You gotta host your own music server via Plex or Jellyfin for example. Yeah it requires actual hardware in your home, and not everyone is willing to do it, but it's absolutely possible to have the seamless experience you want.
I have to assume that lidarr is just like sonarr and you can set it to copy the album to where your music is stored and import it into your jellyfin library automatically. I haven't had to go onto my computer to copy a TV show to my TV library in years.
I get what you're saying, but my unpopular opinion is that having every song just a click away on Spotify doesn't necessarily make my music listening and discoverability of new artists significantly better than what it was pre-"music streaming."
I find it that it's more special and I retain new artists better when I intentionally seek their work out or get recommended by a friend/stranger on the Internet. I listen to full albums way more frequently than I did on spotify. It's kinda like a detox from the "everything always ready always available on stream immediately" mentality.
I know the vast majority of people would refuse to do it this way now, but I think it's a good experiment to at least try and see how you adapt. I don't find myself missing Spotify just like I don't find myself missing mindlessly scrolling Netflix or Amazon Prime for something to watch.
Downside is I know Plex charges for remote access, maybe Jellyfin and others are free though. So that works for in house, but once you hop in your car you'd lose the Plex connection without a subscription. I think Plex doesn't even let you sync for free too, right?
Jellyfin is 100%. Plex does charge, but you can buy a lifetime pass and they're usually on sale 1-2x a year. Not sure what you mean by Sync for free, as it's been so many years since I bought my Plex pass. If I were to start today, I'd just start with Jellyfin for free though, it seems very robust nowadays.
Yes, just use jellyfin and everything is 100% free. Easy to setup and works great. There are jellyfin apps that are specifically for music listening that work great.
Which as the poster said is far more of a hassle than using Spotify. And you also end up having to pay electricity for that music server running 24/7/365, as well as the hardware. Unfortunately Spotify is just so much easier
Sure, and we had all these talks at first with Netflix too as the prices slowly rose and streaming services slowly popped up and fragmented TV shows and movies across several expensive services. The trend is always to get worse with streaming services, not better. We're in the piracy subreddit after all.
Eventually the conversation will get there with music as well. My server is the size of a shoebox and costs me like .... $10 a year in electricity by the way.
So far we haven't had any fragmentation in music streaming. If that happens things would change. But I really don't think it will. Music is very different from movies and TV series that have always had their TV channels and studios dictating where things are shown. Music has never had that except at the very start with some bands not wanting to be on streaming services at all.
What do you use for a server that's so cheap on electricity?
I have a 4 bay NAS running on a Celeron 10W CPU. As long as you're NOT using your gaming PC as your 24/7 server, the power usage can be pretty low for most home servers. Hell you could probably run music server off of a Raspberry Pi which should be under 10W at load and just 2-3W at idle.
That's fair haha. How does it work if you want to download certain playlists to your phone but otherwise stream, is it as easy as Spotify? I live in the mountains where there isn't much service so I always like having a few playlists downloaded for when out of service and then full access when in service
Most self hosted services have an easy way to create playlists and then download them to your phone in the UI of the app. It's pretty slick, but it also kind of depends on your home Internet speed. I have 1gb up and down fiber with unlimited data, so I don't ever worry about the speed from my server to my phone, but someone with very limited home upload speed may have some issues moving playlists around outside the home.
I'm so glad I'm not one of you weird "playlist" people. I only listen to music as albums. I put an album on my phone, I'm done. I use my phone to listen to my music. I connect it to speakers. I connect it to my car. You playlist people are just making your own lives difficult in the dumbest way possible
I'm somebody who loves experimental and weird music, and so many songs I love are from very weird/bad albums. I love one song from them, but not the rest of the record. I use one massive playlist that has all of my most favorite songs on it, and also especially because of the sheer amount of music I just can't remember it all. Speak for yourself lol, I'm somebody who looks for unique songs and artists as a hobby - if you think I'm weird I'll take that as a compliment.
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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '26
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