Lidarr, prowlarr, qbit and navidrome do wonders
This, plus if you love a smaller artist and want to support them you can buy their music from qobuz, download it (it’s drm free), and import it into Lidarr.
Yeah exactly. Some artist also make their music available for download in high ress formats after a fee. Which I am happy to pay directly to them.
Have you tried tidal? ATM I’m too broke to be paying for music but in the future, I would like to support the artists
I also have tidal, I do rip from it from time to time. As it happens that at random songs and artist are no longer available to play in my country.
YouTube music better not be on that list. I have problems with it adding generated music to radio stations all the time (stuff that’s unlabeled but that I know is AI from lists I’ve seen floating around the internet). I went through one ai “artists” whole catalog and downvoted every song they made and still sometimes I catch them slipping.
Tidal, Qobuz, Bandcamp, and Deezer are the ones if recommend.
I’ve been running Navidrome + Symfonium for over 3 years and it replaced Spotify. The only thing they have over my setup is a near infinite number of playlists. But I do everything myself now, I’ve reconnected with my music.
My main issue with Spotify was no lossless audio at the time, and many tracks weren’t on there, if they were they had a habit of disappearing. Now I can listen to any track, remix, bootleg, and even the 1700+ tracks my friend digitised from his vinyl collection until perpetuity.
Symfonium, btw, is truly the best music streaming app, the customizability is beyond anything I’ve seen
Symphonium is the goat. Using it with Jellyfin.
Altho what I miss as well is the big data driven recommendation of new, niche music. I tried new compilation albums, I tried recommendation by genre/tag but nothing quite hits it like spotify 'discover weekly".
Also my listenbrainz doesnt really scrobble while listening offline (downloaded) playlists on symphonium, so its not really an option.
Anyone with a solution to this?
Literally the only thing about Symfonium that’s lacking is having to manually scan the library when adding new music. I use Feishin on my desktops, which some manages to do it in the background.
Feishin is so epic too, I love it
Yeah that’s true. But once metadata is cached, it takes like a minute to scan my entire library!
I’ve been trying to tell all my friends who are self-hosting curious when they see my setup that the feeling of reconnecting with your library is worth all the work alone. It’s like having your old iPod with YOUR library. Adding more to it, reassessing what’s serving you or what can be trimmed, making sick playlists that mean something to you. It’s all so intentional. Algorithmic music is incredible for discovery and that’s about it.
Algorithmic music is incredible for discovery and that’s about it.
This may be true for most but was not for me. I was on streaming services for two years and discovered maybe five new bands. I went back to my old process of discovery (reading magazines, reading online reviews) and discover many more every year.
Algorithms tend to pump you full of similar sounding artists. I’d rather be challenged as a listener and grow than be stuck in a same sounding culdesac.
Couldn’t agree more! Although I always wish the barrier for entry to be lower for self-hosting.
I use Symfonium and sync it with Jellyfin. It really is amazing
Mm zymfonium is not open source I see
I just installed it with a free trial to test it. The past week I installed what feels like dozens of Jellyfin Android music clients, some early in dev, some already out for a while. They all sucked in some respect, most notably offline play. I really really hope Symfonium is better than all the others on that, otherwise I don’t know what to do.
I’m currently using Ultrasonic, it’s ok. On desktop, I love Feishin
Ultrasonic does not support Jellyfin though.
Oh I just use official jellyfin or findroid
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
My conscience has never been more free
Yeah, but are the artists getting paid?
The artists weren’t getting paid when you were using Spotify. The shareholders were.
If you want artists to get paid, you have to buy direct or support them indirectly via merch/tickets/buying streams, etc.
Yeah I do, that’s what I’m saying
Gotcha. Thank you for clarifying.
I use the money to go to concerts and buy merch!
The ones I really like I will still buy something from. The others I don’t listen to enough for them to even make $1 from streaming anyway.
Bandcamp or qobuz. They actually pay the artists a lot better. Especially bandcampfridays
Qobuz bruv. Pays artists more and has easy peasy playlist migration.
I wanted to use it, but a Facebook tracker in the app is a hard no for me.
https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/769361/
Use NextDNS and block the requests. I don’t blame a company for trying to make money. I do respect that if you are paying for a service they should not embed crap like that
I use PiHole/RethinkDNS, but that’s not the point. Of course a company wants to make money, that’s why I pay them a monthly amount for my subscription. If it’s not enough to have a successful business, then ask for more money. But don’t shove spyware up on me. Tidal does not include Facebook spyware, so Tidal it is.
Consider buying and/downloading your favorite tracks to make an offline library. In my case it was totally worth the effort. I get to keep it forever, everything plays instantly and I need no subscription or internet connection. Also I can still pay to stream for a month from time to time.
Bandcamp is good for this. You can stream stuff you bought on there for free through the app if you want to. I download my purchases and add them to my enormous library that I started in the late nineties.
Yeah, that’s where I get about one third of my music. Another third is from Qobuz and the rest is converted from YT or somewhere else. Furthermore, I use MP3Tag and RSGain or Picard to organize the files and set replay gain tags so audio players can play the tracks with normalized volume.
I am really liking Qobuz
bandcamp is all i need. if an artist only sells music on corporate sites, they’re a sellout and part of the problem
Bandcamp is owned by the biggest music licensing conglomerate in the world, how is that not corporate?
I’ve used Qobuz for a long time, and it’s been great.
I moved to Qobuz where I am slowly buying my music to fill in my Navidrome server which is my main driver. They support and pay artists substantially more.
I’d do the same, yet Qobuz is not available in my country, despite being in EU…
My biggest thing is discovering new music in line with my broad tastes. Anything do that that well? Then im off.
If self hosting your music you could always go down the route of Listenbrainz scrobbling with something like Explo to autograb the weekly recommended playlist. Same goes for Last.fm. Music discovery is also the thing that had me hooked for so long.
Will look into this, thanks!
I’ve been using Qobuz for the past few months and it’s pretty good. The playlist limitation sucks but they recently made it easier to shuffle tracks marked as favourites. I also find it easier to discover new and indie artists on there. I wish someone would make a TUI player for it an I imagine i’ll eventually just make my own (haven’t looked at their API yet so not sure if it’s possible) but there is a Linux GUI player called QBZ.
There is this one https://github.com/SofusA/qobine
Something free/open that basically just hit-n-runs YouTube and doesn’t serve any ads.
Examples: Kreate (or a similar fork), Metrolist, etc.
Downside is that YT will push deliberate updates that break these types of apps occasionally and you may have to wait a few days for them to be fixed. It is a cat and mouse game.
Use these apps for music discovery. If you like a particular artist, buy the album directly from them and cache it digitally on your intended listening devices. Or go see a show or buy merch directly from the artists website. The artist makes more margin on those than they will make for thousands of Spotify streams.
Plexamp and a well maintained library.