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Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

coppolaemilio.com

291–300 of 497 posts

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#291

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…

Are playlists in Jellyfin readable? Could you not create a script(s) that takes your existing playlist and generates new ones for you? LLM's are great at suggestions, I mean it drives Spotify's DJ X.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#292
post #286

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've never seen this work. Either it plays the stuff I've listened in the past in a loop or shove some random things I really dislike (maybe hidden promotional stuff?). Personally it's the reason I've cancelled subscriptions each time I've tried, I always ended up listening to radio instead as the value brought by Spotify etc... was really poor.

I use YouTube Music and it definitely does work but yeah it weighs songs you've already said you like way too heavily and generally seems way worse at discovering similar music than Last.fm or Pandora from over a decade ago. (If anything I remember Pandora being too good at finding similar songs - the playlist would end up almost monotonic because it found such similar music.)

Fortunately they do have a "Discover playlist" that completely excludes music you've heard before. Unfortunately that's all you get. No way to e.g. say "play me reggae I haven't heard before", and it's only updated once a week.

So yeah... kinda shit. But still better than the alternative which as far as I remember from the 90s is to only listen to extremely well-known bands and find good news music like once a year.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#293

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…

My favorite songs gravitate heavily towards 2 very different genres. This seems to confuse the hell out of Spotify. The "discover weekly" is comically bad no matter how hard I try to prime my library.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#294

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…

> Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything? e.g. Merge the artists 'Guns N Roses' and 'Guns and Roses' into the most correct one.

I've recently started using Beets[1] to organize my music collection. It's a command line application that IMHO is not entirely intuitive to use at first. But once you get the hang of it, it works incredibly well.

[1]: https://beets.io/

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#295
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have agreed with you 3 years ago. But now not so much. Spotify "Radio" feature just tends to want to give me music I've already listened to over new music. Whatever algorithm they are using has waaaay overfit to what I have already liked. There used to be curated playlists done by humans, now almost everything is "made for you by Spotify" playlists which, have the exact same issue as the radio stations, sudde…

Spotify « radio » is the best reason to listen to real radios ! [honestly the DJs on most of the radios I listen to are insanely skilled !] Btw, is there somewhere a search engine to know when a given [set of] track was played where, in the internet radio world?

100%

No algorithm has been able to be able to be as weird but consistent as a community radio DJ.

The radio can still surprise and delight like little else. All the tech companies have been able to replicate is the disappointment.

Not to say never but people’s great advantage here is that they’re people.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#296

At least in the case of a music player, self-hosting simply isn't good enough for me. I'm not willing to accept a single second of added latency or buffering or downtime because I don't have multimillion dollar server farms. The fact is that the vast majority of us don't have the resources to self-host a Jellyfin instance that can provide near-instantaneous access anywhere in the world to every song ever made at 320k…

I'm a bit confused, why would you have problems with latency for music? This is not real time sound mixing where you need millisecond latencies, the client can just download the whole thing and play it. Even high quality audio files are tiny (unless you're listening to 4 hour classical operas).

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#297

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…

My experience with Youtube Music is that the recommendations are quite poor. So I wouldn't miss that. But it's hard to replicate the breadth of coverage of YT music (even though sometimes songs just vanish from my playlists). But I have started buying a couple of albums every now and then and slowly I am building my owned music library.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#298
post #63

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 we do about Lightroom? Capture one? How about sharing galleries?

You might check out https://www.photoprism.app/

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO using a streaming service’s recommendations is a way to filter out bands that labels aren’t promoting. The services have to be getting paid for pushing - right? If everyone is this lazy about music discovery, then music suffers. I am not using “lazy” as a pejorative. There are people who just couldn’t be bothered and that’s fine. Music just isn’t that important to you. But if the people who deeply love music are…

> IMO using a streaming service’s recommendations is a way to filter out bands that labels aren’t promoting. The services have to be getting paid for pushing - right? I keep hearing this, I also read Mood Machine that says the same thing over and over again. Yet, every week for years, thanks to Spotify I'm discovering artists that don't have the means to pay to be promoted in any way. I'm not saying that I'm special…

Seriously. I've discovered artists with less than 1000 monthly listens thanks to the algo.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#300
I tried Jellyfin for music but couldn't make it work with Sonos so just ended up using Sonos' local music library via SMB, with Symfonium on my phone.

It works well but it's something I'll revisit at some point as I do like the idea of one central library with shared playlists etc.

In fact, I haven't been able to even make a playlist on Sonos, it's baffling.

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