Edit: Also please tell me if a meme is even allowed as the thumbnail for the post in this community - just feels like it gets some of my current desperation across :D

Since the last time I posted here sharing my new home server, I’ve gotten a little more acquainted with the services I’m using. After getting acquisition of shows and movies sorted, I ventured into music (streaming).

As many here, I’m used to using streaming services for music, ie. Spotify or YouTube Music. Naturally, I tried a similar approach by setting up my Arr stack to feed its music into Jellyfin where the music is picked up by Symfonium. I tried it out for a couple days and liked it quite a bit since it keeps my phone clean of “unnecessary” data but I still retain access to music. Unfortunately, the way I acquire my music limits my selection quite a bit unless I venture into torrenting, which I’d prefer not to. So unless I figure out a safe way to torrent on my server, I’m stuck with getting access to a very limited selection of artists and albums.

In addition to that limitation, there’s also the files formats of the music. Most of the music I’ve downloaded was only available in FLAC, which is awesome if you’ve got the bandwidth and data plan for playback, but for me it means that I spend 3GB of data for a day of streaming music which is just not sustainable.

In comparison, I can set up a Revanced version of Spotify in addition to my Revanced YT Music to get access to all the music I could want. Unfortunately, that comes with the caveat of still being tied to the companies I’m trying to get rid of - albeit not financially anymore, but I’m still sharing my data.

Ultimately, I’m not sure what to do. What I love about self-hosting is the independence from all the companies we’re being fucked over by in all kinds of imaginable ways. But if it’s free, outside my sharing data with them, can I really compete?

I’d be interested in hearing your opinions and thoughts on this. How did you solve music streaming with your build?