Navidrome Music Server VS gelli

My primary way to play music is from my self-hosted navidrome[1] server with my collection of albums I've mostly purchased from bandcamp. I can stream it to many different devices at home or on the go.

But sitting next to my bed is a Walkman (actually a $10 Jensen version) with a few of my favorite cassettes in the nightstand drawer. Granted, I listen to raw black metal, so the format fits the music well, but I really enjoy just popping in a cassette and hitting play. When I "metaltate", I listen to full albums and do not want to ever be interrupted or have skipping audio due to bluetooth or anything else. It is a really simple and great experience.

Would I ever take my walkman with me or want to carry around a bunch of tapes on a trip? Of course not! But it does have a time and place that is valuable.

When friends come over, we use either vinyl or my custom built RFID cards. There is more of a ceremony to digging through a physical stack of albums and being forced to listen to the album front to back.

[1] https://www.navidrome.org/

Basically, you run a server on your Mac that scans your music collection and "broadcasts" it to the network (LAN or WAN) via either the venerable UPnP/DLNA[1] family of technologies or the newish Subsonic API[2]. Of course, there are others, like DAAP or AURA, etc..

From there, you need to point a compatible player to said server to play your music on any supported device.

If you want to listen to your music on the go, pairing a Subsonic-compatible server on your Mac and a Subsonic-compatible app on your iPhone is probably the way to go. On the server side, I have only used the original Subsonic[3], which was good, but Navidrome[4] seems to be OK. But be aware that the whole "scene" is super messy and fragmented, with the usual abandoned forks of open source alternatives of everything.

Note that this means opening your local network, which comes with its own complexity.

This r/selfhosted thread[5] should give you an idea.

My use case is slightly different. I only care about streaming to my Denon CEOL mini system, which only supports UPnP/DLNA, so my current setup is:

- All my music is stored on a 2011 Mac Mini,

- I use Kazoo Server[6] (not perfect but reliable) to stream it to my audio system,

- which I control via the HEOS app provided by Denon.

Whatever stack you choose, make sure your files are tagged correctly and consistently.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLNA

[2] http://www.subsonic.org/pages/api.jsp

[3] http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp

[4] https://www.navidrome.org/

[5] https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/pz9dpb/lets_mak...

[6] https://docs.linn.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Kazoo_Server_setup_Ma...

[Scanner] Fix Windows scanner (#2633). Thanks @caiocotts

EDIT: This version has a bug when running on Windows that breaks your database! I deleted the Windows binary from the download page and will publish a fix very soon. For details see: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/issues/2630

Jellyfin is great for movies & shows. As an anecdote, it's not so good for music if you're a collector. I personally use Navidrome for that[0].

Anyway, Sonarr[1] makes use of .NET, too. Very reliable software, in my experience.

[0]: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome

I am running ND via the docker container (deluan/navidrome:latest which is 0.49.3 (8b93962f) at the time of this writing) and interact with ND using the web interface.

Since recently, I mostly used Gelli to play my jellyfin music library and was very happy with it, then I discovered Symfonium and bought it because of the Android Auto compatibility, + I like the "random" list on 1st page which allow me to rediscover old stuff I may have forgotten.

I hate spotify so I built a Jellyfin server with my own audio files so I can stream them everywhere I go. Cleaning up all the tags was a *lot* of work. Playback using Gelli (I've also become a contributor in the process because it was the best player for Jellyfin but missing some features I would've liked) and scobbling with Pano scrobbler for Android.

Maybe Gelli would work for you.

For music playing only from a Jellyfin server, I would recommend Gelli, which features gapless and cache. It's the best music player I know for Jellyfin.

I listen to music on my phone with Gelli. This does not scrobble music either. I'm open to switching apps but finamp seems also not to support scrobbling.

Jellyfin on the server side and Gelli for the client assuming you are using Android.

Gelli (version 1.3.3): Native music player for Jellyfin

GitHub

You can just use the music player app from your android phone to connect your jellyfin. Such as gelli or finamp

You could try Jellyfin as a media server, it has various Android apps that can stream from it that work quite well. I haven't made up my mind yet which one I prefer, so I use both interchangeably: Gelli and Finamp.