I see that when people ask for music servers, people frequently suggest Navidrome or mpd/mopidy. I haven’t tried either. I’m just using Jellyfin as an all-in-one. I’m wondering why do people choose to use a dedicated music server over an all-in-one like Jellyfin?
Is the extra overhead worth it?
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Makes zero sense to use a dedicated music server if you also have other media to serve. Plex and Plexamp for me, haven’t seen anything better on the market.
Holy shit I was googling about this yesterday and was only finding useless reddit threads
Not for me, I prefer AIO, less maintenance.
Navidrome for music, jellyfin for video based media. Audiobookshelf for podcasts and audiobooks.
Get the best of each one, much better.
Jellyfin works nicely for music, as long as you use a good client. The native jellyfin mobile app is not optimized for music. I use symphonium for android listening and am very pleased with it. More settings than Id ever need, different options for downloading/caching songs on device, support for subtitles and all.
I don’t run Jellyfin yet, does it or symphonium support playlists? I guess generally some kind of recommendation algorithm would be nice, but would need some third party metadata like from last.fm
Jellyfin natively supports playlists. Symphonium also supports playlists, both local and from your Jellyfin server.
Jellyfin kinda sucks as a music player, it takes so many clicks to navigate and it often sorts music incorrectly, so that’s one reason to use something else.
I tried using Jellyfin for music but I found that it doesn’t really handle featured artists that well. Navidrome organizes music much better so I prefer using that.
When I set up Navidrome I had no idea jellyfin could do music too. Pretty happy with them separate though. Not for any particular reason, they both do their jobs really well.
Do One Thing Well: Each program should focus on a single task and perform it effectively.
At the moment im not hosting a music server, but used to use Navidrome, it worked fine and used a small footprint.
Having all in one it’s more issues to solve, if something breaks, everything breaks.
Having all on Jellyfin is more convenient.But adding hundreds or thousands of songs along with movies and episodes will create a huge database, more resources used, slower searches
One major reason why I have Ampache as a separate server is that they support smart playlist, which wasn’t well supported on Jellyfin. Navidrome also supports smart playlist, but you couldn’t edit on the web.
how does ampache handle day to day for you? what is your favorite client?
It works pretty well despit having 30k+ music files read over rclone, though I am the only user. It also has a web client, though it looks a bit old. I use Symfonium on Android and Feishin on Desktop since it provides OpenSubsonic API.
thanks for your response!
i had ampache running in docker for like an hour or something but can’t remember why i didn’t give it a fair shot. i think it was because i was still looking for jukebox mode.
how long have you been running it?
i had gonic for a bit but ended up back at Navidrome as the playlists can be edited by the mopidy subidy extension.
still haven’t figured out the smart playlists lol
I build smart playlists for Navidrome with Symfonium on Android or Feishen on desktop, then export to server to get them into Navidrome. I also have been playing around with local AI generating smart playlists with mixed success. The file structure is very simple.
Navidrome just announced plug-ins last release. I think an AI playlist maker would be pretty fun.
Definitely more than a year! If you have tried it in the past, you probably dropped it either because you used it before the revival, or the UI looked really old. At least that was what I did.
Clients often are better suited for music, specially for mobile. For example with Subsonic clients (Navidrome, Gonic, etc), the client aggressively caches the queued songs, which is super helpful when there are hiccups in the network while traveling. A few clients allow me to configure the cache size, allow me to mark some titles are always cached, allow me to browse the cache (case I don’t have network at all). It’s just way better suited for music.
And on the desktop clients are way lighter weight.
Ultrasonic caches too much, on my phone. It has a limiter, but for some reason ignores it. Once a year I have to go and nuke the whole app because it’s using all 120 gigs available 🙃
It’s a feature not a bug 🤪
I wasn’t aware that the client cached the playlist. That’s pretty great.
Ultrasonic and DSub(2000) both do. It’s so incredibly useful on roadtrips. Works really really well. I have the app live on the as card in my phone and keep the cache at a massive 100Gb, I have all my favorite music stores, in flac, ready to go at all times.
I’ve used Plex’s music before. It works well. They have a dedicated Plexamp app for it. Works well with audiobooks too.
It works okay for audiobooks, but if you want it to save your place and track chapters, audiobookshelf is better.
They recently added support for that, i believe. (Edit- starting off where you left it)
Some plex audiobook clients like Prologue for iOS have this built in
I don’t think you’re really limited to one or the other. You can pool all your media in the same place and then point different services at it. I don’t listen to my crusty old downloaded music much these days, but, for example, I used to have Plex and Emby running side by side for years to watch movies/TV without issue. These services don’t consume that many resources so you can try multiple options until you find something you like and then remove the rest.
Airsonic (fork of Subsonic) has worked well for me for a few years. Used Subsonic for many years prior. I mainly use play:Sub on IOS for playback, local/offline caching, etc.
I use Plex for music just because they currently have the best app (Plexamp). My Plex server is mostly just music, and TV shows I record off an antenna using HDHomeRun.
