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Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

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Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#381

Post by PaulHoule »

unsnap_biceps wrote: post #65
PaulHoule wrote: post #56

I struggled with Jellyfin for years, never got it to work right, particularly the XBOX clients. Switched to Plex for the win. I like the recommender that comes with Plex Pass and listen to music off my home server on my phone in the car and when walking in the woods.

I used Plex for years but ditched it when they got caught sending all your watch activity to their company for whatever. My privacy is worth the pain. I'm running Jellyfin, but it's not a smooth system at all.

I bought an XBOX One as opposed to a PS4 because I'd heard the Plex client was perfect on XBOX -- personally I like game consoles as media players because they play discs and I'd rather have an overpowered rather than underpowered machine.

I ditched Plex when they came out with a FAST [1] service which was thoroughly pizzled [2] for me. I switched to Jellyfin which I struggled with in so many ways, the terrible XBOX client which was a degraded version of the web client was the worse but Jellyfin's poor metadata handling was part of it.

Last summer I spent a lot of time in a room in our rental house where I tried (and failed) to gentle a feral cat and wound up watching a lot of Tubi and came to the conclusion that FAST wasn't so bad and gave Plex another chance when I rebuilt my home server and I can say I'm highly satisfied.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_ad-supported_streaming_te...

[2] https://scatter.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/thoroughly-pizzled-...

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#382

Post by sandreas »

mystified5016 wrote: post #378
sandreas wrote: post #225

I personally use Jellyfin ONLY for Video stuff. AudioBookShelf[1] is for audiobooks and podcasts. For music I use navidrome [2] The smart playlist feature[5] is awesome. Having 3 services instead of one seems overkill, but specialized apps instead of one generic one feels different. One interesting aspect of navidrome is, that it has implemented the Subsonic API, which MANY Apps make use of. My personal favorite is S…

Thanks for mentioning audiobookshelf. I'd totally given up on using jellyfin for audiobooks. It just absolutely butchers any book split into multiple files, which is basically all of them. I'll give audiobookshelf a look!

You're welcome. The Android app is pretty good, but for iOS it remains unreleased, so you have to deploy yourself. Prologue seems to be the best iOS App.

There are other unofficial Clients (e.g. in flutter), but I tend to use audiobookshelf as streaming player paired with vlc to play downloaded offline files (the app is not so great here)

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#383

Post by rappatic »

udev4096 wrote: post #221
rappatic wrote: post #127

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…

It's no-brainer for people who do not care about freedom or file preservation. Spotify can pull the plug on whatever your favorite song is and there is NOTHING you can do about it. Then again, spotify has hundreds of millions of clueless subscribers, such as yourself, who will willfully consume the most crappy audio codec and praise them for it

> Spotify can pull the plug on whatever your favorite song is and there is NOTHING you can do about it

There's plenty I can do about it. If Spotify decides to "pull the plug" on a song or artist I like, it's my prerogative to switch providers or decide to self-host. I'm not locked into a lifetime serfdom with them, and it's not like the files will magically vanish from the internet once Spotify decides not to host them.

> who will willfully consume the most crappy audio codec

I listen to 99% of my music through Bluetooth on AirPods, so 320kbps is perfectly fine for my use case. If I was someone who cared deeply about audio quality, I would switch to a competing service with HiFi.

> hundreds of millions of clueless subscribers, such as yourself

At least try to be respectful.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#384

Post by rappatic »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #252
rappatic wrote: post #127

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…

> 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 320kbps. The fact also is that the vast majority of us don't have a requirement to be able to access our media from anywhere in the world. Most people aren't traveling the world on a regular basis, they stay in one area except…

> the vast majority of us don't have a requirement to be able to access our media from anywhere in the world

I don't travel internationally often at all. But when I do, access to my music becomes all the more important.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#385

Post by sandreas »

hypercube33 wrote: post #339
sandreas wrote: post #225

I personally use Jellyfin ONLY for Video stuff. AudioBookShelf[1] is for audiobooks and podcasts. For music I use navidrome [2] The smart playlist feature[5] is awesome. Having 3 services instead of one seems overkill, but specialized apps instead of one generic one feels different. One interesting aspect of navidrome is, that it has implemented the Subsonic API, which MANY Apps make use of. My personal favorite is S…

The thing I miss and can't find a replacement for is lastfm inside of Spotify. It gave two things and did it exceptionally well: 1. Helped me take something I like or am super into at the time (band or song) and give me a playlist 2. actually suggested with a high hit rate something I didn't know about and it was available to play right now. other streaming or stations just loop into what I already have which sucks.…

I tend not to overload my personal library with stuff I'd never listen to.

However navidrome at least supports lastfm via external Integration: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/external-integrations/

I never used it so I can't tell if this is what you're looking for or at least the right direction.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#386

Post by _spduchamp »

I bought a 4TB external hard drive from a thrift shop and found it is loaded with a huge unorganized treasure trove of MP3s that stops maybe around 2008. The tags and file names are a bit of a mess (looks like bad character encoding for anything with accents), and there is no genres or categorization. I'd love to use a subset of this archive on Jellyfin or Navidrome.

Any suggestions for a tool that can clean up file names and tags, and apply some sort of genre categories? I've tried Picard, but the process seems too manual for such a large archive.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#387

Post by rappatic »

jjulius wrote: post #159
rappatic wrote: post #127

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 not willing to accept a single second of added latency or buffering or downtime... >... near-instantaneous access anywhere in the world to every song ever... Nobody needs this. You think you do, but nobody needs everything everywhere all at once. If being wholly unwilling to wait "a single second" isn't sarcasm, then... yeesh.

Fair. I was exaggerating a little.

My point is this: I spend over 100,000 minutes per year listening to music. Any unnecessary friction in the experience is therefore extremely frustrating and has a disproportionate effect on my life. In all my experience self-hosting, it adds a certain level of friction that just isn't worth it considering how much time I spend listening.

I am not hostile to self-hosting in other cases. I am very satisfied with my self-hosted Plex server, for example. But I don't spend 30% of my waking hours watching TV.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#388

Post by chillfox »

fabatka wrote: post #265
layoric wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reflects a lot of what I've been through as well. My subscriptions exploded when AU got a lot of different streaming platforms, and I think when paramount+ came out and took Star Trek off of another one I drew the line. I realised I still owned all the physical media, so time to make backups. Previous to that I moved off Gmail, that was by far the hardest, and still somewhat ongoing after 8+ years. The hardest t…

What about backups? My greatest fear is self-hosting valuable stuff (like family photos) only for my NAS to fail one day and lose potentially everything.

I keep important data on a zpool that's mirrored across 2 drives, I snapshot it nightly, zfs send/receive the snapshot a drive on a different machine, and run a borgmatic/borg backup to borgbase 3 times a week. I also run a scrub on it quarterly.

So I effectively have multiple layers of backups.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#389

Post by _-_-__-_-_- »

wormius wrote: post #168
jjulius wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a "YMMV" situation, because... I don't want that. At all. It's algorithmic and there's nothing stopping artists and labels paying for placement in there. I don't want that. I am a musician, and a DJ, and I've been digging deep through artist and label catalogues on my own for decades. The process of discovery via my preexisting routes is far more fruitful, enjoyable and rewarding than lazily letting an algorithm…

I miss last.fm and audioscrobbler so much. Yeah it's still there, but it's not like the old days, which was far better for feeling like I was in touch with other users, finding tons of new music, and not hearing yet another Home Depot ad. I half wonder if Spotify US is one of those harbingers of doom for the old web in the same way I think of Twitter and iPhone/SPAs/The Stream UI.

ListenBrainz has filled that void for me. My profile here, https://listenbrainz.org/user/iPodSmypod/ Blog post on the topic: https://theonlyblogever.com/blog/2025/scrobbling-libre.html

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#390

Post by flessner »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #322
flessner wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For "content subscriptions" (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix) keep in mind that a part of the revenue goes towards the content creators. For anything else, I can also highly recommend using local or self-hosted software. Plenty of open source software has even exceeded proprietary alternatives in the last couple years.

I suspect that buying an album through bandcamp results in the artist receiving way more money than what a subscription will ever pay them.

Absolutely, this was more of an appeal towards the "torrent crowd" that often doesn't even think about compensating the artists.
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