alt Hacker NewsSelf hosting my media library with Jellyfin and Wireguard on Hetzner
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I stopped my Spotify subscription and gave Apple Music and Youtube Music a try for a few months. I'm now again a Spotify user, despite that Youtube Music is still included in my Youtube Premium.
The apps are terrible in terms of usability, performance, and reliability. I couldn't believe Apple dropped the ball on so hard on this, but then I remembered iTunes and started believing again.
Most of my problem is basic necessities. For instance, it's impossible to remove a playing song from its current playlist on competing apps. That's such a common, basic scenario that Spotify can perform easily.
Youtube Music has horrible sound quality, no need to say it doesn't provide a lossless option. Apple Music is on par with Spotify in sound quality but that's pretty much where Apple's competitiveness ends. I had to struggle with Apple Music even with the simplest things.
My Apple Music summary: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3m2mvmybjr225
My Youtube Music summary: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3m5ms6fxsrs27
Spotify is the only streaming service I still pay for, and I will continue to pay for, because:
1. The catalog is comprehensive. I listen to far more music than I could afford to own. 2. There are no advertisements in the paid service. 3. Their music discovery algorithm is excellent.
I also appreciate the yearly statistics, and how they continue to add value for me. Podcasts and eBooks being added to the platform was cool. I like to make "taste combo" playlists with friends. Really one of the only companies I genuinely feel deserves my money.
I recently made the same switch. Tailscale plus jellyfin is great. Threw in Immich too for good measure.
I wanted a nice native client for Linux instead of using the web app so I wrote one in Rust. Shameless plug: https://github.com/Fingel/gelly
For those who feel that self-hosting limits music discovery, a more traditional option is "radio" (traditional in the sense that you listen to a curated playlist made by someone else).
Radio Paradise [1] and Radio Swiss Pop/Jazz/Classic [2] are two great ad-free ways to discover new music. There are probably tons of others out there.
[1] https://www.radioparadise.com/ [2] https://www.radioswisspop.ch/en
It's worth the effort to host your own media. There are privacy benefits, you own the audio files (presumably) and are no longer hostage to a platform that cares little (if at all) about artists.
There are lots of reasons to dislike Spotify but a frustration of mine with the "I ditched Spotify" discourse is that it hides the ball. As this article quietly acknowledges at the end: ditching streaming services either means spending a lot more money or listening to a lot less music.
To be clear I think either option is fine, but those seem like the important aspects of the change. If you are going to spend 10x more on music by buying from artists - you can probably also afford to keep a streaming service. Spotify does suck so go to [1] or Tidal[2]. The thing that matters to artists is getting money. If you're going to radically alter your media consumption habits that's great too but again seems like the real story.
If we are serious about convincing people to use alternatives to highly controlled streaming media I think we should ground our conversations about it in the practical choices that come with making ethical choices.
[1] Qobuz has the highest per-stream pay rate in the industry by like 40%. https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/discover
[2] Tidal is the widely-available service with the second-highest pay rate. https://tidal.com/
Nice. I self host using Navidrome, FreeBSD and Wireguard. I have a decent Fibre connection to my house and a static IP so it's "free" to serve.
I primary do it because Spotify is basically sucking the life out of the music industry and I love heavy metal.
Regardless of pricing you can't substitute one with the other... Spotify is a streaming service with a massive library. Self hosting means you must BYO media... and, news flash, populating a library with relevant content that rivals Spotify or would satisfy your average user will almost certainly require illegally acquiring said content.
There's a reason Spotify might force shuffle play on the free tier. It isn't solely to annoy you into upgrading. Royalties are 2x - 5x higher for interactive vs non-interactive streaming plays.
I've tried self-hosting with navidrome [0] / plex / jellyfin but the thing I miss most is music discovery via radios / discover weekly. I've tried replicating it a few times with embedding vectors + vector search but at best it finds songs in the (sub)-genre with the tempo / mood being pretty different.
Maybe I just need better data, been meaning to try again when that spotify crawl by annas-archive gets released. I've just been using musicbrainz [1] and youtube. Model-wise I've tried off-the-shelf ones like [2] and [3] and training auto-encoders like VAEs / MAEs [4]
[0] - https://www.navidrome.org/
[1] - https://musicbrainz.org/
[2] - https://github.com/LAION-AI/CLAP
With regards to keeping the service behind a VPN, I have a few questions:
1. How do you deal with various devices (Roku, Smart TVs, ...), as most don't seem to have VPN apps for them?
2. How do you deal with airplay? My ipad can VPN to my home network and access jellyfin when I am away, but Airplay doesn't work, as the stream isn't available to the device I am streaming to.
My jellyfin (and navidrome) on my home server has me very happy with the basic set up. Both are internal only, as the only service I expose is wireguard. But I haven't solved the two issues above, which also keeps me from being able to share my jellyfin with my family.
Does anyone have a good solution for Jellyfin with tiered storage? I’d like to store my media as encrypted blobs in object storage and then materialize it on disk when I’m about to watch it (manually queued or e.g. next episode).
I just did the same, but using a Pi + nvme drive at home. I did an initial setup with Mopidy/Iris, but just tested Plex, and it was such a better experience I am going to start paying for that instead.
It's been a real joy getting away from Spotify's shoving music and podcasts in my face and instead buying music from band camp based on friend recommendations.
I self-host on Jellyfin with Tailscale from my home server and it's been a great experience. It's fun and intentional.
I left Spotify during one of the many scandals they've had but I think this was in 2019ish based on where I was living and I just can't remember what it was. Possibly not paying the artists enough? This was pre-Rogan. Can't say their actions over the last few years have made me regret the decision.
I ran Navidrome and then Jellyfin alongside TIDAL and then Apple Music for a while, but the UX is just so much better with my own stuff and finding things to add is fun. I wish I'd spent all the money I spent on music streaming services over the past 15 years on buying music instead. Vinyl is more expensive now (I buy it anyway), but used CDs are dirt cheap and ripping them is fun.
What do people do to stream to their phones. The article just mentions Wireguard, but how is the media actually played?
I had that same setup and it was great, except Jellyfin. It is ok when it works; clunky but OK, however when something goes wrong with jellyfin, it is really goes bad. Sqlite corrupted, XML files corrupted, basically having to fresh reinstall. Now with Claude code, i just made my own. Works much better, faster, no such issues and more importantly; tailored to me, so not clunky to me even though it might be for others.
I never used Spotify, keep buying CDs, and occasionally MP3 from digital stores.
Still doing the modern version of mix tapes.
Haven't lost anything, and is with a smile I observe kids today being responsible for the revival of portable tape and CD players.
The article is surprisingly missing the most important part: a cost comparison. I understand and share the frustration with rising prices and ads creeping into paid plans, but for people who value optionality and broad access, streaming is still meaningfully cheaper than owning content.
In many cases, the price of a single movie is comparable to an entire month of a streaming service, which gives access to thousands of titles. Ownership can make sense if you repeatedly watch a small, fixed catalog over many years, but for most casual or exploratory viewing, the economics still favor streaming.
I buy my music from Bandcamp and similar and drop it into YouTube Music.
It supports up to 100k uploads and you can stream and/or download your uploads on web/iOS/iPadOS etc. https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522?hl=en
It's not as independent but if you're already paying for YouTube Premium it seems reasonable if you don't want to host your own media server.
You know you can get Spotify for way cheaper by buying card codes and activating your service from that? Just buy a new card before your subscription expires and it adds the time onto your plan when you put in the card activation code.
Even from official retail channels like Best Buy and Amazon a 1 year Spotify activation code in the US is $99, so 8.25/mo. But you can get cards from gray markets like G2A and it's only like $26 a year.
I probably should mention this: If you're a Plex user, Hetzner blocks them so don't try to host it there unless you want to setup wireguard and a reverse proxy somewhere else. They received too many complaints from media companies mad about resellers of access to plex shares hosted on Hetzner so they block the whole ASN.
Dumb question, where do you actually buy digital copy of music these days? Or find a big library of music that you can download.
I'm looking forward to trying jellyfin once DDR4 prices come down a little. I was slow rolling my server build as I added services, but the ECC ram sticks I was using jumped up to 150 USD from 50 USD. Hopefully the lesson I get out of this is just buy the damn chips already lol
I see that they suggest Jellyfin. I wonder if there is an end-to-end encrypted media server that can be self-hosted? E.g. if I was to host my photos on a VPS, I would use Ente instead of Immich because Ente is E2EE. Same for my media.
Never used Spotify, never will. I also, as a producer, pulled my music off that service a long time ago.
I'm also not very happy with Apple Music anymore either. The lack of UX care regarding the service is noticeable. It suffers from weird bugs and tracks which suddenly won't play all the time. This is not the Apple which lovingly created the first few versions of iTunes.
So I've started to collect a solid collection of lossless music files myself, a combination of CD rips, Bandcamp and Qobuz downloads. And I'm using alternate player software to access them, depending on the platform I happen to use. I don't use any server. I manually sync the music files between canonical storage systems (my iPhone, my Linux desktop, and my Mac desktop). I've even gotten my old iPod Classic out of mothballs and started messing around with it. So much fun!
I had a nice little app that I would run once and a while and it would take all my Weekly Playlist Spotify built, remove duplicates and make one playlist.
Spotify built playlists are no longer accessible in the API.
I do not like them now.
I just want to be able to buy a mp3 for a dollar is it so hard.
Okay, so, where do you get the music from?
Cloud hosting is not self hosting. Can you touch the box? Are you root?
They don’t have much in terms of popular music, but I like the concept behind Resonate.
It’s a co-op of artists.
Streamers eventually own the song outright if they listen to it enough.
"You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" Maybe they were wrong? ^^^
6 EUR per month really ain't much but then 80 GB of SSD is really not much for a media library.
FWIW I both rip, losslessly and verifiably, my own CDs to FLAC (lossless but compressed), I run Plex (tried JellyFin and going to switch) and yet I still pay for Qobuz (I don't see why I'd pay for Spotify when lossless streaming services like Tidal and Qobuz do exist: additionally Qobuz allows to buy DRM-free song individually).
Now, and that is not a snark: I both rent dedicated servers since decades now and run Proxmox at home.
I thought "self-hosting" meant hosting on your very own hardware, at your place (e.g. from your home).
If hosting on a rented virtual server is "self-hosting", then I take it hosting on a rented dedicated server is self-hosting too? But then what's the difference between a company renting servers and deploying its apps there? That one is registered as, say, a LLC and that the other is an individual?
So "self-hosting" depends on whether you're an individual or a company?
Sounds like a weird definition of "self-hosting" to me.
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This really is a completely nonsensical article.
The author is angry that his Spotify subscription becomes slightly more expensive, now running at EUR 12 per month instead of 11. So his solution is to instead rent a EUR 6.50 per month Hetzner server plus a storage space that starts at EUR 3.20 per month (next bigger tier is 10.90). Which means he is now paying at least EUR 9.70 per month for infrastructure, and he has invested a whole bunch of time, and he doesn't even have any actual music, because that would cost extra.
A couple of points missed for why Spotify is bad:
- Paying musicians cheap wages to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
- Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams: https://www.engadget.com/spotify-confirms-it-wont-offer-payo...
- Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/spotify-no...