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Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

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451–460 of 497 posts

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The hardest to kick for me now is YouTube Premium.. And in AU it's like $33/month AUD, but I just can't stand ads. Any reason you're not just running network level AdGuard and Firefox with Ublock Origin to block all ads on your home network? Even just FF+UBO would block YouTube ads. The selfhosted subreddit is also a really good resource to use for interesting things to run.

If you use Android. On iOS, even Pihole with isn’t enough.

The Yattee client for Invidious works great on iOS, or the Vinegar/Baking Soda browser extensions that replace the YouTube player with a basic (ad-free) HTML5 player work also.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I had a peripheral awareness of listenbrainz for scribbling, and think that's neat. However, last.fm's radio and song/artist/genre/tag search and suggestion capabilities were on an otherworldly level. Do the *brainz services have anything that really compares?

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#453

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 moved away from Plex when they started shoving free B/C movies with lewd posters on my home page and made is very hard and confusing to remove (if removing it completely was even an option, I still don't know). The whole reason I host plex is that I want an offline experience that I curate myself. The requirement for internet to authenticate and shoveling crapware in my face pushed me towards trying Jellyfin. The J…

I think this is the path. I like jellyfin but I find it has trouble with some files on some devices. Kodi handles pretty much everything. Not as nice for browsing though.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#454

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…

What about their plexamp app for streaming music? It looks pretty nice and seems like a good deal if you purchase the lifetime plan for 50% off during Black Friday.

Might not be true for all setups, but I find that Plex is a resource hog. Navidrome and Jellyfin are a lot leaner. Plex was using quite a bit of CPU just browsing the library.

Plexamp sounds awful to me, trebly and thin. Googling around I found it was a common complaint.

It DOES handle multichannel audio well, though I don't think it can do Atmos natively.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#455
post #420

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Disagree. With a little bit of technical knowledge which I’m assuming most people browsing hacker news have, these services are easy to spin up and use. If you can read a README you can set up Navidrome and point it to your local library in 5 minutes.

Locally. It's a bit harder if you want remote access... I ended up using a reverse proxy and let's encrypt certs... It wasn't to bad but it wasn't easy. I have never looked into Tailscale or similar solutions though, maybe those are just click and go.

Tailscale, ZeroTier, Tinc, Hamachi, and the like are all very, stupidly easy mesh VPN solutions that anyone can use. If you feel like owning a domain, Cloudflare Tunnel makes it similarly easy to expose your service to the wider Internet on a home connection and not have to worry about proxies and certs. The barrier to self hosting has never been lower, and it keeps falling. Heck, Cockpit's Podman management means you almost never need to look at a terminal, and aren't locked in to a bespoke platform that's rainbows and glitter until it stops getting maintained or gets enshittified. Get a little SBC with as much RAM as you can find and you'll be amazed at the capability:effort ratio.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#456
post #372

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Yes, mostly storage. But why? Storage == ZFS. ZFS cli is well documented and works extremely well. Don't use unraid or truenas or any other fancy UI. I know the appeal from the beginners but it's not worth it

You might be amazed to discover there's a an entire world of storage outside of ZFS.

You might be amazed to find there's a lot of good reasons the storage world moved away from the RAID4 model Unraid relies on. They're proprietary too, which isn't great if you care about recoverability or never being in a position where they can withdraw your license.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#457
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?

Darktable and RAWtherapee are both excellent Lightroom alternatives.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#458

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> Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A quick math will show that it's not insignificant If you run it 24/7 on a dedicated desktop with decent idle (i.e. no high power video card, low power CPU), it likely uses ~ 50W average. That gives an estimate of 0.05kW 24hr 30 = 36kWh, which would be in the range of $12/month at current australian electricity prices. If you have bad idle power usage (or som…

Those HDD will quickly add to total power consumptions OP was trying to replace streaming services, so he gonna need storage. Assuimg he had 3 hdd for raid 5, that is another 15*3 = 45w

Looking at a WD spec sheet, it's more like 6-7W during read/write, and 3-4W during idle (1W sleep). Assume your use spread however you want, but that would be a max average of 5W usage per drive, so another 5-20W depending on your storage needs.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#459
post #345
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll argue music algorithmic recommendation on these platforms is a bad thing anyway. First, the algorithm is opaque, so it can push stuff to you because the platform decide it has to get the spotlights. Maybe the label/producer/musician paid for it or whatever you want to imagine that is even worse. It is a well-known phenomenon that if some music is pushed to your ears, you'll end up appreciate it most often than n…

What are the musical equivalents to Kit-Kat and meth?

Equivalence is too strong a word, but content produced by spotify where musicians (or AI prompters) are mere contractors comes to mind.

Getting back to "I don't even want virtuous algorithmic recommendation"… I like jazz rock/fusion, especially when it has a touch of bluesy/blues rock influence. There is probably a lifetime of listening time of that genre, and it takes no effort for me to appreciate anything that resemble this. Long guitar solos by a jazz-educated guitarist who happens to like Jimi Hendrix, sign me up.

But I do think there is value in getting out of my comfort zone, and listen to something drastically new, from time to time. It requires effort though. My first reflex when I hear synthetic drums or autotune, for instance, is to press "next". But it is through other humans being recommendation, that I sometimes make that effort, and actually learn to appreciate something else.

Call me an elitist prick, but I hate to think of music as a commodity for us consumers to consume. It is art. Art is not always pleasant. It sometimes becomes pleasant after overcoming an initial disgust.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#460

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'll admit it, I have a fairly narrow range of music I like so the following works for me on this basis: I don't like Spotify and other music streaming services as they never are consistent with their licensing or good with their recommendations. And the adverts are obnoxious. What I like is radios like Radio Paradise: https://radioparadise.com/player or regular radios available through online streams (such as the French radio FIP: https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip). There is enough to discover on either and they are still mostly in the range of what I would/could listen should they not have existed.
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