Tailscale is the way. You can make their free tier go really far, especially if you use your own OIDC solution.

I'm in the middle of writing up a novel about my music stack since I've just about gotten it exactly where I want it. There's no one-size-fits-all answer here and it's difficult to really replicate the behavior of major streaming services.

The short version of what I have set up:

• Backend: Navidrome

• Frontends: Feishin (both desktop and hosted) and Symfonium

• Remote access: Pangolin (this does involve keeping a Navidrome rest endpoint totally exposed so Tailscale/Netbird/Wireguard are fine too, but I wanted to be sure my wife can access it from her work PC in the office)

• Library and metadata management: Lidarr, beets, and metadata-remote. Lidarr does the bulk (one instance per user/library), beets handles manual imports, and MDRM is for fine-tuning and really obscure stuff

• Searching/Downloading: Lidarr + Tubifarry + slskd. Also support smaller artists as much as possible, bandcamp purchases and merch and whatever go a long way.

• Discovery: Explo

I'll have a full beginning to end writeup pretty soon hopefully. It's still not perfect, and juggling multiple users adds a huge layer of complexity, but I'm happy with where it's at.

Navidrome even supports multiple libraries now. I was using 2 instances for a bit for my wife and I, but now it's all in one.

I didn't realize they had updated. That's great! I knew it was on the timeline but it works so well even with multiple instances I hadn't been watching for it.

For real, I almost feel guilty that I'm not paying yet.

Yep! They released it like a week after I just set up a second instance lmao

The only catch I noticed is that the default "/music" library can't be changed, so I set up my directories in the container like:

• /user1/music
• /user1/discover
• /user2/music
• /user2/discover
• /shared

All 5 are set up as separate libraries, and I keep "/music/ in the container mounted to an empty directory. The discover folders are populated when Explo runs each week, that's a whole project of its own.

Could you explain how you use explo?

This is gonna get a bit into my particular setup but sure

Explo's a super early in development "discover weekly" generator, relies on Listenbrainz scrobbling and runs on a cron job to download the playlist from your connected source (in my case slskd), put it in a folder, and create a Navidrome playlist out of it. I use the SLSKD_MIGRATE option (my feedback is actually the reason the dev even added it), so my files are downloaded to my slskd dir and explo moves them to a separate library.

I'm very particular about my library though so I don't want it just throwing everything into the same folder as the rest of my music, and I have 2 users, so my directories are like:

• /music/me
• /music/wife
• /discover/me
• /discover/wife

Keeping the discover folders for Explo completely outside the main library, but mounted in Navidrome as additional libraries, helps keep things very separate. Explo's also smart enough to check with Navidrome before searching for a track - if it already exists in the library, then it won't redownload it.

I run 2 Explo instances, 2 hours apart, and in between those runs I have another cron job that wipes out my slskd downloads directory for a clean slate.

One small catch I ran into: Explo needs a Navidrome admin account to kick off the library scan, but my users aren't admins (since an admin automatically has access to every single library). So each week when it runs I need to log in as an admin and re-assign each playlist accordingly. Not a big deal, and the dev already has some ideas in mind to address this in the future. This also becomes a small bit of an issue with the whole "don't download existing tracks" thing - Explo's looking at the admin's library which is everything, not the individual users' libraries. So if one user's playlist has a track that's in the other user's library, it won't be properly added. Not the end of the world, but a mild annoyance.

I will say (and this isn't a fault of Explo), I'm not a big fan of Listenbrainz's weekly playlist algorithm. About 2/3 of the playlist tends to be artists that I already listen to, so it feels like a bit of a waste. I hope down the road we can plug in last.fm or something which tends to be a bit better for that.

Thanks, I already have it up and running. Works great!

@wesker@lemmy.sdf.org if it helps, the Symfonium dev is open to de-googled licensing via Ko-Fi donations. See the forum post here: https://support.symfonium.app/t/how-can-i-pay-for-symfonium-without-google-play

Per Tolriq's responses there, you can get the APK safely from the Aurora Store.

ppl

I hate the kid-pidgin, but you make a really good point here:

it's good to stop for second and consider what one's needs actually are.

I mean, this is always excellent.

Too often - you'll see it in this comment thread - we go all out and show our own solution would fit OP's case. And to them it must sound like "if you want a coke from the sev(7-eleven, like circle-k, Ted) you're gonna need a van, a really big spring, a holocaust cloak and a wheelbarrow for sure."

Considering OP's situation, skill level, fuckery tolerance and perseverance is key. Resilio could be all they need, here -- Not elegant, not D.R.Y, not pretty, but its fuckery is low (good g.o.l.f number), but it could be fire-and-forget.

Now, I'm not sure you're not replying to a comment that says the same thing ...just, not as well. Still good advice.

One last comment on your edit: Tempo is great, and I used that as well, plus it's open source. The symfonium dev is actually pretty cool about helping you work around Google if you want to buy it another way, but it has to be activated manually by the dev on each device. I just didn't want the hassle.

I'd probably go with Tempo if I were still using navidrome since it's open source.

Lots of interesting discussion, but I’ll add I’ve been plying with https://www.music-assistant.io/

Integrates all sorts of backends, including everything mentioned here, with streaming to just about any device. Reminds me of MPD back in the day, or at least the promise of it.