Full disclosure, I’m pretty new to selfhosting myself, and I haven’t written a guide like this before, but hopefully this scatterbrained writeup is enough for someone out there lmao
This is just what works for me and how I set it up. Always open to ideas for improvement as well.
Thank you for writing and making content.
In this era, I feel like I’m in the Good Place: it’s impossible to make “good” ethical choices while engaging with modern world. Every day, some platform or artist is found supporting blood money, genocide, unfair labor, treats other artist/collaborators like shit, exploitation… Then we all have to pivot to some obscure alternative with its own issues, lest we be immoral internet users.
I’m so tired of all this shit… /rant
Y e p. It’s a nightmare tbh. No ethical consumption under capitalism etc etc
That saying too often gets used as an excuse to not even try moving away from patronizing a harmful business, as though it isn’t worth any inconvenience since we’re screwed no matter what.
“Replacing TV and movie streaming services is pretty trivial, and typically one of the first projects for any new self-hoster, but music streaming services are a whole different beast.”
both cases you just gather up media files, and you play them. follow me instead for more life hacks.
Bit off topic, but I noticed this post has quite more comments than on reddit (currently 59 to 38) and more votes as well. /r/selfhosted is quite crowded usually, kinda impressive there’s more discussion happening here.
What am I missing? Whats wrong with Spotify?
- Closed non-federated streaming platform; requires an Internet connection.
- Requires a subscription for a lot of basic functionality.
- Even though it requires a subscription, they barely pay artists - the only ongoing benefit to using a non-pirate setup.
- The increasing amount of “Perfect Fit Content” & LLM-generated music in playlists to avoid said payments.
- They provide a guaranteed platform to political podcasts.
- Audio quality is not only dependent on the subscription, but even the top-tier is generally subpar and can vary based on how they throttle you that day.
- As a platform for mass appeal, discoverability is, loosely speaking, crud.
Pick any of those you like.
Complain about paying artists yet the article is about how they automate piracy lol
One of the main advantages of Spotify for me is the AI. I could host the music myself just fine. But having an AI come up custom playlists is another thing entirely.
If you’re not trying to cultivate your own tastes then you’re just letting a corporate blackbox drive your interests and aesthetics.
Like radio then?
Also that always happens. You don’t always discover the best band but you are more likely to discover the ones that spend more on marketing
Should put a note on your blog that Lidarr’s Metadata database is being rebuilt, currently the Lidarr APi spits a bunch of 5xx errors when searching for artists/albums/etc.
https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/issues/5498
If you currently have a library on the stable build the Lidarr team could use some help building the cache, they made this tool:
https://github.com/DeviantEng/lidarr-cache-warmer
It’ll search every artist in your Lidarr library so that the new database has a cache to quickly call upon.
Yeah and it’s been proper fucked for months. I set up anew server on my Mac mini M4 months ago and every now and then I spin up lidarr again to see if it is fixed and nope, won’t recognise a single album in my entire collection and can’t even manually add an artist.
Headphones is pretty terrible and slow, but it has the benefit of working.




