Selfhosted

By the way if you want a really cheap and easy setup for the time being while you figure out jellyfin/navidrome and docker and all that.

Symfonium app can run from a google drive that you can spin up for free and throw some music into. And then if you end up self hosting you can just point it to your server.

Por qué no los dos?

i selfhost the music collection i own on LPs, to replace spotify/yt music i use Archivetune

I use Tidal and Bandcamp

I'm hearing great things about Quobuz

Bandcamp and Quobuz allow you to buy and download music

And I have to mention, as I do in any thread like this: If you self-host music you bought you're a friend to me. If you pirate from billionaires, I don't care. If you pirate from small bands, stop it.

Self host, takes less time then you think after the initial library build. Easy to do in a weekend. If you have some money to spend on music then buy music from the artists you love. Can all be in one place, none of this exclusive garbage, quality as high as you want, can rip music that’s never been released digitally, and I think most importantly - access to your music library without an algorithm telling you what to listen to. You’ll be surprised how your listening habits change and how well you know your music after jumping off the engagement treadmill.

I've mostly gone with pirating. I've built a massive library of flac songs, as for when I'm outside I can't stream cause I'm stuck with ADSL, but I usually keep some albums I'm into on my phone and I also use Grayjay to discover new music.

Leeching off corporations' infrastructures for free is a noble endeavor and everyone should do it.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #263 for this comm, first seen 29th Apr 2026, 17:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Mp3 collections never stopped being cool, you just have to invest some time into it

Use Navidrome for music and transcode mp3 streaming. Done and dusted.

That's a different problem than access to music which I'll leave up to you. But I'll note that music exists out of the sphere of corporate dominance. And by that I mean, artists that self publish.

I find it interesting how quickly one abandons the principle struggle central to the meme on this post. Like, "I use Linux and don't give corporations a dime but I LOVE Jay-z"

spotify and google will figure out a way to block modded apps eventually.

nobody can take your home server and its content away from you

Don't use revanced. The backbone of the dev team moved to morphs now, and so do other modders that used to dev using revanced.

https://morphe.software/

There was a bunch of drama that's worthy for Lemmy but stuck in reddit that I don't care to bring here.

It got easier to patch things in some ways, but having known how to do it "the complex way" with vanced and revanced before I feel like some is lost in translation.

But overall it's a lot better with morphe, the patches against megacorps efforts to block access comes quicker than revanced, and the YouTube minimum app requirement now moved up

Grayjay is a nice alternative.

I went with jellyfin. Got 10 gigs free from box and Mount it with rclone.

If you have less than 10 GB of music, this is best. If you have TB of music, maybe not

Soulseek has far more music on it than you can typically find on free public torrent sites.

Just a heads up.

I wrote an application which runs on my server and monitors my favorites on Tidal/Deezer/Qobuz. It downloads them in bulk whenever I have a premium account with one of them. Usually I purchase a month of premium every few months, at which point I get nice clean FLACs for local use.

The FLACs are moved to Jellyfin and I stream them using Finamp, which also supports transcoding, so I keep 128 kbps Opus files for offline playback and stream the raw FLAC files when bandwidth is no concern.

I have amassed a huge music library over the last decades, so even if all streaming websites go under tomorrow, I have enough music locally to last me a lifetime.

i also only download flac files, and i keep them in my ~/music/lossless directory. i use picard to organize that, and wrote a bash script to keep a synchronized opus format copy in ~/music/lossy. on my phone i use termux/ssh to rsync the lossy files to my phone and avoid streaming altogether. for reference, my lossless directory is 221gb, and lossy is 19gb.

why not both?

Bought a home server, threw at it an HDD and installed jellyfin. Now I buy my music from bandcamp or rip my own cds (yup, I'm buying cd's back too) and haven't logged to spotify ever since.

Can't be happier.

I do both.

The music I like is in my collection. I pay for it where I can, but I'll be honest some of it is pirated because I just can't buy it anywhere.

I also use Opentune to listen to YouTube music without logging in to stream stuff like "lofi chillhop beats".

I recently saw around here a music discovery service (self-hosted) I might try. Can't remember the name...

Ive been trying to get rid of YouTube for over a year now, but haven't found a solution im happy with so still sticking with revanced YouTube.

Got rid of Spotify 2 years ago and self host navidrome and it's perfect for me. I use dsub2000 on my android and feishin on my Linux desktop pc.

I'm UK based, so fairly strict internet laws and I torrent to supplement my owned media. I don't use flac, I'm sure if I tried I could hear the difference from 192kbit MP3, but honestly I don't care. 192kbit or similar mp3's are more than good enough for me.

Self hosting costs money. Hardware setup initially is expensive, both in money and time and effort. It's only a solution if you believe there is a problem that needs fixing.

For me it's well worth it for music. Video not so much, not yet anyway. I listen to the same songs 100s of times, but videos only once or maybe twice at most.

The only problem with something like Revanced is that it can go away at literally any time. It could be shut down tomorrow and you'd lose access to everything it provides. That's fine, or at least tolerable, if you ALSO have something self-hosted you can rely on in case that happens. If you don't have downloaded music self-hosted, then you're totally relying on Revanced permanently and you lose everything if it goes away. Maybe for something like music that's an acceptable risk, but you have to consider it and decide where it is an acceptable risk. What are you going to do if those services you're relying on go away?

Self-hosting, like you said, is about the independence, and the knowledge that once it's up and running on your own hardware, it won't just go away on its own, and it can't just get "shut down" unless you choose to. You might not need that for every service you rely on, but there are probably at least some you would struggle without, and those are things you should consider self-hosting. The more you think about it, and the more comfortable you get with it, the more likely you'll decide other things are important enough to self-host after all.

Either way, just remember to support artists when you can. Bandcamp Friday is one of the best ways I know of to fund artists in exchange for FLACs that you can legally listen to however you want to.

But I was a broke student in the heydays of torrenting, so I'm not judging using any means necessary to listen to music.