Tech, homelabbing, and selfhosting stuff is probably the hobby I by far spend the most time on. So many aspects of my life are enhanced by the services I make to make my life easier. The service I use more than any other is Navidrome.
Navidrome is a music hosting service. No frills, no “AI enhanced feature” bullshit. It’s just a music hosting service with Subsonic API support. It pulls any metadata the files may have had to make it incredibly easy to sort, rate, or see albums at a glance. When combined with MusicBrainz Picard you can gather all the metadata, even for those CD’s that refuse to import properly.
Although it’s no frills don’t think that doesn’t mean it isn’t feature-rich. Navidrome is in active development on their GitHub and are always adding small additions and optimizations to make the experience that much better. One of the most exciting recent additions was dynamic playlists – the ability to set up rules (in my example my ratings) to create a list dynamically and get everything you need. Want all your Beatles albums together then add a new one? Easy enough. The best part of dynamic playlists, however, is how they are synced across devices.
This post isn’t focusing on players (as the built-in player works perfectly well on computer) but if you have an android device it would be criminal not to talk about Symphonium. Although Symphonium had dynamic playlists prior to Navidrome getting it natively it still plays perfect with it.
Good documentation is also the hallmark of a fantastic app and Navidrome also shines in this regard – their docs page has an incredible amount of information and getting started with installing is just a couple commands. The whole process is incredibly beginner friendly and if you have basically any amount of server knowledge getting something that works shouldn’t take more than an hour and a Raspberry Pi.
With Navidrome also comes plugin support. If you are terminally online and require every person to know what you are doing at every waking moment there’s even a Discord plugin that lets others know what you are listening to – extremely similar to Spotify.
As far as breaking free from paid subscription software I truly do feel that music is the easiest, so long as you are able to rip the music yourself and properly index it you will easily never be able to go back.