openhab-addons VS Navidrome Music Server

I used open hab https://www.openhab.org/ for a while and really liked it but had trouble getting it to work with the ZigBee USB stick I bought. So I switched to home assistant and have been on that for a couple years now. Both are solid. I like HA a lot but the one down side for me is I have to pay the 5 bucks a month or whatever it is for the cloud access to control things when I'm not home. Openhab has instructions to set up your own server for remote access.

openHAB (version 3.6.0): Vendor and technology agnostic open source home automation

Here's what I did at my house. I don't control based on dew point and I only have one HVAC unit, but you could pull this off with openHAB and Venstar thermostats. Venstar was the only brand I was able to find with a local API to control the thermostat. You can set up rules in openHAB to perform what you'd like. The rule engine is powerful and flexible. I'm not gonna lie. It's probably going to be a lot of heavy lifting to get it going but it's rewarding once you've set it up.

OpenHAB (like Home Assistant; open source, need to run on own hardware)

openHAB Beta (version 3.3.2-beta): Vendor and technology agnostic open source home automation

While I don't care about the whole carbon boogeyman spectacle I do care about minimising our environmental impact as well as dependency on, well, as many external things as I can. One of those things is electrical power so I put about 14.5 kW worth of solar panels on a barn roof, connected to a 10kW hybrid inverter [2]. Since I don't like external dependencies I do not use the supplier's "cloud-based" management feature (*Fronius Solar Web* for those who care about such details) and disallow the thing access to the 'net. Instead I made my own system based around OpenHAB [1], a bunch of ESP8266 microcontrollers hooked up to things like the utility power meter (which has a handy P1/HAN port just for that purpose), a heat pump, a water heater, a small heater in the feed storage etc. The thing gets hourly electricity prices for today and tomorrow and creates a schedule to enable/disable devices based on demand, price and energy production from the inverter. Once I had everything set up it has worked fine without the need for intervention. This does not yet include the washing machine and dishwasher since these devices do not offer an easily automatised interface and because scheduling their use also depends on what we put in them and when we want them to clean those things. I just check the graphs to decide when to switch them on which works fine, no need for more automation.

Our electricity rates - both use as well as returns for power we deliver to the net - vary by the hour. Using the interface to the utility meter and the inverter I get readings every 10 seconds, the inverter also tells me the net frequency so it is easy to see whether the net is overloaded (frequency clearly below 50 Hz) or oversupplied (clearly above 50 Hz).

[1] ...but I have not yet connected a battery since a) we can sell overproduction and b) batteries are still too expensive. I expect battery prices to go down once enough used electric car batteries enter the market.

[2] https://www.openhab.org/

Openhab3 (Smarthome)

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.