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
It’s on my “short” Todo list to write an app that looks at your current library (Plex, for me) and finds related artists through other apis (like Spotify) and exposes a UI to show what things to check out. Maybe some tracking of what you’ve accepted as interesting and still missing so you can grab off Bandcamp or wherever else you get your music. But at least it would help track/expose WHAT bands to seek out
You might wanna check out spotube, which uses the spotify API for playlists but plays tracks through Youtube. Might be useful for inspo
Definitely a cool project! Can crack it open to get some API insights. The goals don’t quite line up for me, as I eventually want to actually get the tracks into my Plex setup. Additionally, I’m after a more “assisted curation” where I actively consider new artists and thumbs 👍👎 to let them through, rather than trying to make a radio type feature that passively plays new stuff.
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.
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.
What’s garbage about it? It works great for me.
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.
I really would love something like Amie Street before Amazon bought it to kill it. I got so much great music on there for pennies which then led me to buy more and more from those artists. My problem is I need to hear a song a few times before it digs into my soul. And preferably not when I’m paying too close attention to the technical aspects so it can hit me more emotionally. So just having a 10-30 second preview or just hearing it one time is never going to be enough to hook me on an artist. Also, cheaper b-sides since it was demand based meant I was much more likely to hear more of their music and get more invested in the artist.
There’s also qobuz. They have a streaming service, but you can also straight up buy a lot of albums and download them drm free.
Ampwall? https://ampwall.com/
Just adding my +1 for Lidarr being garbage. I’ve tried multiple times and it’s just unusable - I get that music is complex with releases, but Lidarr just seems to over complicate things.
Even with deemix and Lidarr (the Lidarr on steroids thing) it’s unusable.
My solution is to manually acquire files with soulseek and Deezer/deemix, then tag them with Picard and add them to Plex. I have Plexamp and all my family have their own accounts.
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
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
Plex and plexamp is the best music hosting setup I’ve found too. Users can have their own playlist and there is some smart playlist generation.
They also had (maybe still have) tidal integration.
However, you’ll still be relying on other services (probs spotify/etc.) to find new things.
They dropped the Tidal integration and I’m still heartbroken. It was the best setup for music discovery. Haven’t found a replacement yet.
Lidarr, SpotSpot, Jellyfin (Symfonium for listening to music on my Android phone).
I use Spotify (web version) or Lidarr to look/search for the name of the albums for different artists and then download it with SpotSpot (consider pairing it with Gluetun). For me, this is perfect!
Edit: While on my computer, I’m using Feishin to listen to music from Jellyfin. I usually create the playlists from there.
Spotify replacement? Oh, hey, that’s me.
I’m working on Tapesonic, a subsonic-compatible self-hostable streaming service. It won’t stream your local library, but it can import stuff from YouTube and Bandcamp (and probably other sites yt-dlp supports, but I didn’t bother testing) and stream those. Started making it because Lidarr can’t download basically anything and also can’t manage anything that’s not in MusicBrainz even if you download it yourself.
As for discovery - Tapesonic can scrobble your listens to ListenBrainz and, since a couple of days ago, last.fm. Those in turn provide recommendation playlists.
- ListenBrainz playlists are already incorporated, but Tapesonic can only match the songs you already have in your library - everything else is ignored; completely useless for actual discovery and the recommendations aren’t great anyway to be honest
- last.fm recommendations are pretty good and I’m actively working on importing those; last.fm provides a YouTube URL for each track and Tapesonic can import YouTube URLs - you see where this is going, yeah? I expect to push a somewhat working implementation in a couple of weeks as I already have a prototype that works surprisingly well
Caveats:
- Tapesonic is still in it’s “prototyping phase” (what do you mean it’s been more than a year since I started it…) - everything gets changed all the time, only core features get implemented, UI sucks, all that jazz
- breaking changes anytime - expect having to completely wipe everything and start anew at any moment
- no multi-user support for now and I have no idea when it’ll come; you can host multiple instances I guess
Want to give it a try?
docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 -e TAPESONIC_USERNAME=user -e TAPESONIC_PASSWORD=pass ghcr.io/sibwaf/tapesonic- http://localhost:8080/, username/password from the previous command (“user”/“pass” in this case)
- “New tape” -> paste any Bandcamp album URL -> “Import” -> “Add all” -> “Next” a couple of times
- Connect a subsonic client (Feishin, Sonixd, Ultrasonic for desktop, Tempo for Android) to the same address, same credentials
- Enjoy!
Any other configuration parameters, persistency, stuff like this - sorry, you’ll have to study the code. No docs and no support for now.
Thing is: If it ain’t on musicbrainz it wont work on listenbrainz (besides adding a play)
Yeah. That’s why I’m also adding the last.fm integration.
And you still have an option to just import whatever you want whether any metadata aggregators have it or not unlike Lidarr.
I used to live Spotify. Now it’s algorithms and podcasts being pushed. Their app has gone to shit.
Good luck doing a simple thing like… shuffling by artist. Such a mess.
Love Plexamp though.
It’s not FOSS but Symfonium is by far the best music player for your Android. It has support for every self-hosted source concivable. I used to run Navidrome and I’m not using Jellyfin in the backend.
I put my music collection (40gb) on my phone, listen to it with musicolet. One of my playlists is 72 hours with no repeats, so I don’t get bored with the same music like the radio.
I use a script I wrote that plays music from Bandcamp with probabilities based on liking/disliking songs and the albums Bandcamp recommends in association with the rated song. Wary about sharing it anywhere though as it’s definitely against the tos.
I use lidarr + jellyfin + symfonium (android), and that works for me. I mainly listen to full albums, and don’t play around with playlists or recommendations though. I get flac quality and lyrics, remote access to my home-lab via VPN (no offline sync), Android Auto support…
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.
Simplest is to use syncthing and just sync everything to your phone but this won’t cover a lot of your use cases and is probably best for a one user experience.
Lidarr for new music + a subsonic server such as gonic will cover a lot of what you need. The idea is to find and download music(lidarr+dl client) and run your own streaming server(gonic or other implementations). On mobile you use an app which supports the subsonic protocol (such as substreamer or tempo) too listen. You can also just use jellyfin server + it’s client, but AFAIK, the music experience is not as good.
One thing navidrome cannot do is to have different music available per user. A workaround for that is yo host multiple instances using docker and have them access different folders for music but that’s obviously not ideal.
