De-Clouding: Music
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The article discusses the author's journey of 'de-clouding' their music library by moving away from streaming services and towards owning their music, sparking a discussion on the benefits and challenges of self-hosting music libraries.
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Sep 8, 2025 at 9:13 AM EDT
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Nowadays there's probably better alternatives though.
[1]: https://www.musicpd.org/
[2]: https://github.com/ncmpcpp/ncmpcpp
Hope this helps!
Try this in: View > Layout > Edit Layout
https://www.foobar2000.org/macIt's kind of like we've been incurring debt all that time, and the "payments" are all deferred as long as you keep the subscription. But if I drop the subscription, suddenly I don't own any music newer than 2015, despite having paid $1200 -- it was just to rent music from Apple all that time.
Which kinda would be fine since I can afford it and it allowed me to get more music than I probably would have bought with a $1200 iTunes gift card.
But as you pointed out, Apple Music (and in my humble opinion Spotify and YouTube Music) both have modern-day UIs that are a horror show, only getting worse with each passing release. But the only choice is to keep subscribing to one, or rebuild your library at great money or time expense. :(
I'll refrain from explaining the rest of the steps to commit what some people would consider to be copyright violation, though IMHO if you paid for the music you should have a right to download a DRM-free copy as long as you don't distribute it to others.
Though of course, that does factor into the "time expense" you mentioned. But it's something you only have to do once, and you don't have to do it for your whole library at the same time.
The hazards of course are that if someone were to do so and stop paying the subscription fee, they're in dubious moral territory, and if someone built a tool to "help" you do it automatically that person is going to be sued.
The legality of torrenting music tracks you've already paid for elsewhere, which would be breaking the letter of copyright law but not (IMHO) its spirit, I will leave to others to debate.
I'm ~50. Let's say I live to 80. 360 months × AU$25 = NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS WAIT WHAT?
I mean, sure, I might spend $9k on Bandcamp or whatever. But I dunno really if I would.
Later that day
Damn though, Apple Music is convenient...
I've been buying used CDs on ebay when I can get them for ~8USD per album, and buying FLAC/ALAC on bandcamp and qobuz for anything that's hard to find. A couple of albums that aren't streaming I had to pay 30-50 USD for a used CD, Ecstatic by Mos Def, Parabolic by Aoki Takamasa. It's kinda fun to find out what music is "rare" and what music is cheap.
Jellyfin + Finamp is a solid combo, and a flash modded iPod 4th gen (last one with a black and white screen) to play music in the car. It's a good feeling to know none of my albums will ever disappear. (To be sure, albums have disappeared from Qobuz, and now they have a message that says 'be sure to download after purchase !!')
iTunes 12.13 is actually a solid music player on Windows. Ripping CDs works great too. There's no iTunes that runs on the latest MacOS tho, since they supplanted it with "Apple Music". Kind of ironic, but Windows has always been bigger on backwards compatibility.
The need is "transportation" -- you have a number of ways to rent that transportation (bus, train, cab, Uber, rent-a-car, lease) or you can buy a depreciating asset (car) that cuts your per-mile cost slightly from the renting options.
And in the case of my Apple Music subscription I have to make peace with it being an entertainment service that I don't get to keep any physical or digital manifestations of after I stop paying. Like a movie ticket.
Their entire economic model relies upon providing the least amount of money possible to the rights holders. This seems to often mean removing access to "expensive" content in customer libraries.
I don't think it's a simple coincidence that some of the best tracks wind up getting removed arbitrarily. It's almost like I can trigger this to occur by listening to anything "not mainstream" too many times.
This is the main difference between video and audio. One rarely watches the same movie or show more than once (it can happen, and there are people watching Succession or Friends on loop, but they're a minority). But we often listen to the same songs / artists and like the familiarity of it.
Subscription for music is not just detrimental to the artists: it's fundamentally a bad deal for users.
Was. They deprecated their API which allowed you to lookup for more songs of the same type.
Probably just to piss me off. SpotifyQT + that was great.
Now I'm stuck shuffling through playlists.
It’s annoying and gross and ruins the product.
[0] Until recently I used Jellyfin, but the performance of Navidrome is far superior.
now i slowly build it up again ;') its nice some streaming apps offer cache thats handy for offline, but its often a bit limited unless you play with it a bit.
it probably wouldn't hurt to cron-job a sighup and reissue the start command once a week.
Streaming was good, when pandora was free - and even when they first asked for money, it was still good. I never saw the appeal of spotify, and i'm glad $0 of mine went to their product.
I have file boxes full of audio CDs that haven't been backed up yet, who knows how long any of the stuff in there will be available in that format? My favorite anecdote is that some songs on official music streaming platforms will have the same artifacts as kazaa/limewire tracks 23 years ago.
I forget if symfonium has a paid version, but i think i sent money to them. There was another app for android that i tried (and probably gave money to as well), but symfonium never does the wrong thing, although i haven't figured out how it weights songs for random track shuffle.
i'm frazzled from this week, apologies for rambling just to say "hey, me too!"
I switched to seafile from nextcloud, much faster and I never used all those NC features anyway. Native photo syncing and backup support on android.
I recently got that big CD box out and ripped everything as flac for archival.
When on Jellyfin, I used to manually transcode the entire library to ogg and use syncthing to replicate it to my devices. Symfonium's ability to cache transcoded files is quite handy (although the initial backfill of ~20K songs took a few tries)
I often wish there was a Discogs equivalent for DVDs, but there doesn't seem to be.
keep backups for anything you value.
https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups/
Thanks for letting me know. :)
yt-dlp -o '/home/yourusername/Videos/%(title)s.%(ext)s' "URL"
For example, https://youtu.be/ll0egrmKZj0 doesn't include the song name or artist name anywhere in the title (I prefer this version to the final released version of Stand and Deliver), so I'd have to rename it myself anyway to "Look Mum No Computer - Stand and Deliver.mp3"
For example, if I wanted to download Better Luck Next Time by Bombs Away (a random example from the My Mix playlist right now), it would set "Artist" to "Central Station Records" and "Name" to "Bombs Away - Better Luck Next Time [Official Video]". I have a reasonably diverse and sometimes niche music taste, so that problem would crop up a lot, and at that point it's just easier to do it myself, but it would work well for some people =)
I have a python script set up so I can just do "./id3.py artist name filename" and it'll do all the id3 stuff for me (apart from thumbnails, still working on that)
I realise my workflow isn't ideal for some people who want everything to "just work" but I'm happy enough to sort out filenames and stuff like that myself, it makes me feel happy. I do the same with my very legally acquired films and tv shows too
Should I just build one out of a raspberry-pi + screen, or are there better options?
There are also a number of providers of displays marketed for RPi, some with mounts to attach it at the back. E.g. see EYOYO on AliExpress or elsewhere. Here's one[1].
This certainly makes the "build one" option quite trivial, since for most it's just a matter of screwing the RPi in and attaching a couple of cables. I'm planning something similar when I get time, and suspect I'll end up with one of those monitors.
[1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005009871559093.html
Do you have any recommendations?
Any suggestions for storage oriented VPS that I can use for this use case and other backup/storage use cases?
While not OSS, roon 1) can run on linux 2) supports large local libraries (I have > 2k albums in FLAC, and it supports much more) 3) have roon arc that allows you to listen from phone anywhere 4) has a very good system to link metadata and recommendation within your library.
The metadata support is truly wonderful, you can easily browse your music like wikipedia, can find music per composer, performer, discover related musicians, etc. I strongly recommend people serious about music to try it out.
I've happily replaced spotify with it a few years ago, and will never go back.
At least they have a lifetime purchase option, though it costs $830!
Another minor inconvenience is that it is memory hungry for large libraries. In my case, for ~1 TB of flac, the docker takes 5-6 GB RAM on my debian NAS. Limiting it at 4 GB definitely crashed w/ OOM, at 8Gb never had issue.
FLACs are forever. Rip to FLAC and follow 3-2-1 backup rule.
Anyway, none of what the author is doing is novelty to me, I stuck to my guns this past 30 years. I buy on Bandcamp or 7digital, or I rip charity store CDs. Occasionally, for really hard to find stuff, I download from YouTube or get a torrent, but only if I can't find it legally.
I've been running Musicbee on Linux/wine for a decade (I think). My last two DAPs were tiny, light-weight Hiby models.
I have had happily never actually paid for any music streaming service.
I have most of my music on my phone and can listen to it with zero network connection. There have been multiple instances where I have been the only person with music..
although there is something refreshing about the simplicity and resiliency of OP's setup.
[0] https://www.navidrome.org/
So here is my 2 cents:
I self-host navidrome[1] for music and audiobookshelf[2] for audio books and podcasts as well as syncthing[3] for documents (e.g. ebooks).
For streaming music the navidrome browser web client is already pretty good, but for my portable devices I use Substreamer[4] (free but non open source) and DSub[5] (FOSS). These Apps can switch playlists into Offline Mode and sync automatically. This is especially useful with the smart playlist feature[6] of navidrome.
To add music, I rip bargain Audio CDs with EAC[7] to FLAC and then use beets[8] with a cronjob that runs every 30mins to automate the process of importing the files and converting them to MP3 V0[9] to make it compatible with all of my devices (e.g. Car USB Stick). Then I archive the FLACs to keep space requirements low.
For audio books I use the Audiobookshelf App to download the files and then use Voice[10] as a companion app to listen. This is because the Audiobookshelf app is not a native app and Voice just integrates better. I'm currently in the process of adding some of my missing features like Support for Media-Button Tap-Codes[12] and better file scanning[13]. For iOS I'd probably use Prologue[11].
For Syncthing there is a Fork on FDroid that is still maintained and for iOS there also is something...
For standalone music players you could try the following:
Hope this helps anyone who is trying to own their music :-)1: https://www.navidrome.org/
2: https://www.audiobookshelf.org/
3: https://syncthing.net/
4: https://substreamerapp.com/
5: https://f-droid.org/packages/github.daneren2005.dsub/
6: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/smartplaylists/
7: https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/
8: https://beets.io/
9: https://boomspeaker.com/mp3-v0-vs-mp3-320/
10: https://github.com/PaulWoitaschek/Voice
11: https://prologue.audio/
12: https://github.com/PaulWoitaschek/Voice/pull/2960
13: https://github.com/PaulWoitaschek/Voice/issues/3044
https://xenodium.com/ready-player-mode
https://xenodium.com/a-tour-of-ready-player-mode
The music is on the disk, how can we get away from having to use Alexa or similar for listening music that is on our libraries using voice control? Thanks in advance.