Live data from Hacker News

Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

github.com

81–90 of 311 posts

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Navidrome has worked well for me for the last couple years. My collection (~80 GB) is pre-organized FLAC but Navidrome will transcode to MP3 if needed. I use Substreamer on Android to connect to it (Airsonic API/protocol) or the WebUI at home or work. Just the right balance of simplicity and features for me.

How do you tell navidrome to serve "preorganized" flac. That is exactly my case.

AFAICT navidrome doesn't organize anything itself. In your config file, you just say:

    MusicFolder = "/home/vlad/music"
And you're off to the races. The docs even say that this can be a read-only folder, which it is in my case.

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#82
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self hosted music service doesn't necessarily imply new music discovery problems, because a lot of people still discover music the old non-algorithmic way, by being interested in certain genres, studying labels and artists and going through their albums, adding to their collection what they would love to hear again. Buying and owning the song/album somehow brings me more satisfaction than paying a monthly fee for a s…

The algorithms have never introduced me to a new song. They always try to mash up things I've heard before, which is disappointing because I can often go to "similar artists" in Spotify and after drilling down a couple of levels, find new artists. But Spotify will never suggest it until I listen to a song at least once and even then it will only recommended that one song. I still do most of my discovery by looking at…

They have for me, 10 years ago. Seems like the Spotify algorithm figured out that rehashing the same works better for engagement than recommending new stuff

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#83
post #20

I tried this (among a bunch of others) about a year ago and landed on Gonic[1] for the server and Supersonic[2] on PC and Amperfy[3] on mobile. Yes it's a few different tools to maintain (plus beets etc), but it's the ideal set of features etc for me. Self-hosting has been fun and I've started experimenting with local LLMs to build playlists which is helping discoverability.. or more /rediscovering/ artists that I ha…

OK, I will ask. I presume you purchased all those music files that you host on that certain server, didn’t you? I will also assume that there is no tool that lets you acquire music MP3s (or some appropriate file type which is non-audiophile listenable) the Linux ISO way (without having to hunt them songs one by one), right? I am talking about someone already having a Spotify/apple music playlists/likes/favourites. Al…

Bandcamp has a massive amount of _legal_ free / zero cost / €1 per album music if you spend the time digging. As a hobby DJ I really enjoy the digging aspect!

Please don't be so quick to assume all music is pirated by those with large audio collections.

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#84
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I will ask. I presume you purchased all those music files that you host on that certain server, didn’t you? I will also assume that there is no tool that lets you acquire music MP3s (or some appropriate file type which is non-audiophile listenable) the Linux ISO way (without having to hunt them songs one by one), right? I am talking about someone already having a Spotify/apple music playlists/likes/favourites. Al…

Not OP, but gonic is very lightweight and takes little resources. It lives on a machine that serves a few websites and also hosts my photos with photoprism (by far the most resource intensive service on this server). It's a basic N100 machine with 8GB RAM. As for my music, although I own a physical copy of most of it that I bought legally, I downloaded almost everything through bittorrent as is easier than ripping CD…

Yep. Same with Plex. I used to run it with 1.2 GHz dual core Intel Atom. I always encode to 128 kbps Opus when I stream my music and I'm not on Wi-Fi. It took about 300-500ms until the music started when I pressed play. The CPU usage was very low even when actively encoding.

The only thing that takes a bit more of CPU is if you have a huge music collection (I have about 2.5 TB), and you do the first metadata and album art scan over the collection. Otherwise you can run these systems with a potato.

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#85
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I will ask. I presume you purchased all those music files that you host on that certain server, didn’t you? I will also assume that there is no tool that lets you acquire music MP3s (or some appropriate file type which is non-audiophile listenable) the Linux ISO way (without having to hunt them songs one by one), right? I am talking about someone already having a Spotify/apple music playlists/likes/favourites. Al…

For some people music is a hobby — looking for new stuff, buying and sorting it is their passion. The worst thing you could do to me is tell me that I pay $5 a month and the rest of my musical journey is solved and gets decided by a corporate algorithm that pays emerging musicians and niche artists a starving wage.

To me Bandcamp has been the best thing since sliced bread - direct connection with artists/labels, high quality audio (in a dozen formats) and often the chance to buy physical media (I'm a vinyl person).

Digital crate digging is one of my hobbies!

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#86
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I will ask. I presume you purchased all those music files that you host on that certain server, didn’t you? I will also assume that there is no tool that lets you acquire music MP3s (or some appropriate file type which is non-audiophile listenable) the Linux ISO way (without having to hunt them songs one by one), right? I am talking about someone already having a Spotify/apple music playlists/likes/favourites. Al…

Self hosted music service doesn't necessarily imply new music discovery problems, because a lot of people still discover music the old non-algorithmic way, by being interested in certain genres, studying labels and artists and going through their albums, adding to their collection what they would love to hear again. Buying and owning the song/album somehow brings me more satisfaction than paying a monthly fee for a s…

Back in the days, there was a service called what.cd, which was really nice for music discovery. You had very dedicated music fans, great forums and a daily top 10 of most downloaded music. For many it was the fastest way of finding new interesting stuff.

I've heard rumors this kind of services still exist, but we never know if it's just an urban legend.

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have chosen jelly over it because of the way navi stores music. I prefer to organize music in folders myself, and tag them with picard. Jelly then just shows everything nicely with 0 configuration.

Navidrome can work with your folder layout, too. I don't remember why I settled on Navidrome instead of the others, but I basically just told it "here's my music, now go play me something" and it all just worked. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't manage organization at all.

> Navidrome can work with your folder layout, too.

Is that recent? When I was looking to replace libresonic I looked at Navidrome and it couldn't do that, and the developer indicated they didnt have plans to add that feature.

I also settled on Gonic. Mostly for this reason.

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#89

I’ve been searching for services that host personal music collections, but there doesn’t seem to be much available. I came across a product called Vox [1], which I might try. There are also plenty of self-hosted projects of varying quality (but I hadn’t seen Black Candy before). I'd like a service where I can upload a large folder of MP3s, and it would help organize them into albums, perform useful processing like Re…

Most self-hosted services metadata is only as good as the metadata on your audio files. I think using something like MusicBrainz Picard or beets to tag your media well is required, along with making sure that all files of a given album are in the same folder. (Plex has what seems like strict file naming conventions for music, but really all you need to do is make sure each album has all its files in one folder). If y…

So here is my question, or one of them, as someone starting this whole journey: exactly what metadata do you want outside of artist, song title, album title? Because I can see there's a lot to be had. Embedded album covers, subgenre tagging, synchronized lyrics ... hyperlinks to Discogs and MusicBrainz, maybe? Tempo in BPM? Key?

ID3v2.3 or IDv2.4? Can you even do that to FLAC? And where do you get that metadata, using what tools?

I just don't want to be the guy who has to re-rip three thousand CDs because he did his workflow in a lazy or careless manner.

Re: Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server

#90
post #86
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self hosted music service doesn't necessarily imply new music discovery problems, because a lot of people still discover music the old non-algorithmic way, by being interested in certain genres, studying labels and artists and going through their albums, adding to their collection what they would love to hear again. Buying and owning the song/album somehow brings me more satisfaction than paying a monthly fee for a s…

Back in the days, there was a service called what.cd, which was really nice for music discovery. You had very dedicated music fans, great forums and a daily top 10 of most downloaded music. For many it was the fastest way of finding new interesting stuff. I've heard rumors this kind of services still exist, but we never know if it's just an urban legend.

RED and OPS are sadly not even a faint and distant shadow of WCD.
Post reply on HN