When I stopped using Spotify I tried a few different solutions until I found the perfect replacement for me. If you want the tl;dr: I now use Jellyfin. But if you want to know how I got here, follow me through each step of the way.
I started gathering all my music files (mp3, or flac) in my computer, and from there I wanted to just listen to them the old way. The first issue I encountered was that none of the available music players were any good.
We all love the nostalgic look of Winamp in screenshots, but in reality those players are very limited. They work (kinda) okay for playing a single album, but I struggle to browse my library or create a playlist with them. I tried tons of programs, but none of them satisfied me. I guess music players left the zeitgeist so the technology of playing files locally didn’t improve much lately.
For a few days, I went along with the good old VLC player, but I was surprised to find how bad it is at handling flac files.
I gave foobar2000 another go, and remember how much of a clusterfuck setting it up is. After a few days of trial and error I decided that it wasn’t worth the effort.
Since I was feeling adventurous and I wanted an excuse to learn htmx, I ended up building a rudimentary web music player that worked surprisingly well. The player streamed music from my library on a browser, so I could spin up a local server and access to all my music remotely from anywhere.
This worked well for a while, and it was a nice learning exercise, but it all fell apart when I had to go on a trip. Without internet or having the laptop running to host the server I wasn’t able to listen to any music on my phone, so it made some flights particularly long. I knew I could take the project to the next level and add some sort of “download to listen offline” feature, but the browser storage is not enough for that, so I would had to bundle the website into a “proper app”. I wasn’t going to spend more time on this side project, so it was time to look for another solution.
My last resort and the option I ended up using the most was Apple’s Music app. It is a bloated program with vestiges of what itunes was. It tries very hard to sell their subscription service, but below all noise, there is a music player that’s actually not bad. It has all kinds of sorting, and an up to date interface.
You can sync the music library with your phone or other devices and you won’t have any issues if you are offline. No more boring train rides!
Unfortunately, having your entire music library in every device takes too much space, so you have to start playing some sort of storage battle royale, and decide which music you won’t want to listen anymore.
This shouldn’t be a big deal (none of the issues I’m listing here are), but when you are competing with the knowledge of something like Spotify existing, it is hard to voluntarily make things harder than they should be.
Fortunately for me, YouTube decided to shove a video down my throat:
I didn’t know Jeff Geerling, but I’ve been a happy subscriber since 🙂 he has a lot of good videos and he always carries a contagious enthusiasm about any topic he covers.
The video I linked covers how Jellyfin can replace something like Disney+ or Netflix, but it can also replace Spotify. It has all the features that I was looking for! There is only one downside compared to Spotify: you have to host it yourself.
Self-hosting might sound scary to some, and of course it is not something I would recommend to everyone. But I promise that you can set up Jellyfin without much hustle even if you are not a programmer! To do so you don’t need to buy a NAS or any fancy extra equipment. If you have an old computer around, it is probably good enough as a home server.
Jellyfin has everything I hoped for and more. I tried running it locally in my computer at first, and I was surprised of how easy it was to get it up and running. Then I discovered that there are apps that communicate with your Jellyfin server and allow you to download music from your library for offline listening. Fintunes, Manet, Finamp, and the list goes on. Finamp is the one I ended up daily driving in my phone.
In the past few months, the world started shifting significantly, so I wanted to give another step in my journey of digital autonomy. I bought a mini pc to start self-hosting apps like Jellyfin from home. Since the experience was so good, I started looking into other things I could start self-hosting, and I’m now running Immich as well. Immich is like a much better Google Photos, but that’s a story for another time.
If you read until here, and you are curious about self-hosting, I encourage you to give it a try! It doesn’t take much time and it is totally doable as a hobby/side project. If you have some minimal knowledge of how to use a terminal, you won’t have any problems to set things up. And once it’s running, you will be able to enjoy your entire library from any device anywhere.
If software like this keeps getting better, I can imagine a future where we don’t have to depend on some other’s peoples computers to access to our own music, movies, photos or memories. We just have to make it easier and better, like open-source always does. It might take longer to get there, but I’m damn sure we will.
