I’ve been running Navidrome + Symfonium for over 3 years and it replaced Spotify. The only thing they have over my setup is a near infinite number of playlists. But I do everything myself now, I’ve reconnected with my music.
My main issue with Spotify was no lossless audio at the time, and many tracks weren’t on there, if they were they had a habit of disappearing. Now I can listen to any track, remix, bootleg, and even the 1700+ tracks my friend digitised from his vinyl collection until perpetuity.
Symfonium, btw, is truly the best music streaming app, the customizability is beyond anything I’ve seen
Altho what I miss as well is the big data driven recommendation of new, niche music.
I tried new compilation albums, I tried recommendation by genre/tag but nothing quite hits it like spotify 'discover weekly".
Also my listenbrainz doesnt really scrobble while listening offline (downloaded) playlists on symphonium, so its not really an option.
Literally the only thing about Symfonium that’s lacking is having to manually scan the library when adding new music. I use Feishin on my desktops, which some manages to do it in the background.
I’ve been trying to tell all my friends who are self-hosting curious when they see my setup that the feeling of reconnecting with your library is worth all the work alone. It’s like having your old iPod with YOUR library. Adding more to it, reassessing what’s serving you or what can be trimmed, making sick playlists that mean something to you. It’s all so intentional. Algorithmic music is incredible for discovery and that’s about it.
Algorithmic music is incredible for discovery and that’s about it.
This may be true for most but was not for me. I was on streaming services for two years and discovered maybe five new bands. I went back to my old process of discovery (reading magazines, reading online reviews) and discover many more every year.
Algorithms tend to pump you full of similar sounding artists. I’d rather be challenged as a listener and grow than be stuck in a same sounding culdesac.
I just installed it with a free trial to test it. The past week I installed what feels like dozens of Jellyfin Android music clients, some early in dev, some already out for a while. They all sucked in some respect, most notably offline play. I really really hope Symfonium is better than all the others on that, otherwise I don’t know what to do.
I moved to Qobuz where I am slowly buying my music to fill in my Navidrome server which is my main driver. They support and pay artists substantially more.
This, plus if you love a smaller artist and want to support them you can buy their music from qobuz, download it (it’s drm free), and import it into Lidarr.
Use NextDNS and block the requests. I don’t blame a company for trying to make money. I do respect that if you are paying for a service they should not embed crap like that
I use PiHole/RethinkDNS, but that’s not the point. Of course a company wants to make money, that’s why I pay them a monthly amount for my subscription. If it’s not enough to have a successful business, then ask for more money. But don’t shove spyware up on me. Tidal does not include Facebook spyware, so Tidal it is.
YouTube music better not be on that list. I have problems with it adding generated music to radio stations all the time (stuff that’s unlabeled but that I know is AI from lists I’ve seen floating around the internet). I went through one ai “artists” whole catalog and downvoted every song they made and still sometimes I catch them slipping.
Tidal, Qobuz, Bandcamp, and Deezer are the ones if recommend.
I have tried:
Spotify,
Apple Music,
Amazon Music,
You Tube Music,
Tidal
I now stick with Tidal. Started by (very rich) artists. They pay musicians 3-4X more than Spotify. Highest sound quality available. Good app and works with smart speakers.
BTW with Soundiiz it is easy to sync you playlists across multiple platforms, so no friction with switching.
They make you pay if you want to import a playlist more than 1000 songs. that really upset me and prevented me from proceeding with starting a tidal subscription.
I’ve been using Qobuz for the past few months and it’s pretty good. The playlist limitation sucks but they recently made it easier to shuffle tracks marked as favourites. I also find it easier to discover new and indie artists on there. I wish someone would make a TUI player for it an I imagine i’ll eventually just make my own (haven’t looked at their API yet so not sure if it’s possible) but there is a Linux GUI player called QBZ.
Consider buying and/downloading your favorite tracks to make an offline library. In my case it was totally worth the effort. I get to keep it forever, everything plays instantly and I need no subscription or internet connection. Also I can still pay to stream for a month from time to time.
Bandcamp is good for this. You can stream stuff you bought on there for free through the app if you want to. I download my purchases and add them to my enormous library that I started in the late nineties.
Yeah, that’s where I get about one third of my music. Another third is from Qobuz and the rest is converted from YT or somewhere else.
Furthermore, I use MP3Tag and RSGain or Picard to organize the files and set replay gain tags so audio players can play the tracks with normalized volume.
If self hosting your music you could always go down the route of Listenbrainz scrobbling with something like Explo to autograb the weekly recommended playlist. Same goes for Last.fm. Music discovery is also the thing that had me hooked for so long.
Something free/open that basically just hit-n-runs YouTube and doesn’t serve any ads.
Examples: Kreate (or a similar fork), Metrolist, etc.
Downside is that YT will push deliberate updates that break these types of apps occasionally and you may have to wait a few days for them to be fixed. It is a cat and mouse game.
Use these apps for music discovery. If you like a particular artist, buy the album directly from them and cache it digitally on your intended listening devices. Or go see a show or buy merch directly from the artists website. The artist makes more margin on those than they will make for thousands of Spotify streams.
I used to have Spotify Premium, on the family plan. My wife almost never used it, but she had it. I put it on her phone, made her an account, added her to the family plan. So she had access. She just didn’t use it.
I left because, at the time, Spotify was not engaging with the Japanese market. About 10-15 years ago, the big western record labels in the US, UK, et al stopped signing new rock bands, stopped promoting rock music, and rock radio was quickly dying. Meanwhile, Japan was taking rock music and running with it, and a lot of the popular acts were singing in English, or mixed Japanese and English. And Spotify was not biting. You could get a couple Japanese bands on Spotify, if they were huge, but most of them? Not up there. I wanted rock music. Culturally, rock music moved east, and Spotify mostly refused to follow.
Apple Music had a six month free trial (this was… 2018?) and we dropped Spotify to Free and went with that. Worst case scenario, I figured, I’d just get six months of free music and go back. Now for background, I’m an iPhone guy, my wife uses Android. Even with an iPhone, I was using Spotify, because, at the time, it was just what you did. No one cared about Apple Music, it was a cash grab, it wasn’t taken seriously. But I checked it out, I imported all my playlists, it had everything I wanted… and it had all the Japanese stuff I was looking for. We never paid for Spotify again.
Best of all, my wife actually uses Apple Music. Apple Music is fine on an Android phone. She got a new Android phone at one point and was told her old one wasn’t worth anything. I took it, wiped it, and put a few apps on it. Of course I have Apple Music on it. Even on a 2019 Galaxy S10, it still runs. I’ve also got a 256GB SD card in it with a backup of all my music, so it has the streaming, and it has offline playback (via an app called Poweramp, but any offline music player would work).
I wouldn’t mess with Amazon or YouTube for music streaming. If I had to choose an alternative to Apple Music, I’d only consider one where their primary business was music, like Qobuz is a new one that looks promising, or maybe Tidal. Ironically, last I heard, Napster pays artists the most per stream, but it’s not the filesharing Napster. That app died almost 20 years ago. A streaming service (Rhapsody, I believe) just bought the name and logo.
I’m one of those guys who doesn’t need to pay for music streaming. I have a massive collection and I have room to expand it. I know how to take a CD and get the second best digital copy (the best being lossless) from it. My computers don’t have optical drives, but I have a USB-powered one that, with an adapter (USB A to USB C) works just fine on my laptop. Haven’t plugged it into the desktop yet. Ports are all in the back, it’s a pain in the knob, I’ll just use it on the laptop. I pay for music because I love music. More than movies, more than TV shows, more than books, and more than video games. I don’t see paying for streaming as a bad thing. Pay for what you love, if you can. A lot of people pay for services they don’t use. My wife insists on paying for Netflix. I never use Netflix. I think she uses it sometimes. I think it’s a waste of money. She doesn’t. So she pays for it. I pay for Crunchyroll because we both love anime, and I do it through Apple TV so everyone on our family plan can access it. I would not pay for streaming of dumbed down TV shows, but that’s just me. I pay for what I love.
I didn’t see them say that FLAC wasn’t lossless. When I do see someone say that, they’re usually confusing lossless with uncompressed. FLAC and ALAC are lossless. No one can say otherwise. I have my entire library as uncompressed AIFF because o have the storage and I can always compress if needed.
When did I say FLAC isn’t lossless? I said I know how to make the second best thing after lossless. Lossless is WAV, FLAC, ALAC, it really doesn’t matter which one it is. I’m actually encoding to low-complexity m4a (aac) at the highest bitrate. To my boomer (Gen X actually but they always forget us and I’m closer to boomer than Millennial) ears, my m4a files sound pretty close to lossless at about a third the size. It’s my sweet spot of quality to file size.
I’m on my trial month with Deezer before I buy the family subscription and get rid of Spotify. My experience so far is positive, but their search seems not to be as good as spotify’s and their catalog is more limited. Still worth it if they pay more to the artists and they are not led by Daniel Ek
I been using all these apps for music streaming , all open-source , Spotify and YouTube music clients. Cicada has the best FLAC lossless audio streaming from both Spotify & YT music.
I need to leave Apple Music. My OG archive of media is good for pre-2014 but anything else afterwards…. That’s a lot of mining to be done online aarrrrr
I’ve been running Navidrome + Symfonium for over 3 years and it replaced Spotify. The only thing they have over my setup is a near infinite number of playlists. But I do everything myself now, I’ve reconnected with my music.
My main issue with Spotify was no lossless audio at the time, and many tracks weren’t on there, if they were they had a habit of disappearing. Now I can listen to any track, remix, bootleg, and even the 1700+ tracks my friend digitised from his vinyl collection until perpetuity.
Symfonium, btw, is truly the best music streaming app, the customizability is beyond anything I’ve seen
I use Symfonium and sync it with Jellyfin. It really is amazing
Symphonium is the goat. Using it with Jellyfin.
Altho what I miss as well is the big data driven recommendation of new, niche music. I tried new compilation albums, I tried recommendation by genre/tag but nothing quite hits it like spotify 'discover weekly".
Also my listenbrainz doesnt really scrobble while listening offline (downloaded) playlists on symphonium, so its not really an option.
Anyone with a solution to this?
Literally the only thing about Symfonium that’s lacking is having to manually scan the library when adding new music. I use Feishin on my desktops, which some manages to do it in the background.
Feishin is so epic too, I love it
Yeah that’s true. But once metadata is cached, it takes like a minute to scan my entire library!
I’ve been trying to tell all my friends who are self-hosting curious when they see my setup that the feeling of reconnecting with your library is worth all the work alone. It’s like having your old iPod with YOUR library. Adding more to it, reassessing what’s serving you or what can be trimmed, making sick playlists that mean something to you. It’s all so intentional. Algorithmic music is incredible for discovery and that’s about it.
This may be true for most but was not for me. I was on streaming services for two years and discovered maybe five new bands. I went back to my old process of discovery (reading magazines, reading online reviews) and discover many more every year.
Algorithms tend to pump you full of similar sounding artists. I’d rather be challenged as a listener and grow than be stuck in a same sounding culdesac.
Couldn’t agree more! Although I always wish the barrier for entry to be lower for self-hosting.
Mm zymfonium is not open source I see
I just installed it with a free trial to test it. The past week I installed what feels like dozens of Jellyfin Android music clients, some early in dev, some already out for a while. They all sucked in some respect, most notably offline play. I really really hope Symfonium is better than all the others on that, otherwise I don’t know what to do.
I’m currently using Ultrasonic, it’s ok. On desktop, I love Feishin
Ultrasonic does not support Jellyfin though.
Oh I just use official jellyfin or findroid
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
My conscience has never been more free
Yeah, but are the artists getting paid?
The artists weren’t getting paid when you were using Spotify. The shareholders were.
If you want artists to get paid, you have to buy direct or support them indirectly via merch/tickets/buying streams, etc.
Yeah I do, that’s what I’m saying
Gotcha. Thank you for clarifying.
The ones I really like I will still buy something from. The others I don’t listen to enough for them to even make $1 from streaming anyway.
I use the money to go to concerts and buy merch!
I moved to Qobuz where I am slowly buying my music to fill in my Navidrome server which is my main driver. They support and pay artists substantially more.
I’d do the same, yet Qobuz is not available in my country, despite being in EU…
Lidarr, prowlarr, qbit and navidrome do wonders
This, plus if you love a smaller artist and want to support them you can buy their music from qobuz, download it (it’s drm free), and import it into Lidarr.
Yeah exactly. Some artist also make their music available for download in high ress formats after a fee. Which I am happy to pay directly to them.
Have you tried tidal? ATM I’m too broke to be paying for music but in the future, I would like to support the artists
I also have tidal, I do rip from it from time to time. As it happens that at random songs and artist are no longer available to play in my country.
Qobuz bruv. Pays artists more and has easy peasy playlist migration.
I wanted to use it, but a Facebook tracker in the app is a hard no for me.
reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/769361/
Use NextDNS and block the requests. I don’t blame a company for trying to make money. I do respect that if you are paying for a service they should not embed crap like that
I use PiHole/RethinkDNS, but that’s not the point. Of course a company wants to make money, that’s why I pay them a monthly amount for my subscription. If it’s not enough to have a successful business, then ask for more money. But don’t shove spyware up on me. Tidal does not include Facebook spyware, so Tidal it is.
YouTube music better not be on that list. I have problems with it adding generated music to radio stations all the time (stuff that’s unlabeled but that I know is AI from lists I’ve seen floating around the internet). I went through one ai “artists” whole catalog and downvoted every song they made and still sometimes I catch them slipping.
Tidal, Qobuz, Bandcamp, and Deezer are the ones if recommend.
I have tried: Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, You Tube Music, Tidal
I now stick with Tidal. Started by (very rich) artists. They pay musicians 3-4X more than Spotify. Highest sound quality available. Good app and works with smart speakers.
BTW with Soundiiz it is easy to sync you playlists across multiple platforms, so no friction with switching.
Soundiiz nuts
Sorry…
They make you pay if you want to import a playlist more than 1000 songs. that really upset me and prevented me from proceeding with starting a tidal subscription.
I definitely don’t have that problem 😂.
I’ve been using Qobuz for the past few months and it’s pretty good. The playlist limitation sucks but they recently made it easier to shuffle tracks marked as favourites. I also find it easier to discover new and indie artists on there. I wish someone would make a TUI player for it an I imagine i’ll eventually just make my own (haven’t looked at their API yet so not sure if it’s possible) but there is a Linux GUI player called QBZ.
There is this one github.com/SofusA/qobine
I love Poweramp for listening to .flacs on android, best 8€ i’ve spent on an app
Consider buying and/downloading your favorite tracks to make an offline library. In my case it was totally worth the effort. I get to keep it forever, everything plays instantly and I need no subscription or internet connection. Also I can still pay to stream for a month from time to time.
Bandcamp is good for this. You can stream stuff you bought on there for free through the app if you want to. I download my purchases and add them to my enormous library that I started in the late nineties.
Yeah, that’s where I get about one third of my music. Another third is from Qobuz and the rest is converted from YT or somewhere else. Furthermore, I use MP3Tag and RSGain or Picard to organize the files and set replay gain tags so audio players can play the tracks with normalized volume.
Honestly, some are better than others depending on priorities, but literally anything is a better option than Spotify on most fronts these days.
bandcamp is all i need. if an artist only sells music on corporate sites, they’re a sellout and part of the problem
Bandcamp is owned by the biggest music licensing conglomerate in the world, how is that not corporate?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songtradr
Bandcamp or qobuz. They actually pay the artists a lot better. Especially bandcampfridays
I am really liking Qobuz
I’ve used Qobuz for years and have zero complaints.
My biggest thing is discovering new music in line with my broad tastes. Anything do that that well? Then im off.
If self hosting your music you could always go down the route of Listenbrainz scrobbling with something like Explo to autograb the weekly recommended playlist. Same goes for Last.fm. Music discovery is also the thing that had me hooked for so long.
Will look into this, thanks!
I’ve used Qobuz for a long time, and it’s been great.
Something free/open that basically just hit-n-runs YouTube and doesn’t serve any ads.
Examples: Kreate (or a similar fork), Metrolist, etc.
Downside is that YT will push deliberate updates that break these types of apps occasionally and you may have to wait a few days for them to be fixed. It is a cat and mouse game.
Use these apps for music discovery. If you like a particular artist, buy the album directly from them and cache it digitally on your intended listening devices. Or go see a show or buy merch directly from the artists website. The artist makes more margin on those than they will make for thousands of Spotify streams.
Plexamp and a well maintained library.
I used to have Spotify Premium, on the family plan. My wife almost never used it, but she had it. I put it on her phone, made her an account, added her to the family plan. So she had access. She just didn’t use it.
I left because, at the time, Spotify was not engaging with the Japanese market. About 10-15 years ago, the big western record labels in the US, UK, et al stopped signing new rock bands, stopped promoting rock music, and rock radio was quickly dying. Meanwhile, Japan was taking rock music and running with it, and a lot of the popular acts were singing in English, or mixed Japanese and English. And Spotify was not biting. You could get a couple Japanese bands on Spotify, if they were huge, but most of them? Not up there. I wanted rock music. Culturally, rock music moved east, and Spotify mostly refused to follow.
Apple Music had a six month free trial (this was… 2018?) and we dropped Spotify to Free and went with that. Worst case scenario, I figured, I’d just get six months of free music and go back. Now for background, I’m an iPhone guy, my wife uses Android. Even with an iPhone, I was using Spotify, because, at the time, it was just what you did. No one cared about Apple Music, it was a cash grab, it wasn’t taken seriously. But I checked it out, I imported all my playlists, it had everything I wanted… and it had all the Japanese stuff I was looking for. We never paid for Spotify again.
Best of all, my wife actually uses Apple Music. Apple Music is fine on an Android phone. She got a new Android phone at one point and was told her old one wasn’t worth anything. I took it, wiped it, and put a few apps on it. Of course I have Apple Music on it. Even on a 2019 Galaxy S10, it still runs. I’ve also got a 256GB SD card in it with a backup of all my music, so it has the streaming, and it has offline playback (via an app called Poweramp, but any offline music player would work).
I wouldn’t mess with Amazon or YouTube for music streaming. If I had to choose an alternative to Apple Music, I’d only consider one where their primary business was music, like Qobuz is a new one that looks promising, or maybe Tidal. Ironically, last I heard, Napster pays artists the most per stream, but it’s not the filesharing Napster. That app died almost 20 years ago. A streaming service (Rhapsody, I believe) just bought the name and logo.
I’m one of those guys who doesn’t need to pay for music streaming. I have a massive collection and I have room to expand it. I know how to take a CD and get the second best digital copy (the best being lossless) from it. My computers don’t have optical drives, but I have a USB-powered one that, with an adapter (USB A to USB C) works just fine on my laptop. Haven’t plugged it into the desktop yet. Ports are all in the back, it’s a pain in the knob, I’ll just use it on the laptop. I pay for music because I love music. More than movies, more than TV shows, more than books, and more than video games. I don’t see paying for streaming as a bad thing. Pay for what you love, if you can. A lot of people pay for services they don’t use. My wife insists on paying for Netflix. I never use Netflix. I think she uses it sometimes. I think it’s a waste of money. She doesn’t. So she pays for it. I pay for Crunchyroll because we both love anime, and I do it through Apple TV so everyone on our family plan can access it. I would not pay for streaming of dumbed down TV shows, but that’s just me. I pay for what I love.
The demise of mainstream western rock music is sad, I hate the current never ending stream of rap.
I keep buying music through iTunes, DRM free and legal, I am not interested in renting my music library.
EDIT: BTW, why do you not consider FLAC as being lossless?
I didn’t see them say that FLAC wasn’t lossless. When I do see someone say that, they’re usually confusing lossless with uncompressed. FLAC and ALAC are lossless. No one can say otherwise. I have my entire library as uncompressed AIFF because o have the storage and I can always compress if needed.
When did I say FLAC isn’t lossless? I said I know how to make the second best thing after lossless. Lossless is WAV, FLAC, ALAC, it really doesn’t matter which one it is. I’m actually encoding to low-complexity m4a (aac) at the highest bitrate. To my boomer (Gen X actually but they always forget us and I’m closer to boomer than Millennial) ears, my m4a files sound pretty close to lossless at about a third the size. It’s my sweet spot of quality to file size.
I am sorry, I just found your phrasing a bit unusual.
Thank you for clairfying!
I made a video on this topic several months ago.
TLDW: Metrolist and Outertune
(But would appreciate a like to help with the algo if you try these out and like them. Thanks!)
I’m on my trial month with Deezer before I buy the family subscription and get rid of Spotify. My experience so far is positive, but their search seems not to be as good as spotify’s and their catalog is more limited. Still worth it if they pay more to the artists and they are not led by Daniel Ek
Not Spotify, but I’ve just been using YT Music FOSS alternatives for a while + offline music from CDs I own.
With my headphones, I can’t tell the difference between a lossless FLAC and audio from YTM, so it’s not an issue for me.
Murglar
Nice. Do I need referral code for this? Can u share your username so that I can register??
I don’t think a referral code is needed!
I been using all these apps for music streaming , all open-source , Spotify and YouTube music clients. Cicada has the best FLAC lossless audio streaming from both Spotify & YT music.
What app is that all in?
What app is that all in? 😶 its just a app folder …
I need to leave Apple Music. My OG archive of media is good for pre-2014 but anything else afterwards…. That’s a lot of mining to be done online aarrrrr
I’m assuming you intend to use a lidarr, jacket, deluge stack to do that?