Edit: Also please tell me if a meme is even allowed as the thumbnail for the post in this community - just feels like it gets some of my current desperation across :D
Since the last time I posted here sharing my new home server, I’ve gotten a little more acquainted with the services I’m using. After getting acquisition of shows and movies sorted, I ventured into music (streaming).
As many here, I’m used to using streaming services for music, ie. Spotify or YouTube Music. Naturally, I tried a similar approach by setting up my Arr stack to feed its music into Jellyfin where the music is picked up by Symfonium. I tried it out for a couple days and liked it quite a bit since it keeps my phone clean of “unnecessary” data but I still retain access to music. Unfortunately, the way I acquire my music limits my selection quite a bit unless I venture into torrenting, which I’d prefer not to. So unless I figure out a safe way to torrent on my server, I’m stuck with getting access to a very limited selection of artists and albums.
In addition to that limitation, there’s also the files formats of the music. Most of the music I’ve downloaded was only available in FLAC, which is awesome if you’ve got the bandwidth and data plan for playback, but for me it means that I spend 3GB of data for a day of streaming music which is just not sustainable.
In comparison, I can set up a Revanced version of Spotify in addition to my Revanced YT Music to get access to all the music I could want. Unfortunately, that comes with the caveat of still being tied to the companies I’m trying to get rid of - albeit not financially anymore, but I’m still sharing my data.
Ultimately, I’m not sure what to do. What I love about self-hosting is the independence from all the companies we’re being fucked over by in all kinds of imaginable ways. But if it’s free, outside my sharing data with them, can I really compete?
I’d be interested in hearing your opinions and thoughts on this. How did you solve music streaming with your build?
Por qué no los dos?
By the way if you want a really cheap and easy setup for the time being while you figure out jellyfin/navidrome and docker and all that.
Symfonium app can run from a google drive that you can spin up for free and throw some music into. And then if you end up self hosting you can just point it to your server.
I’ve got a server set up already and am using Symfonium but thanks for the suggestion regardless :)
Can you just point it at a shared network directory too?
It says it supports network shared folders or NAS that use SMB or webdav… So yeah should.
Good to know. Could be helpful setting up basic, low-maintenance servers for family members.
Yeah it has become my go to for recommending to people with struggles with Spotify.
Plus if they ever purchased albums through amazon they have all the MP3 files anyways available to download and I have them throw the files in a drive.
Does it display album art? I thought that came from the server software. Or can symphounium source that?
I use Tidal and Bandcamp
I’m hearing great things about Quobuz
Bandcamp and Quobuz allow you to buy and download music
And I have to mention, as I do in any thread like this: If you self-host music you bought you’re a friend to me. If you pirate from billionaires, I don’t care. If you pirate from small bands, stop it.
i selfhost the music collection i own on LPs, to replace spotify/yt music i use Archivetune
Self host, takes less time then you think after the initial library build. Easy to do in a weekend. If you have some money to spend on music then buy music from the artists you love. Can all be in one place, none of this exclusive garbage, quality as high as you want, can rip music that’s never been released digitally, and I think most importantly - access to your music library without an algorithm telling you what to listen to. You’ll be surprised how your listening habits change and how well you know your music after jumping off the engagement treadmill.
I’ve mostly gone with pirating. I’ve built a massive library of flac songs, as for when I’m outside I can’t stream cause I’m stuck with ADSL, but I usually keep some albums I’m into on my phone and I also use Grayjay to discover new music.
ADSL? You poor soul :/
Leeching off corporations’ infrastructures for free is a noble endeavor and everyone should do it.
Network traffic, unique accesses, etc are metrics used by investors and media to measure their success, so we’re still contributing to it, and also, we’re preventing alternatives from gaining more fame, so getting rid of corporations should always be the preferred path
spotify and google will figure out a way to block modded apps eventually.
nobody can take your home server and its content away from you
Bum music off of Spotify and save up for a home server in the meantime, got it.
Today servers can be nothing more than a $50 nuc from eBay with a larger drive in it, or an external one.
My server today is an old Small Form Factor Dell. It has no problem running VMWare ESXi, with multiple Windows and Linux VMs, ripping DVDs, converting videos and streaming, all at the same time.
The issue now is storage is getting pretty damn expensive
Yeah, I got 4 used 2TB hard drives on Amazon back in early 2024 with a $100 gift card and still had a few bucks left over, and now I see that you basically can’t find a single 2TB drive lower than $70…
I wish I started my homelab sooner…
Fortunately I bought my storage just before the latest increase. I’ve just put my replacement cycle on pause until prices come down.
More risky for me but fortunately I have 3 local copies of everything.
In a dystopic future, somewhere…
Chilling out listening to some music
BANG!
“Put your hands up! No sudden moves!”
“But, but…”
“We tracked down self-hosting activities, and we’re confiscating everything and taking you to jail”
Mp3 collections never stopped being cool, you just have to invest some time into it
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System NAS Network-Attached Storage SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
[Thread #263 for this comm, first seen 29th Apr 2026, 17:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Don’t use revanced. The backbone of the dev team moved to morphs now, and so do other modders that used to dev using revanced.
There was a bunch of drama that’s worthy for Lemmy but stuck in reddit that I don’t care to bring here.
It got easier to patch things in some ways, but having known how to do it “the complex way” with vanced and revanced before I feel like some is lost in translation.
But overall it’s a lot better with morphe, the patches against megacorps efforts to block access comes quicker than revanced, and the YouTube minimum app requirement now moved up
Alright, I’ll give this a shot. What’s the harm in keep using Revanced, I’m wondering tho? Vulnerabilities that may not be patched out? Or is it just about the lack of features/overall functionality if new patches are rolled out slower/not at all?
From what I can see in both subreddits, it’s mostly buggy and failed patching as far as I can see for those sticking with revanced.
I’m unsure on vulnerabilities but if the recommended app version is old enough or not working on bypassing using newer versions, I’m sure is not good.
Also I forgot to mention this previously but in revanced aubreddit the mention of morphe is a subreddit bannable offence. At least that’s what the morphe fans are saying. Personally the ones egging on revanced is childish but I can and can’t properly vouch.
A bit of my history of how I knew all these
I started to use URV (I think that stands for universal revanced) because that took base revanced manager and added ways to easily use different patch repos. Back then it’s because I was still patching xitter app. So I already wasn’t using the revanced manager for a few weeks but still use their repo on that URV.
Then I saw a weird post in revanced sub about some dev tiff. A month from that post I somehow got to see a morphe post in the revanced sub so I tried morphe and stuck around a bit in morphe’s sub. That’s how I know what happened so I decided to trust the morphe guys.
Technical wise I just have no idea how differing they are. I just stick with the results I personally get.
Edit: oh my the tone of my two comments is night and day to me lol
Thanks for the detailed write-up. So far, I can’t tell there’s much of a difference outside the limited amount of apps you can patch - Revanced had a lot more to offer. Functionality-wise, they apps themselves seem identical, so I don’t really care which I use.
Alsp no worries about the tone of yours comments - came off fine :) and thanks again for the suggestion
Use Navidrome for music and transcode mp3 streaming. Done and dusted.
That’s a different problem than access to music which I’ll leave up to you. But I’ll note that music exists out of the sphere of corporate dominance. And by that I mean, artists that self publish.
I find it interesting how quickly one abandons the principle struggle central to the meme on this post. Like, “I use Linux and don’t give corporations a dime but I LOVE Jay-z”
I’ve seen so many people suggest that that I’m honestly ashamed I just didn’t know Jellyfin and Navidrome could do that. I guess the file sizes are sorted then.
The thing is, what I’m using is good shows and movies but music isn’t that much of a focus. Maybe if I used a different indexer that’s “dedicated” to music, that’d not be a problem. So that leaves me with torrenting or Soulseek, the former of which I have experience with, but it’s unsafe unless you use a VPN, and the latter of which I don’t and don’t know how to set up on my server (yet) because I don’t know how Docker, containers and whatnot work. CasaOS is very user-friendly like that, but I don’t really know how to import or deploy programs in general. That’s what made even make the post in the first palfe because I felt stuck, not knowing how to proceed now. Falling back to year-long habits is just easier instead of overcoming challenges and growing with them is the gist of it.
I agree. I guess growing up in capitalism, it’s justdifficult to outright abandon every single habit you’ve built up overnight. It takes time and patience and as long you’re aware of it and try to move in a good direction, that’s good enough for me.
-arr stack is your friend. Read up on VPN kill switch. Isolate via docker networking. Run unbound DNS resolvers with dnssec.
What time is it? Key question of the movement
Soulseek has far more music on it than you can typically find on free public torrent sites.
Just a heads up.
i started with lidarr and very, very quickly stripped that our for just slskd
Same here. Lidarr had trouble finding most of the stuff I was looking for. I wish I had some kind of automation like the are stack for slskd. Maybe I try soularr that promises that, whenever I feel like exploring this part of the sea.
Tubiferry plugin for lidarr.
Wow that seems way easier and feature richier than the other service I was looking into. Definitely gonna try that one! Thanks
I wrote an application which runs on my server and monitors my favorites on Tidal/Deezer/Qobuz. It downloads them in bulk whenever I have a premium account with one of them. Usually I purchase a month of premium every few months, at which point I get nice clean FLACs for local use.
The FLACs are moved to Jellyfin and I stream them using Finamp, which also supports transcoding, so I keep 128 kbps Opus files for offline playback and stream the raw FLAC files when bandwidth is no concern.
I have amassed a huge music library over the last decades, so even if all streaming websites go under tomorrow, I have enough music locally to last me a lifetime.
If anyone doesn’t want to write their own software, Lidarr has auto import from lists. You can add your playlists from Spotify and last.FM and it will watch them and automatically download the songs from the lists. There is no Tidal, or Deezer option though which feels like a ball drop by the Lidarr devs.
Grayjay is a nice alternative.
I guess Revanced and by extension Morphe offer that too as you get access to the perks of YT Premium and can just download the music you want to listen to offline. Sure, it’s still tied to the app itself and the jailbreak working but so is Grayjay, isn’t it?
Grayjay is more like a “insert any plugin from any website and we’ll make it work” app. You just enter your YouTube/Twitch/Kick/SoundCloud/Crunchyroll/Bilibili account and boom, no ads, full anonymity, and download whatever you want.
