Self hosting my own op-shop sourced version of Spotify

While I’ve never signed up to a paid subscription of Spotify (or similar streaming music service), I’ve missed having ready-access to my music collection for a long time now.

Growing up, I had a lot of music playing out through a classic setup of a bunch of MP3s and Winamp on my PC. You know, the software that really whipped the llama’s arse.

It was an unbeatable combination at the time for a high school / uni student, in a world where streaming services didn’t exist and storage wasn’t cheap. 128kbit MP3 didn’t sound “CD Quality” but it had to do. The cloud wasn’t really a thing and accessing music from your PC at home wasn’t really practical on a dialup modem.

There was also not too many great portable options available, but at the time I had a subset of my music collection on The Humble MiniDisc, which still brings load of nostalgia for me every time I play a disc. Yes, I still use MDs.

After the Winamp/MP3s era, there was the Foobar2000 era. It’s a great program and I still use it. And my current setup allows me to use it in harmony with something much more accessible which I’ll explore in this blog today.

There was a dark era where I kind of moved away from Foobar2000, after I had finished hosting the Fusion Delusion radio show one last time. I still to have lost my way with playing music and instead just got a bit lazy. Foobar2000 was there, I just wasn’t sitting on the computer queuing up songs anymore.

There’s been a Google Home speaker in the kitchen running free Spotify which was OK but honestly, full of loud garbage ads for products I’m not interested in (or music groups I don’t want to see live, since bands aren’t a thing anymore) and terrible voice interpretation by Google. The amount of times I had to spell out bands like Jabberloop letter by letter (J-A-B-B-E-R-L-O-O-P) just to try and get it working was maddening. Other times, it would just completely pick the wrong band or album and I would just give up.

This went on for longer than I’m willing to admit.

I started obsessing over collecting CDs more recently, and I could write a lot more about that process in another blog (stay tuned for that one!).

But today, I want to talk about the tech set up and how it works well beyond just for me.

The current set up looks like this:

• Ubuntu server on a PC I built (a small mini-itx box running a low power CPU with hard drives in raid-1)
• Samba for Windows shares for ease of file access on the network, although I only have 1 Windows PC left on the network now
• All music in the network share, in FLAC format, ripped from the CDs I’ve been collecting from op-shops (plus CDs I already had in my collection)
• Jellyfin running in a Docker container with my music mounted and indexed/tagged
• Running Finamp app on a couple of phones/tablets for ease of access to the music collection (then bluetooth to my amp/speakers). Finamp is great because the music keeps playing when I turn the screen of my tablet/phone device off, which is exactly what you want when you are playing music, compared to the official app which seems to be more geared to video playback
• Tailscale VPN on my phone and server for remote access to the music collection, which could be expanded as new devices need to gain access to Jellyfin
• Foobar2000 on my PC pointed at the shared network drive, because it’s still a slick interface to search, compile playlists and play music

What I love is:

• It’s easy to find all my music and I love using the tagging to navigate around the collection through albums, artists, genres, etc.
• The metadata-based “More Like This” recommendations aren’t always perfect but are good enough
• As I buy new music (the majority coming from Op Shops) and add it to the library, it appears in “recently added”, all with album art, just like I’m looking at it on the shelf
• I may not have the biggest collection, but there’s a bit over 1,000 albums now available to play on demand and there’s something for every mood
• Hitting random on songs leads to some really good discoveries and re-discoveries of things I have forgotten I had in the collection

Importantly, this set up is not just for me: other people in the house can also play the collection in our house. It’s really easy for my wife to pick up the ipad, pick her favourite CD, and away it goes. The music collection is a combination of ours, although it’s heavily weighted towards things I’ve found in op-shops likes Vinnies and Salvos. A recent test was when visitors came over to house sit and they were not only able to find something they liked, they also rediscovered albums and artists that they hadn’t listened to for many years.

Here’s example of the web client for Jellyfin displaying 10,000hz Legend by Air, with great recommendations at the bottom of the screen for more albums by Air and other albums which are similar in my collection:

Where this falls short is that I don’t have a lot of really ’new’ music. I can’t just discover something through serendipity that isn’t in the library. I’m limited to what I buy on Bandcamp and the occasional new CD that I buy. I think over time, as good CDs in op-shops dry up, I’ll be hitting up sites where FLAC files can be bought such as Bandcamp a lot more. But not every band is doing releases on there, so I may have to look at other sources. I also don’t have super rare CDs, albums which I’m not prepared to pay massive $$ for.

The other genre missing from the collection and often reached for weekly on a Sunday in our house is K-pop for “K-pop Sundays”. I’ve certainly never seen K-pop in an op-shop (I have found J-pop on rare occasions but only old stuff probably considered ‘classic’ these days) but maybe if I wait 5-10 years when the hype is over and everyone starts to Marie Kondo their K-pop CD collection into op-shops I will have the opportunity to solve this. Assuming CD releases for K-pop are a major thing. Something tells me no.

So, many hats off to the Jellyfin team for unlocking that magic of exploring my CD collection once again, in a way that’s simple enough to manage, easy to trawl through and great for other users beyond myself.

One of the biggest challenge is that a lot of the music metadata I’m using comes from community sources like Musicbrainz (Picard is a great tool!) and so I’ve ended up with weird genres like Alt, Alt. Rock, Alt Rock, Alternative, Alternative Pop/Rock, alternative rock and AlternRock. Combing through and fixing these takes a bit of time and patience. It’s not an impossible task because I don’t have too many CDs, but if I don’t keep on top of it, it will only get worse.

Overall, I love it. But please excuse me while I go fix up some of the metadata now.

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