Selfhosted

Mp3 collections never stopped being cool, you just have to invest some time into it

Don't use revanced. The backbone of the dev team moved to morphs now, and so do other modders that used to dev using revanced.

https://morphe.software/

There was a bunch of drama that's worthy for Lemmy but stuck in reddit that I don't care to bring here.

It got easier to patch things in some ways, but having known how to do it "the complex way" with vanced and revanced before I feel like some is lost in translation.

But overall it's a lot better with morphe, the patches against megacorps efforts to block access comes quicker than revanced, and the YouTube minimum app requirement now moved up

I do both.

The music I like is in my collection. I pay for it where I can, but I'll be honest some of it is pirated because I just can't buy it anywhere.

I also use Opentune to listen to YouTube music without logging in to stream stuff like "lofi chillhop beats".

I recently saw around here a music discovery service (self-hosted) I might try. Can't remember the name...

Leeching off corporations' infrastructures for free is a noble endeavor and everyone should do it.

I wrote an application which runs on my server and monitors my favorites on Tidal/Deezer/Qobuz. It downloads them in bulk whenever I have a premium account with one of them. Usually I purchase a month of premium every few months, at which point I get nice clean FLACs for local use.

The FLACs are moved to Jellyfin and I stream them using Finamp, which also supports transcoding, so I keep 128 kbps Opus files for offline playback and stream the raw FLAC files when bandwidth is no concern.

I have amassed a huge music library over the last decades, so even if all streaming websites go under tomorrow, I have enough music locally to last me a lifetime.

spotify and google will figure out a way to block modded apps eventually.

nobody can take your home server and its content away from you

Soulseek has far more music on it than you can typically find on free public torrent sites.

Just a heads up.

Either way, just remember to support artists when you can. Bandcamp Friday is one of the best ways I know of to fund artists in exchange for FLACs that you can legally listen to however you want to.

But I was a broke student in the heydays of torrenting, so I'm not judging using any means necessary to listen to music.

Ive been trying to get rid of YouTube for over a year now, but haven't found a solution im happy with so still sticking with revanced YouTube.

Got rid of Spotify 2 years ago and self host navidrome and it's perfect for me. I use dsub2000 on my android and feishin on my Linux desktop pc.

I'm UK based, so fairly strict internet laws and I torrent to supplement my owned media. I don't use flac, I'm sure if I tried I could hear the difference from 192kbit MP3, but honestly I don't care. 192kbit or similar mp3's are more than good enough for me.

Self hosting costs money. Hardware setup initially is expensive, both in money and time and effort. It's only a solution if you believe there is a problem that needs fixing.

For me it's well worth it for music. Video not so much, not yet anyway. I listen to the same songs 100s of times, but videos only once or maybe twice at most.

i also only download flac files, and i keep them in my ~/music/lossless directory. i use picard to organize that, and wrote a bash script to keep a synchronized opus format copy in ~/music/lossy. on my phone i use termux/ssh to rsync the lossy files to my phone and avoid streaming altogether. for reference, my lossless directory is 221gb, and lossy is 19gb.

Use bandcamp to discover new artists and give them a few bucks whenever you can.

I listen to a LOT of music - basically most of the day when I'm not on a call.

I don't follow the mainstream so never had a spotify account, and am really listening either to radio-browser.info or a few channels on youtube that I sponsor, which link to the artists on bandcamp, where I buy the music I like.

To your point on bandwidth, I try to store music at the highest quality I can get, but then transcode to players.

I did try mp3fs to live transcode files to my phone in the past, but didn't use it much in the end.

I've torrented some music in the past, but TBH, I find it in different places easier nowadays.

I used to find some interesting stuff with Napalm FTP indexer - but be very careful with direct connections to random FTP servers.

why not both?

Bought a home server, threw at it an HDD and installed jellyfin. Now I buy my music from bandcamp or rip my own cds (yup, I'm buying cd's back too) and haven't logged to spotify ever since.

Can't be happier.

I tend not to sail the Sea's very often. I generally prefer to buy the albums or borrow them from my friends or the local library, rip them to Flac and then stream them to my phone using either Jellyfin or Navidrome. When I just want a radio station, I'll open up Spotify. Many years ago, I had a collection of online radio stations I'd listen to, but over time they either closed their public streams and required an dedicated app or died off completely.

On your data bandwidth issue, both Jellyfin and Navidrome support on demand transcoding and can stream any bitrate you might want. There are options for it both in the web app and in most of the phone clients I've run across. I generally have my phone apps set to 96k MP3 as I can't really hear a difference most of the time, at least not with the headphones I have in combo with the background noise that is generally around me and my preexisting hearing damage. Most folks can't tell a difference between CD's and a 128k mp3.

As for torrenting, I can say that you will probably want a paid VPN running AND active any time your torrent software is running. Beyond that I would recommend you check out !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com for more information.

The only problem with something like Revanced is that it can go away at literally any time. It could be shut down tomorrow and you'd lose access to everything it provides. That's fine, or at least tolerable, if you ALSO have something self-hosted you can rely on in case that happens. If you don't have downloaded music self-hosted, then you're totally relying on Revanced permanently and you lose everything if it goes away. Maybe for something like music that's an acceptable risk, but you have to consider it and decide where it is an acceptable risk. What are you going to do if those services you're relying on go away?

Self-hosting, like you said, is about the independence, and the knowledge that once it's up and running on your own hardware, it won't just go away on its own, and it can't just get "shut down" unless you choose to. You might not need that for every service you rely on, but there are probably at least some you would struggle without, and those are things you should consider self-hosting. The more you think about it, and the more comfortable you get with it, the more likely you'll decide other things are important enough to self-host after all.

Personally, I ripped my CDs to MP3S, and convert anything I downloaded to MP3, as well. I'm no audiophile, so I really can't tell the difference when listening; the difference is only noticeable when I look at my storage and bandwidth.

I don't use most of the software you mention, but converting FLAC to other formats is pretty easy. E.g. with ffmpeg you'd say

ffmpeg -i somesong.flac -o somesong.mp3

or similarly for other formats. There are more options to control the output bit rates and that sort of thing.

You're in the selfhosted community, surely you know what sort of answer you're going to get. If you just need to hear it, selfhost!

Honestly? I just used PipePipe to download the songs I wanted as MP3 and saved em to USB. This a step above basic caveman shit lol. I suppose I could have gone real 2003, gone to the library, ripped em manually.

In any case, as with all self hosting decisions, there has to come a point where you consider quality over quantity.

Great, you have 10,000 songs. How many of those do you actually listen to? 30? 100? 300? How much is enough? Because if the answer is 10,000...what do you have to give up to get that? Clearly, if you're uncomfortable with online music hosting, at some point, you need to bail. But how can you keep things fresh?

I have a crazy idea one day that I will use my self hosted LLMs (namely self hosted ACE-Step 1.5) to create my own filler play list, mixed with actual songs I enjoy (say, 350ish, high fidelity tracks). The rough idea -

• point LLM at MP3 folder
• it randomly selects a song to play
• creates AI based DJ that introduces those tracks as part of "station identity"
• Additionally, have the AI based DJ read "local news" (based on my RSS feeds) every songs.
• All of this blended into the generated station flow

I can see this whole thing being tunable too (mostly AI filler stuff, akin to LoFi girl, balanced mix, mostly my library and AI DJ etc).

I'm doing other LLM based shit right now, but I can 100% see myself doing this out of pure "Fuck it, why not".

Use the left to find content, use the right to consume the content.

Convert from FLAC to mp3, and get a docker image of a torrent service with built in vpn support.

Both. Use YT & Spotify as discovery engines (along with Pandora, Jango, and Soma FM), but download your favorite tracks and self-host.

You can always transcode flac to another format to save bandwidth. I haven't used jellyfin for music, but shouldn't it support transcoding that too on the fly?

Revanced to discover new music, then selfhost what you liked.

@v4ld1z I download my music onto each device, personally, but I do have some experience with streaming. I prefer it just to be rid of the companies, but I do also cut the quality of all of my music down from FLAC to 128kbps MP3s. I can't hear the difference, even on high end equipment, so it's just a gain for me. YMMV on that though.

I just use nextcloud to sync it all, though, and Symfonium on mobile/strawberry on desktop. It's about 10 gigs for all of my music. I don't have the largest collection, but 1.3k songs is still quite a bit

I've got both.

Jellyfin with high quality for the things that I want to listen all the time.

Newpipe for on demand things.

I am with you on the whole not wanting to use torrents. And also kinda have similar issue. I try to buy my stuff, but its becoming harder and harder avoid DRM.

There is a benefit though in not having a huge library, I am not paralyzed with choice and I am more intentional with listening to my music. Almost like the good old days, taking a tape and sitting with my wired headphones next to a hi-fi system and "just" listening.

I have a very similar experience, I still use Spotify and YT to discover new music, but I then torrent it (or find it on soulseek) to keep my jellyfin collection growing. I also buy off bandcamp since that's pretty convenient to fill in my favorite albums.

A as a step towards B man

Poor que no los dos?

Self hosting for things I care to keep around, streaming to get new download ideas and for stuff where hosting everything would be too much.

For movies and shows I find myself some Linux ISOs.
Music, I get from Bandcamp if available and if not, there are very good Tidal downloaders out there. Tidal also doubles as my "I want to check out this song" service.

there is a hidden button called bandcamp, idk where you can get music to stream maybe api server that use your free ytmusic and spotify solutions)

I used to use YouTube music revanced, but at some point it asked me to verify my age to listen to a song my rage against the machine, and that was the last straw. I uninstalled YouTube music, took a dusty raspberry pi 5 from a shelf where it'd been sitting for like half a year and connected it to my router with an Ethernet cable. Then I installed qbittorrent (headless) and mounted its downloads under the music category (it stores the downloads in separate directories, depending on the torrent's category) into Navidrome. I also have Prowlarr installed for easier searches of indexers. So far I have an 80GB library of music. I try to keep the size down by downloading 320kbps mp3s where possible.

I use the Symfonium app, it was totally worth the 4.50€, I'd be willing to pay more honestly. On desktop I use Feishin.

I also have Listenbrainz set up as a scrobbler on Navidrome. The stats are pretty cool.