Navidrome Music Server VS gonic

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.

Gonic seems to be the most active fork of Subsonic that supports browsing via folders, but there's no Windows support. I'm considering running it via Docker on my Windows server but haven't had a chance to look into the pros/cons of that. Curious if anyone here can shed some light on this for me

I've always thought of that one to be more useful when e.g. using gonic, which comes with out a web interface (and seems pretty awesome overall, although I have never tried it myself since I'm quite happy with Navidrome).

Just wanted to give quick plug for my music player app Supersonic! It's a client for Subsonic API-compatible servers, so it handles the UI and playback while the server (Gonic or LMS would be good lightweight choices for localhost-only setup) handles the library management/metadata indexing. It's a quite young project but I have lots of plans for continued improvement and new features (and would gladly accept contributions)!

In the past I've used Airsonic, Gonic, Plex, and Jellyfin. Just for a bit o' variety

i would say it's a bit experimental, but you could try gonic (subsonic jukebox mode) + snapcast

Gonic