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Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

coppolaemilio.com

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Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#92

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

> 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 0.05kW24hr30 = 36kWh, which would be in the range of $12/month at current australian electricity prices. If you have bad idle power usage (or somehow mostly active not idle), maybe you'd be looking at twice that. But for OP who was spending $xxx/month on subscriptions, it's a pretty negligible cost. If you really want to save this too, raspPi can do a lot of home server needs nowadays

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#93
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 feedback, but a lot of us feel betrayed. They had open user testing for the new apps but they didn’t implement or fix any of the reported issues.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#94

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?

MusicBrainz Picard ... one album at a time until you get the hang of it.

MP3Tag for manual cleanups and out of normal oddities, etc.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#95
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 elements of the song "More emo", "Slow paced" etc. This exposes me to a lot of new music and keeps it fresh and if I'm lucky I'll discover a new artist or song to add to my rotations.

You lose that.

A lot of these services overtime build mixes which takes your listening habits and tries to categorize them into specific mixes made up of your existing library & new music.

I don't browse any music forums and so apart from my favourite bands, I have no idea on when artists I like release new albums and would not encounter them on a self hosted solution, etc.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#96
post #26

What’s wrong with Spotify?

"You'll own nothing and you'll be happy": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_ha...

I've never understood the conspiratorial use of that slogan because it's unironically correct. Ownership is economically a cost and a risk and you're generally better off if you can utilize something without owning it or distribute ownership.

I'm much better off using free software than having copies of proprietary software on my shelf and the train is much cheaper than the car insurance.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#97

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…

Interesting they felt the need for a re-write when it was already so good. I wonder what the impetus was

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can't justify the time to go torrent music every time I want to try something new. I don't have a "small list" of artists, I listen to tons of artists and if I immortalized it with a torrented library, how would I ever find new music?

This^.

There're recommendations in these comments that can solve the automating and downloading part of it but they still don't solve the discovery part of it.

The only way I see is - use Spotify to discover; sync your library using said software to collect and play later.

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#99

I wish more artists would sell their music on Bandcamp. I use jellyfin for music but acquiring music is difficult.

If you can't find a place to pay for it, then just do what Spotify did when they launched. I recommend Nuclear[0] for that [0] https://nuclearplayer.com/

Love the testimonials!

Re: Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

#100

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've never used Spotify so can't compare to that, but Bandcamp is like a much better version of the local record store. You can follow artists and record labels you like, which will give you email notifications whenever they release something. You can browse new and old music by all kinds of esoteric tags and subgenres. Every week or so you get an email of some new releases in your favorite genres. You can download in multiple formats, personally I download FLAC for backup and 320 for listening. It's easy to search for tracks or artists you discovered elsewhere, it's easy to listen to and scrub through tracks... Just great. If you're a gamer, it's like the Steam of music.

My only complaint is that when I buy a bunch of songs my credit card gets charged a bunch of times (one for each artist/label) which has triggered fraud warning in the past, but I guess they do that to avoid the hassle of routing money to each artist in their own currency... It seems mildly customer unfriendly to me but in a world where people charge a can of coke to their credit card maybe not all that weird any more.

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