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Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

coppolaemilio.com

101–110 of 497 posts

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#101

Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills. I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions. The subscriptions really had gotten out of hand, it had gotten to about $200 (AUD) a month. Quick napkin math is that I have cancelled about ~$150 a month worth of subscriptions so far. The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling…

[deleted]

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#102
post #32

I finally decided to self-host last week and boy I did not know how much that domain has progressed. I have setup a domain, a VPS with Cloudron and cloud backup in less than two hours. I was absolutely blown away. I no longer use notion and store all my files and photos on the VPS, it has been wonderful. The bonus is how good I feel about my for not relying on the big players.

Can you share more about your set up? How much storage, are you backing up your data elsewhere? And what did it cost you, apart from time?

Sure. I might upgrade but at the moment:

- Domain name - $3/year

- Cloudron free tier with two apps - free

- Wasabi for backups (Cloudron supports every cloud storage possible and Wasabi is not the cheapest, I just wanted to try it) - $7/m

- Hostinger VPS with 50GB of storage - $5/m

I will probably add more apps to Cloudron at which point I will have to pay $15/m. But I think it is worth it - you can install every possible app with one click and have single sign-on. I offered to split the service with some friends too which would make the economics even better.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#103

Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills. I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions. The subscriptions really had gotten out of hand, it had gotten to about $200 (AUD) a month. Quick napkin math is that I have cancelled about ~$150 a month worth of subscriptions so far. The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling…

What do you do for backups? I'm just setting up an Emby instance with a 4 TB hard drive attached, but I'm worried it'll fail and take everything with it.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#104

I self-host a couple of things including an Emby server to watch movies. Self-hosting a music library seems interesting. But I discover and listen to music far more than I watch movies. This article tells me how good Jellyfin is, but the music collection process is not here. Do you download them manually? Do you buy records? I grew up downloading music into my PC and then transferring them to my SD card which I used…

I think the unstated assumption is that the reader has an existing music library. Where that library came from is an excercise left to the reader. I use bittorrent, which I admit is a little morally smelly, but I justify it by buying vinyl albums of any artists I listen a lot to. It'd take a lot of Spotify listens to match the money to the artist of buying a single album from the band website. Lots of vinyl comes wit…

I don't usually recommend software that isn't open source, but MusicBee is really great for organizing tunes. You can build really deep auto playlists based on any tag you like, you can do bulk updates across lots of fields, you can have it reorganize files into folders around any of the tags, including with fallbacks for missing tags, there's configurations to download metadata from online, all kinds of stuff. Plus it's a super customizable music player too.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#105

Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills. I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions. The subscriptions really had gotten out of hand, it had gotten to about $200 (AUD) a month. Quick napkin math is that I have cancelled about ~$150 a month worth of subscriptions so far. The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling…

Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A quick math will show that it's not insignificant

Dunno, my N100 with 1 SSD and 1 nVME (which hosts over 15 services including jellyfin) is probably not really relevant compared to my desktop PC. ~10W vs 180-350W depending on what I’m doing.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#106

What’s wrong with Spotify?

Spotify prices are quite reasonable, especially when you consider what has happened to video streaming services like Netflix. Plus Spotify has a large portion of all music ever, and mostly has close to 100% of new music that is being released.

Hosting my own, even though it appeals a lot to me on principle, just would be either too costly to maintain legally (buying new music) or too cumbersome illegally (torrenting any music I want to listen to).

I guess if someone is really into music, they will spend a lot of time on finding new music, and will be inclined to spend more money on the hobby too. But for casual listeners like me, it's far too convenient to simple select a song on Spotify and click "play radio" and get an unending playlist of new songs.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#107

If you haven’t been keeping up with Plex, self-hosters like myself and others are up in arms over the client rewrite. It feels like the Sonos update for us. Broken features. Useful functionality removed. UI that’s more streaming focused than self-hosting like it used to be. If you haven’t gone down the Plex path yet, don’t right now as the community and developers sort out their roadmap. Plex seems to be open to feed…

I really like Infuse Player on my AppleTV. It "just" reads from a network share that has a bunch of folders with movies and tv shows and just handles the rest. Occasionally I will have a codec issue but I just transcode for free using handbrake.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#108
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik it's not terribly good to the artists. One of my favorite bands left the platform; I'm not there yet but if it happens en masse (or at least enough to effect me noticeably) then I'm out too.

What's the alternative for the authors?

Streaming services could price themselves out of the market in an attempt to generate the income needed to pay artists fairly. (Google/Apple could temporarily draw money from coffers and outcompete Spotify temporarily)

Or artists could sell the music directly at a fair price (no streaming service but vinyl or downloads). Or more people could go to concerts

Either way, consumers need to pay more before all good artists can make ends meet. The (comparatively) pocket change that many of them get from streaming won't be enough even if Spotify turns into a non-profit and improves payout from 70% of their income to 99.9% of their income

Most consumers seem to disagree, judging by the reactions to Spotify's recent price increase in the netherlands (even though the increase was lower than inflation or median income growth). With the money simply not being on the table unless you get lucky and get massively popular, there is no realistic alternative, but some options feel more fair than others. I could totally see myself doing music as a hobby and seeing what I can sell on Bandcamp rather than supporting Google and having them/Youtube stream my music to people

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#109

This article fails to mention the absolute butchering of features that takes place moving from a typical music streaming subscription to a self hosted Jellyfin library. A large part of my listening on YouTube Music is going to a particular song or band I like and clicking "Radio", which generates a playlist of similar sounding songs. You can then fine tune it with a filter i.e "Popular songs, deep cuts" or specific e…

> I have no idea on when artists I like release new albums and would not encounter them on a self hosted solution, etc.

Depending on what you like, bandcamp makes it easy. You can follow any artist (which is also offered whenever you buy), and from then on get release notifications. But of course, what’s available differs by genre. For metal, most bands are on BC, except most Japanese artists and major label stuff.

I buy, download, and put the flacs on my Jellyfin server.

There are, of course, also piracy solutions for that, pretty sure the *arr stuff has automatic downloading per artist.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#110

Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills. I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions. The subscriptions really had gotten out of hand, it had gotten to about $200 (AUD) a month. Quick napkin math is that I have cancelled about ~$150 a month worth of subscriptions so far. The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling…

What do you do for backups? I'm just setting up an Emby instance with a 4 TB hard drive attached, but I'm worried it'll fail and take everything with it.

Not OP, but I use a PI with attached SSD as a backup server, and then save that stuff to Backblaze B2 as additional cloud backup.
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