The reason I gave up on MP3’s and subscribed to Spotify was because Spotify was easy. I’ve been listening “Iron Maiden - Empire of the Clouds” song every day and like a week ago, its removed. This was the last straw for me. Right now I’m trying to find “Stremio” of the music world. Can someone assist?
Key features I’m looking for:
- Synchronization between devices
- Offline play
- Playlist support
- Both desktop and mobile apps
- Wide music library (optional if I will upload music)
- Lyrics (optional)
Update: thanks to everyone who shared their solutions 🙏
I was an early adopter of Jellyfin and love it - but personally prefer Navidrome for my music server. Granted, I haven’t looked at the music capabilities of Jellyfin in a long while, because I’ve been running Navidrome.
Symphonium android client is my recommendation for that (and I believe it also works for Jellyfin) but there are others.
My pipeline is essentially as you describe though Lidarr –> nzbget –> Navidrome
I also use Navidrome and Symphonium, along with Wireguard.
Same, Navidrome, Lidarr, Symfonium and Nginx reverse proxy. Plus last.fm scrobbling.
But getting new music takes a while, I should probably try the OPS interview.
Plus last.fm scrobbling
Every app seems to offer this. Why do I want this? I feel like I’ve been wondering this for like 20 years, but have been too afraid to ask lol.
It’s a music tracker + finder + social network. You can see how your taste changes over time. Personally my favorite feature is the weekly stats with a genre timeline.
Thanks!
For new music suggestions
Thanks!
I just set up navidrome after reading this, and I really like it, but it’s an absolute pain to install on windows
Ah sorry! I have only run it from within Docker on Linux. BUT, I’m glad you got it working!
Yeah, it comes as a command-line exe. you have to manually set it up as a service so it can autorun and have the right permissions. But I really do enjoy it so far
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I was about to move from Plex to Emby when the whole controversy erupted, and I waited excitedly for it to be ready.
Switched as soon as it was viable and have not regretted it one time.
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Yet, that’s the exact opposite of Stremio for the music world. The point of Stremio is that you do not queue stuff, download it, save it all to your hard drive and all.
I checked out Lidarr and it only supports usenet and bittorrent. Unfortunately it won’t work for “local” music I think.
What do you mean “local”? Lidarr is not a player. It looks at your already existing music files and pulls any missing albums from the list of artist you already have.
Wrong word. I meant I’m from a 3rd world country and the music from my country can’t be found on public indexers. Not a native speaker 🤷♂️
I have Lidarr on Steroids to automate downloads. It uses Deemix to download automatically. Deemix will download in MP3 with a free Deezer subscription, but if you want FLAC you need the premium suscription, or the month trial.
In Lidarr you can import a spotify playlist and it will add all the artists for you, which then downloads through Deemix. You can even download the entire discography if you like. Plus extras like album art.
For streaming I use Airsonic from my PC, then the Substreamer app on my android for the front end. You can create playlists in here and can also download songs on your device for offline play.
When I’m done downloading the majority of my playlists Artists and want to get rid of the Deezer subscription, I’ll probably switch to Usenet and Soulseek to download.
It payed off today, we had a mobile/internet outage for most of the day and I was still able to stream music.
This looks great. Im using the lidarr extended scripts which can use deezer or tidal.
Yeah I tried to get that working but couldn’t get it going for some reason.
Are you Australian and with optus by chance.?
Yeah both my mobile and internet are with Optus haha
I’ve been downloading tons of my Spotify music using spotdl and sticking it on Plex, which kinda accomplishes most of what you want. I then organize it with lidarr. Spotdl doesn’t actually download from Spotify but it uses Spotify metadata to tag files after matching with and downloading from YouTube music, it might just use youtube-dl/p under the hood but being able to give it a Spotify playlist, artist, or album url from Spotify makes it super convenient. For some artists I just download the entire artist in one go.
Now this is what I’ve been looking for!
I like to DJ sometimes and I typically just create playlists for sets I want to do and listen to them over and over to get familiar / play around with the order / discover new tracks that fit by letting Spotify make suggestions.
It’s a pain to then have to go find all those tracks manually, so this sounds perfect for my usecase.
@deezertogdrivebot you can use this bot on telegram to download from Spotify and it even support playlist and gives you zip file link and the source of audio is Deezer so it can goes up to FLAC
Wow this is gold. Thanks
why not buy the album and then use it locally on your device? vlc runs pretty much everything and you could fit thousands of songs while offline (could even remove the gsm/wifi/bluetooth from a phone running some FOSS os and turn it into your offline media device)
thrift stores sell albums for $1 and there are a few sites that sell new music to be downloaded for cheap
Can you even buy DRM free music these days?
yeah not sure. are there ways to rip a drm physical album to audio file?
There are ways to rip physicsl media but they break the encryption which is ‘illegal’.
I meant more just having control of the actual files when buying from places like Amazon or ITunes rather than just being given library access to the songs for so long until that company loses the license and deletes them from your library.
exactly
On bandcamp! If I want to support artists, this is the site I always go to. And yt-dlp works also great on bandcamp when I’m not feeling so generous ;)
I don’t know if there exists a solution with all your requirements. You could host your own music library via Plex or something, and aquire stuff via lidarr but this doesn’t have the instant availability of Spotify.
I’d probably use ViMusic (android) if we didn’t have a family apple music sub going. It basically uses the YouTube music backend. Super easy to set up and use, has on-device playlist and download support. I don’t think it does synchronisation though.
Does ViMusic support Android Auto? That’s a nifty find, thanks!
It seems there is a way to get it to work
Hyperpipe (self-hostable YTMusic frontend) supports accounts, which allows for syncing between devices. It really needs an app on at least mobile for it to really be worth it though, as right now it can only be used through the web UI.
What’s the bitrate gonna be on ViMusic though – is it whatever is on actual YouTube video uploads? I imagine that would be very lossy. I could be wrong. If it was ~320kbps I’d be all over it. That’s what I’m looking for really. Short of my current solution, which is Soulseek > cloud service storage > CloudBeats (Android app) for stuff I want decent quality of, and Spotify adfree using XManager for discovery and lower quality listening.
Most songs are between 130 and 160kbps
Ah thanks for letting me know. Not ideal
I think YouTube music is different to actual YouTube but I’m not exactly sure. You can always just try it and see if it’s good enough.
yt-dlp -x -f 251 https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=9CWTig2kBKE
I upload all my music to a selfhosted Jellyfin server. Finamp is a great Android app for Jellyfin that has offline play.
What’s the usual cost for self hosting a server? Also, is there some way I can use Google Drives/OneDrive/Mega as storage solution for these services?
Likely very cheap, you just have to buy all of the hardware first. I’ve got a raspberry pi b+ (the 2012 one) that I’ve previously used to host my music.
I have a RockPro64 and 2TB SSD connected with USB. I measure it at around 5,5W so in a month thats ~4 kWh electricity. For storage I think its not feasible to host it on a cloud, see https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/storage/
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://music.piped.video/watch?v=9CWTig2kBKE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
My setup is lidarr+airsonic. This setup fulfills all the requirements you listed. The webplayer is really good and you can use free apps to stream your library on mobile devices. Highly recommend “substreamer” for iOS and android. To access my library at home, I use Twingate (Zero Trrust Access VPN that uses the QUIC protocol and it’s lightning fast). Also, the mobile app allows for offline playback and has cool playlist builder features.
iBroadcast lets you upload your music and listen to it anywhere - phone, browser, or offline access. I have like 42,000 songs and I’ve been using it for years. It’s awesome.
To get the mp3s, I still use the website that’s often referenced in old /mu/ memes/instructions.
I’m pretty sure it hits all your features - I’m not sure about lyrics though.
Hey that sound too good to be true, no ads and a free tier? Amazing
Idk if it’s actually open source, but they seem to be going on the open source financial model: make an awesome thing and then survive on the generosity of people with money who appreciate it.
Plexamp is a great Plex music front end if you already have a Plex server with music.
Are we saying the quiet parts out loud now?
The benefits of not being reddit
Tidal-dl on your phone using sharable links on tidal. Then ftp your flacs to a Plex server. It’s all in order with artwork that way and is super easy to do
Then use Plexamp
It’s easier to install streamrip (beta version) on the server directly. That way, you can download music directly to the server and skip the whole ftp part.
The easiest thing to do is probably something like YouTube Music revanced and/or Spotube.
I use ViMusic, front end for Youtube Music (I think) for Android. Needs to be sideloaded (obviously). You can search up existing playlists. I have not found a single song that can not be found on this app, since it also includes the normal youtube library. It just works. There are other open source front end for spotify that are similar to this, but I’ve been using this for a while, and not found anything bad about it. So highly recommend. Also, the radio function is the best radio function I have ever tested.
F-droid
Isn’t F-Droid, alternative appstore, just sideloading, made easy?
Yes, but if you have root or a supported rom it can install in the background, like the play store
And it only contains FOSS
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Didn’t apple use to delete your local music and replace it with whatever remastered re-re-release bullshit? Even if they don’t do it anymore, it was shitty in their part and I wouldn’t trust them anymore. Also, their app on Android doesn’t support casting to other devices… At least it didn’t work as it should when I last tried.
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I’m sorry to hijack this thread, but does anyone know of any other mp3 players that work with foobar2000 other than classic ipods? I would need lossless support too, either ALAC or FLAC or something.
Fiio has some pretty solid options for this. I really enjoy the Android mp3 player I picked up from them.
Never heard of this, thanks for the suggestion
Does it work eith Foobar? Does it support lossless?
Yes the players support lossless/flac and LDAC blue tooth codecs. I have foobar loaded onto the android player. I also use Qobuz/Roon. I like the auto playlists that roon generates and I can control different zones in the house with different Roon endpoints. I like qobuz for the detailed write ups and I can download high res files so they’re available offline.
The m15s was on sale for a bit at apos.audio. I got it because I liked the options to bypass battery /increase gain when plugged in. Also has 3 different output options -2.5mm, 3.5mm, and 4.4mm
I also have the device that only functions as a blue tooth player, which is nice in the car.
Glad to answer any other questions you’ve got.
Thanks man! I’ll likely review this on the weekend. I appreciate the offer to answer questions. This is super helpful.
Okay, first things first, I’m sorry for being very very ignorant.
But wouldn’t a 200-300$ Android phone also support foobar2000 and playing FLACs?
No it’s a good question. It would support playing the flac, but the power output on these players (like the m15s) is way higher than what you’d get from a $2-300 phone. Additionally, the 2.5 and 4.4mm ports are balanced outputs, which you’re probably not going to get from a cheaper phone. The cheaper phone also likely won’t support LDAC blue tooth.
It’s that this device is more specialized towards rendering high quality audio and has the power output to drive demanding headphones that require a lot of juice to drive. The separation of instruments is more noticeable and you can crank up the volume extremely loud and there is no distortion to the audio, which is nice for parties.
The device I use daily also has a battery bypass function that enables “ultra high gain”, so when I’m at home and want to drive my bookshelf speakers, I can turn the gain way up and feed the signal into another amp (using the fiio as a pre-amp to push more power to the amp). That way I’m not impacting the life of the battery in the audio player. The volume would be limited using a phone.
Edit: I fully acknowledged that the m15s is expensive, even on sale. I love listening to lossless music, travel regularly for work, and like spoiling myself with a high quality, portable setup. I use the player in my car, for get togethers, and while mowing the lawn. I’ve been very happy with the purchase and use the player daily. Enough power to drive my 660s and Shure 846 iems.
