Navidrome Music Server VS LMS

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.

For those that dont know if you add an album that has multiple album artists ( artist 1;artist b) then plex/plexamp instead of showing the album in both artists pages and showing both artist tags as clickable (same way EVERY streaming service is serving music right now) it populates a new artists page named "artists a;artist b". They keep adding trash features that none cares about or even asks and don't even have a basic feature that projects like Lightweight Music Server already have.

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)!

If you're concerned about power usage You can start with just a raspberry pi or something similar running something like Lightweight Music Server which uses a subsonic protocol. Then any app that can connect to a subsonic server like ultrasonic (not sure if this one specifically available for iOS). That's how I started before moving onto Plex and Plexamp.

Good time to move your library to something else like LMS https://github.com/epoupon/lms

I use LMS (Lightweight Music Server) to stream my music to desktop and mobile. It supports the Subsonic API for clients, scrobbling to ListenBrainz, has a nice web UI, and for some reason is the only music server that supports volume equalization with Replaygain.

Not sure if that would fit your needs but https://github.com/epoupon/lms has a radio mode that automatically feeds the play queue with similar tracks. Just seed with some tracks (a whole album, a discography, a single track, etc.) and hit play.

LMS - LightWeight Music Server https://github.com/epoupon/lms Super fast with a good set of features. Seems to be well coded in general.

Hmm, that link shows me my IP address is banned (I assume from the time when the provider I use had dynamic IPs so a whole range is banned). Anyway - is it this? https://github.com/epoupon/lms

https://github.com/epoupon/lms has a built in recommandation engine to help you find similar tracks (in your collection) to what is in your current play queue.

Maybe Substreamer has a problem with a specific server? The server I used is here (open-source): https://github.com/epoupon/lms/blob/master/INSTALL.md