tomahawk VS Navidrome Music Server

In a way, This reminds me of the (much more ambitious) system of resolvers [1] of the (now defunct) tomahawk player [0]

The idea was you just give it the metadata and it "resolves" it into any service. I really like this idea. it kind of lives on in "playlist converters" like tunemymusic or soundiiz. but it is not the same as it being built into the player itself (like spotube albeit with a different more straightforward aim here)

[0] https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk

[1] https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk-resolvers

Tomahawk "a free multi-source and cross-platform music player. An application that can play not only your local files, but also stream from services like Spotify, Beats, SoundCloud, Google Music, YouTube and many others... "

There is this app called Tomahawk, although I don't think it has been maintained in a while.

Just works (plays almost all formats) - FooBar2000 Minimal as fuck (CLI/Terminal) - CMUS Bloat (lots of features some you want, some you didn't know you wanted and stuff you won't use) - tomahawk

I hope eventually all of the guys muddling around this will realize the obviousness of the truth: we need a metadata-first player with Artist, Track, Album Linked Open Data entities, where the actual data are just sources for that entity, and you can have multiple providers (YouTube, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, torrents, IPFS, anything). Some tracks you listen to often you can "cache" on the SD card, so you don't hit the network AGAIN for the same data (cell towers and servers use power you know). Other times you want to make room and you blow away some of the data. But if you've got reception and a locally unavailable track shows up in a playlist it will just fetch it from one of the other sources. If some uploader decided to cripple your playlists with link rot, no problem, all of the metadata is intact and in your control, you just need to find another provider for that CreativeWork. Your metadata then becomes a monolithic single-source-of-truth database of information like "Blind Observatory is a project of David Pasternack", "this track belongs with tracks of the style called Chillrave", "this track is via Alice", "heard this in a mixtape by Bob". At which point it becomes obvious you shouldn't be handling the fabric of your digital life in anything less than a top quality FOSS graph database of sorts. You tend to that directly, then glue code deals deterministically with stuff like writes to embedded tags so the music files are portable.

Turns out Tomahawk does a lot of what I want, it's just no longer in active dev - https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk

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.