maerk.xyz

Setting Up Navidrome

Monday July 17, 2023

Why bother?

I was streaming my music most of the time anyway. On all my PCs and my Kodi machine, I just used SFTP to stream my music. Some music players don’t like that, and Kodi seems to randomly decide that it can’t connect to my server anymore. I already started using Jellyfin instead of SFTP for watching movies and TV, so I figured I should install what is basically Jellyfin for music.

My thoughts

Installing it is pretty simple although I fucked it up like a dozen times and was literally yelling at my computer at 4AM like a chimp person. If you just follow the fucking instructions correctly the first time you’ll have no problem. Big surprise.

What’s cool is that you don’t need some gay app. You can just use anything that works with Subsonic. On my PC I use Strawberry and on my phone I use Symfonium, which I paid for. There are a ton of free music apps that work, but this one looks very nice and I’m very particular about the UI in music players. I paid for Poweramp too.

Of course you can also just use a web browser. I picked the Spotify theme because it’s actually the nicest looking one.

You may be thinking “Why not just use Spotify you retard?” Fuck you I’m not paying to rent music that can vanish at any time or might not ever be available. I will die on this hill.

I’m still not sure how I feel about streaming on my phone, but I’m gonna give it a try. I’ve always had my entire collection offline on my phone and I’ve been super autistic about it for as long as I can remember. I used to use Google Play Music and manually select every single album and check off “keep offline”. Symphonium automatically downloads albums I mark as favorites and I have unlimited data anyway so maybe it won’t be so bad.

Side note: Beets

I also set up Beets thinking I would finally fix all my tags and I’d never have to think about them again. In highschool I started putting aside a couple hours every once and a while to manually fix my tags. I never got them all right. After setting up Beets I remembered why I always just did it manually. Some albums I have just don’t exist on MusicBrainz. Correcting mistakes was always annoying. Since my current collection’s tags are all pretty good, I just scraped my favorite artists and now I scrape new downloads as I add them to my collection. Doing it little pieces at a time isn’t overwheming and it makes it easier to detect mistakes and correct them. If your shit is a complete mess I would definitely recommend Beets or something else that scrapes MusicBrainz.