I was hoping to go all in with Jellyfin, but it’s been absolutely maddening to try to get it to play nice with my curated library. It just makes too many dumb assumptions about artist metadata.

Any other suggestions?

EDIT: I installed Navidrome, then poured over the documentation for the config file and micromanaged every setting. This has allowed me to get damn near close to the exact unobtrusive behavior I had hoped for.

EDIT 2: AFA mobile client goes, I’d absolutely consider paying for Symphonium, if it didn’t seem to require my having a Google Play account (fuck that). So instead I’m trying Tempo.

  • nfreak@lemmy.mlEnglish
    9·
    6 hours ago

    I’m in the middle of writing up a novel about my music stack since I’ve just about gotten it exactly where I want it. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer here and it’s difficult to really replicate the behavior of major streaming services.

    The short version of what I have set up:

    • Backend: Navidrome

    • Frontends: Feishin (both desktop and hosted) and Symfonium

    • Remote access: Pangolin (this does involve keeping a Navidrome rest endpoint totally exposed so Tailscale/Netbird/Wireguard are fine too, but I wanted to be sure my wife can access it from her work PC in the office)

    • Library and metadata management: Lidarr, beets, and metadata-remote. Lidarr does the bulk (one instance per user/library), beets handles manual imports, and MDRM is for fine-tuning and really obscure stuff

    • Searching/Downloading: Lidarr + Tubifarry + slskd. Also support smaller artists as much as possible, bandcamp purchases and merch and whatever go a long way.

    • Discovery: Explo

    I’ll have a full beginning to end writeup pretty soon hopefully. It’s still not perfect, and juggling multiple users adds a huge layer of complexity, but I’m happy with where it’s at.

      • nfreak@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        3 hours ago

        This is gonna get a bit into my particular setup but sure

        Explo’s a super early in development “discover weekly” generator, relies on Listenbrainz scrobbling and runs on a cron job to download the playlist from your connected source (in my case slskd), put it in a folder, and create a Navidrome playlist out of it. I use the SLSKD_MIGRATE option (my feedback is actually the reason the dev even added it), so my files are downloaded to my slskd dir and explo moves them to a separate library.

        I’m very particular about my library though so I don’t want it just throwing everything into the same folder as the rest of my music, and I have 2 users, so my directories are like:

        • /music/me
        • /music/wife
        • /discover/me
        • /discover/wife

        Keeping the discover folders for Explo completely outside the main library, but mounted in Navidrome as additional libraries, helps keep things very separate. Explo’s also smart enough to check with Navidrome before searching for a track - if it already exists in the library, then it won’t redownload it.

        I run 2 Explo instances, 2 hours apart, and in between those runs I have another cron job that wipes out my slskd downloads directory for a clean slate.

        One small catch I ran into: Explo needs a Navidrome admin account to kick off the library scan, but my users aren’t admins (since an admin automatically has access to every single library). So each week when it runs I need to log in as an admin and re-assign each playlist accordingly. Not a big deal, and the dev already has some ideas in mind to address this in the future. This also becomes a small bit of an issue with the whole “don’t download existing tracks” thing - Explo’s looking at the admin’s library which is everything, not the individual users’ libraries. So if one user’s playlist has a track that’s in the other user’s library, it won’t be properly added. Not the end of the world, but a mild annoyance.

        I will say (and this isn’t a fault of Explo), I’m not a big fan of Listenbrainz’s weekly playlist algorithm. About 2/3 of the playlist tends to be artists that I already listen to, so it feels like a bit of a waste. I hope down the road we can plug in last.fm or something which tends to be a bit better for that.

  • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    4·
    10 hours ago

    Jellyfin.
    On the phone it’s only usable at home because I don’t have a VPN in place.
    But I could stream via the web ui which is not convenient.

  • Nico198X@europe.pubEnglish
    114·
    13 hours ago

    SD Card on my phone. i don’t stream it anymore. storage is so cheap now i can easily hold all of my flac files, no problem.

    edit don’t look for solutions to problems you don’t have. most ppl don’t NEED to stream everything over the internet.

    go back to local.

      • slamphear@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        8 hours ago

        I’m currently waiting for my Fairphone 6 to arrive, but I believe the sim tray includes a spot for an SD card. I was also recently using a Furi Labs FLX1, which also had an SD card slot. There are other options out there. 😊

    • remon@ani.socialEnglish
      31·
      8 hours ago

      So you only listen to music on one device? If not, do you swap the SD card between devices all the time or do you have a separate SD card for all devices? How do you keep them in sync, transfer playlists, etc? What if you have more than 2TB?

      Yeah, go local as in: Run your own media server and stream from that.

      But only keeping music files on the end device is a step in the wrong direction.

      • Nico198X@europe.pubEnglish
        21·
        8 hours ago

        i listen on two devices: my phone and my PC.

        depends on ppl’s use cases. a home media server is over-engineered solution for me, and perhaps others. but it’s good to stop for second and consider what one’s needs actually are.

        • remon@ani.socialEnglish
          2·
          8 hours ago

          Right, but considering that OP is already running a media server and also is looking for a way to curated his library, I don’t see how switching to on-device storage would be anything but a downgrade.

          • Nico198X@europe.pubEnglish
            21·
            8 hours ago

            up to OP. i read it as “i wanted to go all in on Jellyfin, but it’s been a PITA. what else would you suggest?”

    • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.orgOPEnglish
      1·
      7 hours ago

      I use a DAP with an SD card on the go, because my whole collection is lossless and I like fidelity. However, it’s convenient to be able to stream music to my TV while doing house chores, in addition to allowing family access.

      • Nico198X@europe.pubEnglish
        2·
        7 hours ago

        the family bit is key i think for needing a home server. some TVs you can do via BT to the phone.

        but if you’re setting it up anyway for your family, then yeah, best to organize around the server.

        good luck to you!

      • Nico198X@europe.pubEnglish
        3·
        11 hours ago

        sure, then in your case, if you absolutely must have access to it all at one time, then home streaming makes sense.

        for me, and i do imagine most ppl (tho i could be wrong!), it doesn’t make sense compared to just returning to local.

        genius that i am, i only realized that AFTER i setup a jellyfin server on my home server for streaming my music. XD derp.

        • HiTekRedNek@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          10 hours ago

          I use navidrome. And what’s nice about it is, there are 3 people in my household, they can all access that. We all have our own favorite tracks saved in our preferred player, and we can still save a good chunk of them to our phones.

          In my case, I have a random mood playlist of 200 tracks that gets updated every morning before I wake up, my phone app caches all 200 of them, so I can play them without network access.

          • SidewaysHighways@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            8 hours ago

            how does this work for you? i was on gonic but moved back to navidrome to allow for mopidy to let home assistant trigger playlists directly (with the mpd integration)

            but i haven’t figured out the smart playlists yet

            • HiTekRedNek@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              7 hours ago

              I have a few smart playlists set up that are each various genres of music. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough.

    • roofuskit@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      21 hours ago

      There really isn’t any decent alternative. I can run 4 Navidrome servers along side each other using less resources than a single copy of the alternatives. It just works and does almost everything you could want.

      • nfreak@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        Navidrome even supports multiple libraries now. I was using 2 instances for a bit for my wife and I, but now it’s all in one.

        • roofuskit@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          5 hours ago

          I didn’t realize they had updated. That’s great! I knew it was on the timeline but it works so well even with multiple instances I hadn’t been watching for it.

          • nfreak@lemmy.mlEnglish
            3·
            4 hours ago

            Yep! They released it like a week after I just set up a second instance lmao

            The only catch I noticed is that the default “/music” library can’t be changed, so I set up my directories in the container like:

            • /user1/music
            • /user1/discover
            • /user2/music
            • /user2/discover
            • /shared

            All 5 are set up as separate libraries, and I keep "/music/ in the container mounted to an empty directory. The discover folders are populated when Explo runs each week, that’s a whole project of its own.

    • ctry21@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      11·
      1 day ago

      +1 for Navidrome. As simple as pasting the album into the directory and it sorts the rest. I use subtune on my phone to access it and it works great.

    • jhdeval@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      24 hours ago

      Another vote for navidrome. I tried substreamer on android ibdid not like the search. I use symfonium easy interface let’s me randomize in many ways.

      On a side question anybody have suggestions for automatically creating genre based m3u files? I would like to setup “radio” like stations but adding my music to a playlist.

      • N0x0n@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        15 hours ago

        Not sure this is what you are looking for but navidrome has smart playlists, which is a small configuration file you can add to your navidrome and will automagically create a playlist in your navidrome based on your config.

  • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
    3·
    16 hours ago

    Careful curation of mp3 tags and a short leash.

    My Plex and Jellyfin libraries are the same files and they are both handled identically because I don’t let them think about the files.

    I used a tool to export my Plex playlists as XML, then wrote a little python to convert them into M3U, jellyfin recognizes the M3 use and just makes playlists.

  • Suzune@ani.socialEnglish
    4·
    18 hours ago

    At the moment I’m trying out Ampache. It seems to have more features than Gonic.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
    14·
    1 day ago

    I still use Samba to do everything related to filesharing (including music streaming). I haven’t needed to touch my media server in years. It just continues to work. 🤷‍♂️

    Since it’s just normal network filesharing, pretty much any music player that has samba support works. On a PC, I like Winamp. On my phone, VLC.

    • N0x0n@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      15 hours ago

      What application do you use on your phone to mount samba shares (Android)? I know Amaze can mount those but they are not easily accessible by other applications.

    • Cousin Mose@lemmy.hogru.chEnglish
      1·
      15 hours ago

      Not related to music steaming but I’ll just throw in that Infuse is an awesome iOS, macOS, tvOS app for streaming movies from a Samba (or a multitude of other) servers.

      • kerobaros@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        16 hours ago

        I’ll keep an eye on that, thank you, but I’ve been using beets to maintain a very large library for 10+ years and I’m very happy with it. It was the only software I found to cure my foobar2000 addiction way back when

    • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.orgOPEnglish
      20·
      1 day ago

      > be Jellyfin

      > see a track in an album with a “… feat. …” artist tag

      “This must be a completely different artist than the album artist!”

      > create somehow fucking immutable new metadata

      • gccalvin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        81·
        1 day ago

        I also use Jellyfin. Before being able to set custom tag delimiters, you had to ensure your music artists and album artists ID3 tags were correct. I believe it used a ‘;’ to separate multiple artists. Now with custom delimiters you can set your own. You may be able to try and fix things by setting ‘feat.’ as a custom tag.

        Ultimately, I would recommend just using mp3tag and spending a few minutes setting up an action that replaces ‘feat.’ with a delimiter, such as a ‘|’. Run it through your current library and you should be good.

        • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.orgOPEnglish
          10·
          1 day ago

          Thank you for the info. I might try this, however I’m already having a 10x better experience now that I’ve set up Navidrome, and then tried the Symphonium client.

          • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            8 hours ago

            You can use Symphonium with JF libraries as well.

            I almost set up Navidrome but I have TVs and Movies on JF already

          • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            23 hours ago

            I did this for a while, and only switched back to Jellyfin/Finamp while degoogling (needed for paid version). I thought it was definitely worth it while I was using it. I also listen to music on the TV and Jellyfin handles it better than other options I tried (including side-loading symfonium).

            I currently use a separate music library manager on my server to organize my music collection, then Jellyfin just does the server work.

            I think you’ll be very happy with the setup you are using.

            • curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              1·
              8 hours ago

              Personally I just run both.

              Navidrome is what I would call the daily driver, but since its just a share that JF can also see, for TV playback its JF just like you.

              But I’m also a stickler for metadata so I don’t often run into issues. When I do see something come up thats not right, I correct manually. Which wasn’t happening very often until lidarr had the metadata issue with musicbrainz, though the past few months its been a manual effort.

    • pHr34kY@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      23 hours ago

      Oh, you have 10 random singles in the same directory? That must be an album all from the same artist!

  • Domi@lemmy.secnd.meEnglish
    7·
    23 hours ago

    I use Jellyfin but I download all my songs from Tidal, Qobuz or Deezer and tag them automatically right then and there in a clean format so Jellyfin does not have to guess at all.

    I also have some automatic checks in place to convert incorrect metadata to a proper format. Like moving artists from the title (feat. Somebody else) to the artists tag Somebody; Somebody else and a bunch more.

    Together with Finamp on desktop and mobile everything is pretty much working as expected.