touch of bluesy/blues rock influence. There is probably a lifetime of listening time of that genre, and it takes no effort for me to appreciate anything that resemble this. Long guitar solos by a jazz-educated guitarist who happens to like Jimi Hendrix, sign me up.
But I do think there is value in getting out of my comfort zone, and listen to something drastically new, from time to time. It requires effort though. My first reflex when I hear synthetic drums or autotune, for instance, is to press "next". But it is through other humans being recommendation, that I sometimes make that effort, and actually learn to appreciate something else.
Call me an elitist prick, but I hate to think of music as a commodity for us consumers to consume. It is art. Art is not always pleasant. It sometimes becomes pleasant after overcoming an initial disgust.
No wonder, I'm pretty sure they're doing A/B testing all the time.
> Not sure why Youtube would suggest big breasted female artists when I never, ever, ever watch the video when I'm playing music.
They don't care. I sometimes open YT on new machines and it's always the same generic junk.
Sure, it is really easy to maintain… if you are already skilled with system administration and how all of these things work.
You can use it to sync local snapshots or to a destination that does snapshots for example
Borg/restic are more complete solutions
Big streamers cater to most people's interests of music and are probably satisfactory for them but for us weirdos in music last.fm and it's music genome thing were amazing.
Seriously though, seconded, but also install Rockbox: https://www.rockbox.org/
I'm a firm believer that tools should be made to be usable by both technical and nontechnical people. Usually we do one or the other but it's a false dichotomy. "For the noobs" pushes for sane defaults, reduced complexity, and fixing bugs. It's also an entry point to become a power user, especially as being a power user in one domain doesn't mean you're automatically in another. "For the power users" gives flexibility, helps fix bugs (faster and higher coverage), as well as is critical for feature development (unless you naively believe you can know everything your diverse users need and have an infinite budget), and evangelize your product. The magic of success requires having both but I think we pretend it is one or the other. It needs to work well and be pretty.
Any comparable options for iOS? Not everyone in my household is on Android unfortunately
Edit: seeing play:sub mentioned maybe I'll have to check that one out
> As of today, daylist is available to both Free and Premium users across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland at spotify.com/daylist.
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-09-12/ever-changing-playli...
(note: old post, but still accurate?)
I have very similar rate with “daytime mix”.
So which one do you mean? “Discover weekly” and ”release radar” have new songs, yeah. But “radios” are like the previously mentioned playlists.
sort of like the DJ mix without the annoying voice. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1EP6YuccBxUcC1
> Would you mind sharing a tutorial if you’ve saved one somewhere
I would if I had one, but I mostly just googled the official installation instructions for any random component I wanted. No overall tutorials. Service-wise, I'm using Jellyseerr to discover content and take requests from friends/family, Radarr for sourcing movies, Sonarr for sourcing TV shows, Lidarr for sourcing music, Prowlarr for centralizing the configuration of the other *arrs, Sabnzbd as a usenet download client, rtorrent as a bittorrent client, and Jellyfin for consuming my library. You probably don't need all of those depending on what you're after, but you can just look up the instructions for only the components you want. And if you want to get content from usenet or private torrent trackers, you'll need the relevant accounts.
> what disk, CPU, and memory I am looking at for this?
Whatever you want honestly. You can run most of this on a toaster so long as you don't have unrealistic performance expectations for it. Obviously if you're planning to download 10TB worth of content, you're going to need at least that much disk space, and if you're planning to download it faster than HDDs can spin, you might need some SSDs. But most of these things are just downloaders and file managers and don't really need much more than network bandwidth to source the content and disk IO to put the content somewhere. Maybe 8GB of memory for some of the more bloated services (my whole server idles at ~5GB used, and it runs a lot of other junk) and to do really large indexer merges when searching for content, and however much hardware you need to meet your transcoding requirements if you're playing through Jellyfin or similar. You can stream source material without transcoding and consume basically no CPU from it, or you can enable transcoding with a decent enough CPU or pretty much any supported GPU. All up to you and your needs.
I'd recommend starting with pretty minimal hardware and adding more as you need it. My storage has quadrupled since I started doing this and at some point I tossed in an old GPU for transcoding.
Thanks for your input on this. Next time I get into it I will definitely look at it and you are right about needing resources as much is my usage need. I just meant to ask what are the bare minimums sort of.
There're recommendations in these comments that can solve the automating and downloading part of it but they still don't solve the discovery part of it.
The only way I see is - use Spotify to discover; sync your library using said software to collect and play later.
Hard to make a particular recommendation as backing up to the cloud is a popular option but depends on your upload speed and rate of data change. And depends how much you're willing to spend for what tradeoff
Use Hetzner! I'm not affiliated just a happy customer.
So I effectively have multiple layers of backups.
I’ve been considering buying some of those giant DVD lots that come up on Craigslist from time to time, or checking out flea markets for good deals.
With the way things are heading, one of my fears is I will get old and lose access to some of the shows are movies I loved in my youth. Licensing with streaming services are so fickle, and some others are removed or edited if they around found to be politically incorrect a decade or two after being made. I want to make sure I still have access to the original versions.
I do often wish I was one of those people who didn’t care, and could be happy with an iPad as my main computer, but it’s not in the cards for me.
I have been hunting down the movies that I was watching when growing up and it's been a real mission, especially the really old ones that were made before I was born.
Do you know what version of the Abyss you are going to get? Is it that theatrical version that cut out a major plot point or the director's cut that includes it? What about Blade Runner? Do you want the original theatrical version or the super duper pointless extended Director's Cut? You don't get a choice with streaming, and you often don't even know what version it'll be.
I find this is even worse with music. Take the Beatles. Their songs have been remastered many times. Some of the remasters are good, and some of them ruin the music for me. But what version are you going to get? And, you may be listening to a good version today, but due to label negotiations, have it swapped out with a different version tomorrow.
I take a lot of pride in curating my personal media collection. I know these issues aren't important to everyone (and some people who might care are just unaware), but they are incredibly important to me.
Anything I want to keep I'll make a specific decision and move it to my RAID1 drive which is backed up off-site.
With my usage I'm paying about $25 annually using S3. But if I ever need to full restore I'll be paying around $100 in data transfer fees.
Unraid is mostly used for storage management, the docker and vm parts are definitely side bits to the system.
My optiplex shows as 8.191 kwh last month -> 11w average.
There are plenty of old laptops that would be a great replacement, mine draws 8W at idle with 2x2TB SSDs: https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2023/05/16/reusing-old-hardwar...
I’m interested in the next generation: arm64 machines with 2xM.2 slots could do wonders as an idler.
OP was trying to replace streaming services, so he gonna need storage. Assuimg he had 3 hdd for raid 5, that is another 15*3 = 45w
You got me there
> Kinda like saying Winamp is alternative to Spotify
No, it's really not like saying that. I was responding to a post lamenting the difficulty of acquiring the files for the music they've already discovered on Spotify, and I brought up a music file acquisition system that pulls from what they've discovered on Spotify. That's different than comparing a local player to a discovery system.
If anyone has a solution I'd love to learn.
For android there is New Pipe and some forks.
I prefer to pay my yt loved channels than ser a fucking add
> to block all ads on your home network?
I already use Firefox on /my computer/. We were talking about a pihole or some /network/ solution. How do I block ads on my friends computer when they get into my network without touching their computer? How do I block ads on my TV? You'd have to do something like deep packet inspection. Devices I fully control I can trivially solve this but there are plenty of devices I don't, including ones I own.
And for Android, you know you can use revanced, right? You can recompile the app and others to get more control
We were talking DNS blockers. The context matters. I already use ublock but I can't do ublock on my pihole. I can't do it on an iPhone (I can use orion browser but YouTube quality is low). I can't do it on my TV. I can't do it on my friends computer that visits my house. And so on. I appreciate you trying to help but you're misunderstanding the problem and honestly I don't know how someone could be on HN and not know about ublock.
I’ve had Spotify since it launched in the U.K. so it has plenty of my listening history!
their algorithm is working then
The both of you,stop making things up.
Having parity on a one or more separate disks is one of the hallmarks of RAID4, and as such the comparison conceptually makes sense even if it's not literally RAID4. The actual state of their data protection is actually worse due to data not being striped across the data drives, reducing I/O, causing balancing issues, limiting large file sizes, and increasing risk of data loss if the wrong drive is killed at the wrong time. Modern software RAID not only solves all these problems, but also automatically heals bit rot and often includes compression support for both space savings and increased throughput. Unraid stalwartly refuses to grant these protections and enhancements to its users in the name of "simplicity", which I as a storage engineer must balk at.
Put your data at unnecessary risk if you want. I will shed no tears for you.
I mostly watch movies I have already seen before, but with the fragmentation and constant moving around that's happening with steaming services I would frequently end up using 3+ different ones every month. The constant cancel/renew cycle was a real hassle and very error prone, I would often forget one or two.
I only watch about 20 new movies a year, so even without hunting for bargains I will easily save a lot of money. But I will be looking for bargains, because why not.
I also visit my local library almost every week. They have a surprisingly excellent movie and tv catalog!
I have now cancelled all my movie and music streaming services!
I'm really just spitballing here. Seems really difficult to pull off, but what would such a system look like if we didn't design it for profit extraction and instead designed it to cut out all the middlemen? To really just make it as easy as possible for artists to connect to listeners. If we designed it without a desire to get rich
Please allow me to recommend FIP, as a human (it's a classic here but there's no such thing as recommending too much FIP) : https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip
And remember you can always get the audio steam through HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), on its M3U format, or others with better quality. There are many Android apps like Transistor to enjoy the stream, and even VLC can open these, in order to avoid using a web browser.
Likewise, I prefer online radios than big tech algorithms that craft my music experience.
No algorithm has been able to be able to be as weird but consistent as a community radio DJ.
The radio can still surprise and delight like little else. All the tech companies have been able to replicate is the disappointment.
Not to say never but people’s great advantage here is that they’re people.
Outside of rock you're left with automated pop and country stations who have computerized playlists.
note - I'm in the Midwest US.
Most of the radio stations here in Columbus, Ohio are what you described, the clearchannel / IHeartMedia stations.
However, there is an independent radio station and it's so great. They play Democracy Now! during the daytime and they have a rotating list of shows for the evening. I've heard some really great music during the evening shows.
If you're in Columbus, tune in to 98.3 or 92.7 FM!
Disclaimer I make https://www.radio-addict.com but only retrieve the played song data on demand (never tried to probe all 80k+ radio streams at the same time on my small server, could be fun), but searching on it could be a new feature (it's stored in Elixir genservers :D)
To those who aren't in the know already, it's this:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dgmltn.rad...
Commercial radio is the devil.
Classic rock exists to sell lawn mowers to middle aged men
I'm flagging you both.