I chose Navidrome for my music collection. I basically use it when I'm outside working around the property. Put on my raggedy ass pair of Beats, I found in the thrift store for $5...had to do some repairs but they work, on a defunct old phone just for the wifi access. When I'm inside tho, I use Music Bee. Navadrome has everything I need, tho I am still searching for a mobile app that operates like I want it too. The app I'm currently using, Agin Music, is good, but there are a couple places in the operation flow that won't let me backtrack to the previous page I was viewing. I'll keep testing until I find one.
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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Android or iOS?
On android I found symphonium to be a great app to use with my navidrome server. On iOS, play:sub was the best experience I found
Second for Symphonium. Hands-down best *sonic client.
Same feedback here. Works well with Navidrone
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Symfonium is great, and in its current state, probably the best Subsonic client for android. (Tempus is good enough for me though.) But best of luck if you ever have a nontrivial issue and ask the dev for help. That's one abrasive mf. (Just take a look here. It's hard to find anyone so full of themselves.)
That said, if it works for your needs, it's a great app. I won't judge anyone for using it, but I'm someone who can't and won't separate the art from its artist. If that applies to you, you've been warned.
On iOS, ply:sub was the best experience I found
I'll check out ply:sub. Thank you for the recommendation.
If you’re doing a search, it’s play:sub. Here is the link on iOS. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/play-sub-music-streamer/id955329386
Also, it’s a fantastic app and I use it every day.
I found it, however..... it's $5, which I don't mind paying for software, then it says 'in app purchases'. So my question is what are the 'in app purchases' after I lay down my $5? It does seem to have a lot of bells and whistles others don't have.
fyi you can check what the in-app purchases are on the appstore page. just scroll to the bottom tap on the little arrow next to in-app purchases
I'm a dumbass sometimes. LOL
that makes us two lol. i remember finding that information at the bottom, but not the little arrow to actually see what could be purchased. i always thought it was weird that the info showed up twice. or they added the arrow later and i‘m gaslighting myself lol
The “in-app purchase” is a donation page where you can donate extra to the developer if you want to. It’s 100% voluntary and doesn’t unlock any extra or additional features. I’ve never donated anything beyond the $5 purchase price.
Sweet! Thanks
yeah for iOS ply:sub is the way to go. my friends and family who use my Navidrome server and have iphones all use ply:sub. Android friends use Symfonium.
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Symphonium requires google play, right?
Nope. You can buy an infinite trial via the developers ko-fi!
There's info about it on the symfonium forum.
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Arpeggi on iOS is the best I’ve found. Available via TestFlight invite only. I plan to switch to Android in the next year, so I’m always interested to hear what clients people like over there too.
Tempo, Subtracks or Ultrasonic. All 3 on F-droid. You might find what you need there
I have no idea about Navidrome, but I completely agree with the gist of this article. Actively choose the music you listen to. When the music you've chosen has run out, if you're not motivated to make another choice, let the music stop and enjoy quiet for a while.
I migrated from Apple Music to Qobuz as part of my dropping of US services.
It’s very much playlist and release based which is great for both curation and discovery. At least I’ve found myself discovering more music from their playlists, which are often curated by musicians.
They do have a “for you” list but for whatever reason only show it on mobile, and it’s not my favourite algorithm.
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Really feeling this, the first paragraph could've written by me and I switched to Navidrome as well some months ago.
Btw, your RSS feed seems to be broken:
https://lukecyca.com/lukecyca.xml
XML Parsing Error: not well-formed Location: https://lukecyca.com/lukecyca.xml Line Number 46, Column 50: Macintosh Classic II Refurbishment & PiSCSI Enclosure -------------------------------------------------^
Presumably, that ampersand needs to be replaced with &...
Thanks for your comments! I've fixed the RSS file now I think.
Quickly and effortlessly get some music playing that can act as a backdrop for your real activity such as working, driving, cooking, hosting friends, etc. Keep it rolling indefinitely.
“Discover” new music by statistical means based on your average tastes.
This is the main thing I want out of music software tbh.
I also just started the process of migrating to a self hosted music server. I'm using navidrome, but a big feature I want is being able to easily add custom tags to songs that I can later use to search and filter for what I want. Navidrome will only open your library in read-only, which is a smart security measure, but means it cant support this. I'm going to try Koel next and see how that goes.
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I started with Navidrome, then looked at the disk space occupied by my library and it occured to me that 1TB MicroSD cards are a thing now, and I can listen to all my library offline.
A few years ago, I set up a home-server with music and some pictures on there, and recently I noticed that my storage disk was getting full. Then I saw that the disk only had 16 GB and wondered, where the hell I got that small of a disk from.
So, I go to plug in a bigger disk and can't even find the original disk at first. Turns out my whole storage capacity was one of these bad boys:
Spoiler
And yeah, I've got about 1800 songs, clocking in at 5.8 GB, so even that tiny storage would easily be enough for a much larger collection.
And I do also have them replicated on my phone, for listening on the go. (Don't even need an SD card in my case.)
Haha, server grade hardware. Impressive, actually, that it survived so many years. I have a similar one in my car and it's 10+ years old and works okay, but another one that's permanently sticked in my server with an emergency boot image died when it was needed the most.
I know there is a lot about Plex to hate, but I am always grateful for Plexamp. It requires a Plex pass, but it’s worth it for Plexamp alone imo.
Jellyfin doesn't have something comparable in the dedicated (OSS) world, but Symfonium takes a Jellyfin connection and is hands down the single best music player I have ever encountered on any platform.
Doesn't finamp provide music player features?
I wish jellyfin would support downloading music out of the box.
Oh, sorry, I did not mean to imply that there re no players (there are, e.g. Finamp), just nowhere near the same level of polish, features and stability.
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I’d love to try symfonium but I am on iOS.
Too bad it's unusable if you're like me and have huge playlists that you want to offline for shuffling due to spending long stretches of time without an Internet connection.
When I asked about this limitation, I was told that it was stupid to have such big playlists and needing to offline them because nobody is without Internet for long enough times for it to matter.
Great response from the developers that.
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I mean, if you're paying for something anyway, Navidrome + Symfonium is (to me) a better option.
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Quickly and effortlessly get some music playing that can act as a backdrop for your real activity such as working, driving, cooking, hosting friends, etc. Keep it rolling indefinitely. The particular songs don’t matter much. They are fungible as long as the general mood stays consistent.
can’t relate
i find new awesome music all the time, i only found i loved hardstyle 8 years ago, techno 5 years ago, vaporwave like a year ago
This is a fantastic service if you’re not that interested in music and are just looking for the aural version of mediocre Ikea artwork to cover the bare walls of your day
if you want to make it harder for yourself to discover new music then cool, but don’t imply that because you used spotify as a sort of cafe jazz background radio that we all use it like this
Agree, but this is why I do both. Sometimes I listen to my local stuff and having a great time because it's more refined
syncthing+musicolet(android) and cmus(linux) works lile a charm
I recently set up a Navidrome/Lidarr setup and I'm beyond thrilled. Works great. I also recommend Symfonium app on android, it's paid, but it's worth it for the quality. On desktop, I'm trying out strawberry, but I find it a bit clunky, so I will probably try out other players. Use beet to download and ebmbed lyrics, and my music has never been better. I immediately ditched Spotify and haven't looked back.
I use jellyfin for music. Some of the third party apps are nice. I can even stream it to Jellyfin app on Android Audio from my server while I'm driving, which is crazy to me.
I don't normally use Jellyfin for music but I do like that some subsonic clients like supersonic are supporting Jellyfin as an alternative, so if navidrome breaks for some reason I can just change over quickly.
I don’t know why so many people think you have to do one or the other, that you can’t host your own and use spotify.
No matter how much you might hate Spotify from an ideological point of view, you cannot deny its amazing music discovery ability.
I use Spotify as a way to find what to add to my collection, which I then stream using Plexamp when it makes more sense than just using Spotify - which isn’t very often tbh, only really when license issues prevent an album being in my country on Spotify. I can share my plex music library with friends and family though.
I am actually in the process of setting up my own navidrome server on my proxmox host running on my old desktop hardware.
I was initially inspired by the following post and am very excited to get rid of Spotify.
I've been using Navidrome for a few months now. I also use Amplify on my iphone to stream using native controls which I find very useful.
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