Navidrome Music Server VS sonixd

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.

Try this https://github.com/jeffvli/sonixd

You can use Sonixd to stream music from your own Jellyfin or Subsonic server.

I've you're still looking for a desktop client, check out Sonixd. Also for both Subsonic and Jellyfin. Best I've found. It stores playlists in the backend and has MPRIS supporr.

Glad you like Navidrome. This information is already in place, just not exposed in the UI. If you use a client that provides this info (Sonixd, Airsonic Refix, DSub, ...) You you see this. Ex: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/331353/212409922-ba5f589f-dadb-449f-a3e9-03065b8ba8e5.png

Cool project! For anyone that’s struggling with chrome tabs and is looking for a good Navidrome client for desktop sonixd is fantastic: https://github.com/jeffvli/sonixd

To summarise what we've gotten to so far: - Jellyfin web can do this using Instant Mix feature, but instant mix is at present pretty basic (see discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/jellyfin/comments/o0eic8/what_is_instant_mix_actually_based_on_also_is/). It won't work very well at the level of "Artist" but starting from a specific track or album produces a pretty good mix for some music in my library. Instant mixes can be saved as playlists. - Some Jellyfin apps can do this: especially symfonium (android) has advanced features for making mixes. The only limitation here seems to be saving playlists back to jellyfin server. And if you don't have an android phone and sonixd has a very limited ability to create a (completely, and imho unhelpfully) random playlist. - There are more convoluted solutions. Jellyfin users can try to use Subsonic clients with jellyfin by installing a server shim, but it seems this isn't being developed anymore and I wasn't able to get it running. It is also possible to use jellyfin as an MPD server, so more generic clients can be used here too.

It won't be applicable to everyone, but I want to give a plug to Sonixd[1]: it's a Subsonic client, meaning that it'll work with Subsonic or any other music server that uses the Subsonic API (Navidrome, Airsonic, gonic).

It's an Electron application, which won't be for anyone, but it's sufficiently smooth and snappy for me.

[1]: https://github.com/jeffvli/sonixd