LinkinWires' blog

Out of all of mine self-hosted services I use Jellyfin most of the time (not counting my Sharkey instance). I really like music, my life feels empty and dull without it. Videogames and music are 2 my most favorite media formats. Before I bought my first home server, I used cracked Spotify clients for listening to music, but the start of my home lab and enshittification of Spotify (which I felt even though I was using cracked clients!) forced me to search for alternatives. And now I'm here to tell you what I was using and what I am using now to listen to music.

Media server

I tried two media servers: Navidrome and Jellyfin, on which I settled. Navidrome is purely a music streaming server while Jellyfin is an universal media server, you can stream music, films, shows and even books. If you are looking to exclusively listen to music, then I would recommend Navidrome. Unix philosophy about making a program do one thing and do it well works here – Jellyfin can serve as a music streaming server, but Navidrome is easier to deal with. I settled on Jellyfin, because I at some point had to host other media. Although there's no need for me to do so anymore Jellyfin works well enough so that I don't feel the need to switch back to Navidrome. And who knows, maybe I would need to host other media again at some point in time.

Client

Although Jellyfin and Navidrome both work in browsers, you would want to use a client on a mobile device. Jellyfin has an official client for desktop and mobile which is just a WebView wrapper. Might seem weird, but it still works on older Android versions, although it will warn you about older Android WebView version (tested on Android 4.4.4). I use Symfonium on my phone, it's a paid app with 30 day trial version, which can be used to listen to music locally or to stream music from Jellyfin, Plex, Emby, (Open)Subsonic-compatible server (i. e. Navidrome), SMB and WebDAV servers and even Google Drive, OneDrive, DropBox, Box and pCloud. On PCs I use Feishin, it's totally not ideal, but it's the best client I tried so far, also it has UI similar to Spotify. It supports Jellyfin, natively supports Navidrome, and also supports OpenSubsonic-compatible servers.

Where do I get music?

I listen to music in FLAC, I do hear difference between loosy and loseless. Thus I prefer Bandcamp, even if it means I have to spend money to buy music. I buy whole albums even if I liked only one song from the entire album =). The issue is that Bandcamp is the only way to legally buy music in Ukraine, all other sellers block registrations from Ukraine and using VPNs. Some artists (i. e. Aphex Twin) sell music on their website, but unfortunately it's a rare occurrence. If I have no way to legally buy music (their own fault) then I find artist on Qobuz, Tidal or Deezer (these streaming services allow you to listen and download music in at least CD-quality FLAC, which is sufficient most of the time) and download their music using special rippers (you can always check FMHY for more info about them 😉).

File tagging tools

I am very sad that there are no tools similar to Mp3tag on Linux. I can not recommend EVERYTHING I tried so far, even puddletag, which was said to be modeled from Mp3tag. I have a feeling that the devs who made tagging software for Linux haven't used their own software at all. Specially for this blog I tried using Mp3tag through Wine, very unideal, but better that puddletag, which loves to crash a lot, or other software which simply has a bad UX.

Mass renaming of files

Sometimes I have to rename files for organizing my music library. KRename is an ideal piece of software for this, it has everything you would ever need.