Selfhosted

Personally, I just have the local files saved on my devices and listen to them locally. No usage of the network, no need to set up Navidrome or anything like that, it works really well! I don't really change the music I listen to that much, but if I did need to sync between devices, I could simply use Syncthing!

One slight gripe is that, when listening to music on my phone, I get notification pings interrupting my music. When I get the time, I want to get a dedicated MP3 player to avoid this issue, probably some iPod or a clone that supports Rockbox.

Por qué no los dos?

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.

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

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

Just a heads up.

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

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

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

You're in the selfhosted community, surely you know what sort of answer you're going to get. If you just need to hear it, selfhost!

I listen to a LOT of music - basically most of the day when I'm not on a call.

I don't follow the mainstream so never had a spotify account, and am really listening either to radio-browser.info or a few channels on youtube that I sponsor, which link to the artists on bandcamp, where I buy the music I like.

To your point on bandwidth, I try to store music at the highest quality I can get, but then transcode to players.

I did try mp3fs to live transcode files to my phone in the past, but didn't use it much in the end.

I've torrented some music in the past, but TBH, I find it in different places easier nowadays.

I used to find some interesting stuff with Napalm FTP indexer - but be very careful with direct connections to random FTP servers.

I tend not to sail the Sea's very often. I generally prefer to buy the albums or borrow them from my friends or the local library, rip them to Flac and then stream them to my phone using either Jellyfin or Navidrome. When I just want a radio station, I'll open up Spotify. Many years ago, I had a collection of online radio stations I'd listen to, but over time they either closed their public streams and required an dedicated app or died off completely.

On your data bandwidth issue, both Jellyfin and Navidrome support on demand transcoding and can stream any bitrate you might want. There are options for it both in the web app and in most of the phone clients I've run across. I generally have my phone apps set to 96k MP3 as I can't really hear a difference most of the time, at least not with the headphones I have in combo with the background noise that is generally around me and my preexisting hearing damage. Most folks can't tell a difference between CD's and a 128k mp3.

As for torrenting, I can say that you will probably want a paid VPN running AND active any time your torrent software is running. Beyond that I would recommend you check out !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com for more information.

Grayjay is a nice alternative.

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"

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

Use bandcamp to discover new artists and give them a few bucks whenever you can.