Hello everyone I’ve been looking for a solution to replace Spotify, for me and my family. I already self-host some services, such as Jellyfin and Sonarr/Radarr For music however, my actual setup is the following :
- synchronize my music folder on my phone with my NAS
- download on the phone or on my computer However, I struggle with finding new music and having an easy way to add music.
From what I’ve read, Bandcamp could let me buy some music and add it to my collection (however all artists aren’t on bandcamp) There also seem to be a consensus around Navidrome for a music server.
But how can I set it up so that each member of my family has a separate account (with different musics in it), still discover new songs and easily add them? I’ve looked into Lidarr (not a lot I have to admit) but it seems like it’s mainly for downloading full albums, more than just songs. Is that the case?
TLDR: What self-hostable services can I use to replace Spotify, so that each member of my family has its own instance, recommendations and downloads?
Thank you in advance and sorry for my English
I’ve wanted to replace Spotify for years but have never been able to do it. Everyone here will suggest you just use Jellyfin, but that doesnt solve the discovery problem. My idea was basically using spot-dl to download playlist and add them to my music library. But it would always break after a few days and the metadata was always all messed up.
Thank you for your feedback, I was starting to think of something like that but figured it would break too much if it isn’t updated
So as you noticed there isn’t a one size fits all solution.
You are correct in that bandcamp allows you to buy songs and albums from artists, but not every artist is on the platform. I cycle between Quobuz, HDTracks, or other alternatives (wink, wink)
Navidrome is good for sharing one library, in my experience. It expects one library that a bunch of users can then interact with. This does meet your requirements of seperate stats and downloads per user however you will have access to your family’s music just like they will have access to yours.
You could try out funkwhale, which is similar but expects multiple libraries. So you can have a library of just your music and same with your family members, this will allow duplicate tracks. I will caution that funkwhale is, in my experience, not easy to get setup. I would personally recommend navidrome as it is very easy to setup annd use. As others mentioned, it uses the subsonic api under the hood so any subsonic client can access your navidrome libary. I use Feishen on desktop and symphonium on mobile.
You also mention syncing music folders between devices, this might get tricky. But you can setup a rsync services to ssh to your phone and then migrate tracks to your library. But personally I would recommend just trying to only download your music to your NAS so you can skip this annoyance. You can setup Lidarr which is sonarr/radarr but for music. However music piracy is not what it was 10 years ago, and I struggle to have lidarr autopull albums, but thats also because I try to use flac which is not as common either.
Finally you mention recommendations, for me the only option is ListenBrainz. You can setup a musicbrainz account, it is an open source music metadata platform, and then use that login for ListenBrainz, which is a tracking and recommendation engine. You can directly plug in that api to navidrome to have it sync all of your listens.
In summary, my recommendation is to only download music to your nas, setup navidrome for library sharing, (you can download from navidrome), and then setup lidarr for albums. Finally for individual tracks look into deemix, if you only want mp3 then it’s just free downloads.
Please feel free to reply or message for any clarifications.
Thank you for your detailed answer ! I have one more question : it seems that deemix uses only the Deezer servers. Is there someway to have a downloader that looks for tracks on Spotify or YouTube as well? Because sometimes the songs aren’t available (or the metadata is terrible)
No deemix only picks from deezer, but It seems to have song parity with spotify. Or rather I haven’t found a song on spotify that wasn’t in deezer.
As far as metadata, I use picard to autopopulate meta data from musicbrainz. My typical workflow is find something in deemix, download it and put it in a staging directory, then have lidarr import, trackname fix, and metadata fix, and then finally have navidrome scan the final folder and make the music accessible.
Not FOSS, but something I’ve been considering is Roon. I switched to Tidal from Spotify (which is a legit improvement imho)
They have a self hostable option and the idea is to mix your personal library, Tidal, Quobuz, and recommendation engines into one app.
I saw this recommended in another thread, but if I read correctly you need not only the roon subscription but also the Tidal/Qobuz one right ? Each of those being around 15$/month, that’s starting to be a bit too much for me I think
And check for each music service their offered music. I’ve checked out tidal actually today with one of those export playlist tools and about 10% of my (honestly: niche) music wasn’t available.
Absolutely, it’s expensive. Definitely better to share it with family and friends to equalize the cost.
I only consider it because I listen to a ton of music, my university degree was music, and I spend a lot of money on music generally.
From my experience with sonarr and radarr, I thought lidarr would be great, but it’s garbage.
Bandcamp isn’t what it used to be, apparently there’s a better service for music now, I’m sorry I can’t recall the name.
Navidrome should serve you well for Spotify replacement. It uses the subsonic api, so you can use any app that supports that, and there are many.
Regarding sync phone with server, you might want some thing like synching or nextcloud with a local player on your phone. My music collection is 1.5TB, so I simply stream and have only a few select albums downloaded locally on the phone.
Bandcamp isn’t what it used to be, apparently there’s a better service for music now, I’m sorry I can’t recall the name.
artcore? https://www.artcore.com/
or formaviva? https://formaviva.com/
(though I still like bandcamp)
Yeah, I want to say, Bandcamp was sold to a new company last year but so far, it’s pretty much the same as before. I can see someome saying they have some beef with them, but I still use them fairly often, to support lesser known bands when I can. And they schedule special Friday events where they don’t collect any fees - all music sold on those days goes straight to the artists. Sooo much better than the evil Spotify.
I would love to know of a good alternative to Bandcamp, but don’t rule it out entirely, IMO.
Replacing any of the paid-for recommendation services is hard in my experience (I loved the Google Music recommendation engine, RIP). Anyways you sort of have two paths of travel to intertwine if you want to stay away from The Big Boys™:
(a) Find independent streaming sites like SomaFM, Big Sonic Heaven and DKFM ([1], amongst many others) which fit your genres as they routinely have “new tracks weekend” besides the broad exposure you get to hearing bands you’ve never heard as the volunteer DJs rotate their preferences. These are your old school original Shoutcast / Icecast streams run solely on donations, there are a lot of them out there for every genre.
(b) Look into something like https://audiomack.com/ - I don’t use it (maybe I should!) but it “feels like” it might be a fit for your needs based on your OP details. Maybe not, at least give it a glance and see what’s going on with it as it does look interesting. Something else might catch your eye at: https://bandcampalternative.com/
[1] some sites from various genres:
(I loved the Google Music recommendation engine, RIP)
This will never cease to sting. Google Play Music was so good.
I uploaded giga upon gigabytes of well-curated (tags, etc.) songs - the max was 400MB per file so you could just about fit a 1 hour DJ session into that as a single “song” as well. The desktop app was complete garbage but you could eventually get your entire MP3 collection uploaded as a massive recommendation seed for the engine to use “more like this!”. Or put 30 songs into a playlist and then say “make me a radio station based on these 30 songs.” and next thing you new you had a 500 long tracks playlist of similar music. sigh those were the good days.
Unfortunately it had a lot of internal track mis-labeling problems; a number of my saved playlists got destroyed when the conversion to YTM happened as the two services could not agree on what a given song was, so YTM thoughtfully made a mess of it. (as well as GM having songs YTM did not, so all those just disappeared too). This soured me on ever adopting YTM and pushed me back to Shoutcast/Icecast solutions.
I used lidarr to sync my followed artists from spotify and then just use plex and plexamp for music, all my plex users have access to it also but I think most people still have spotify so it’s just mainly me using it
Jellyfin is pretty nice for music too. I use it with Finamp, an Android client.
Finamp is also on ios, making it a great solution for when you have several users across ecosystems. There are other Jellyfin music clients as well but I don’t know them
You can also point Navidrome at your music folder for web access which I prefer when using my laptop
The discovery problem is definitely the biggest challenge though. Lidarr is something but if you enable it with newsgroups you’ll generally only find more “notable” music. Anything on the more esoteric side is generally gonna be tougher.
You can integrate torrents and private trackers but if you’re anything like me you want to run all downloaded music through a mass tagging program like beets.io or picard to get stuff tagged according to musicbrainz so your library is consistent, which wrecks seeding, and private music trackers are generally pretty draconian about seeding. So then it’s either keep two copies of music, one to seed and one tagged, or hit and run everything and get banned, or just have a library with messy tags (which if you’re like me is just simply not an option). I currently do the two copies thing because it’s generally not that much space and once I hit a 2:1 ratio I get rid of it. In the instance the tags match 100% I point it at my library and permaseed. This is labor intensive though and everything else on my server is mostly automated
I have never figured out a way to integrate soulseek. This would probably be the optimal way as the library is almost as extensive as private trackers (sometimes more so), I can filter by quality (though sometimes flacs are transcodes with this way), there’s etiquette to not clog peoples queue but no real seeding rules, etc. but on my server soulseek runs in a vnc based docker and scripting that goes beyond my talent level
I use syncthing and poweramp.
Lidarr is centered around full albums unless a song was released as a single, specifically it uses release-group on musicbrainz.
I run both jellyfin and Plex, and for the music app I think plexamp > finamp, but both work to sync between their respective instance. I haven’t tried anything else because I already had Plex pass for other things.
Plexamp seems to tick all the boxes, but yeah that plex pass requirement is a bit of a downer.
The Emby mobile music player is awful. For whatever reason it will play and show your history on the desktop/server side but it doesn’t keep track on the mobile app.
Bandcamp to buy albums but if you really need a streaming service similar to spotify, Tidal offers better quality and gives at least 3x more to artists.
If you’re just looking for a source to acquire tracks, Qobuz works. Their mobile client is trash, but the serve quality and source files are great. Easy to migrate Spotify playlists over as well.
Nextcloud + Nextcloud Music App is also a good solution. The app supports subsonic too, so it can be used with a few different apps.
I use Jellyfin to host my music, and Finamp on my phone to browse and listen to it. Finamp supports downloads as well, so you can listen to your music offline and away from home. Pair that with a self-hosted VPN to access Jellyfin away from home and you’ve got most of your needs covered!
Go to local “art in the park”, music nights, and other such local events and listen to the band playing. Unless you live in a very rural area there is likely many many bands playing someplace every day around you. When you hear something you life find the band and ask how to get their music. If they sell CDs buy one - buy one even if you only accept the music but don’t like it just to support the idea that CDs are not dead.
I use Navidrome and Jellyfin.
