Navidrome
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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There really isn't any decent alternative. I can run 4 Navidrome servers along side each other using less resources than a single copy of the alternatives. It just works and does almost everything you could want.
+1 for Navidrome. As simple as pasting the album into the directory and it sorts the rest. I use subtune on my phone to access it and it works great.
Agree with Navidrome. Works great in browser and the Substreamer ios app.
Another vote for navidrome. I tried substreamer on android ibdid not like the search. I use symfonium easy interface let's me randomize in many ways.
On a side question anybody have suggestions for automatically creating genre based m3u files? I would like to setup "radio" like stations but adding my music to a playlist.
Filter by genre tag to make the finding part easier?
I tried their demo, and I really dig the minimalist approach. Might give it a shot.
Plexamp
Jellyfin, and yes it thinks its very cleaver with mumbling metadata.
> be Jellyfin
> see a track in an album with a "... feat. ..." artist tag
"This must be a completely different artist than the album artist!"
> create somehow fucking immutable new metadata
I also use Jellyfin. Before being able to set custom tag delimiters, you had to ensure your music artists and album artists ID3 tags were correct. I believe it used a ';' to separate multiple artists. Now with custom delimiters you can set your own. You may be able to try and fix things by setting 'feat.' as a custom tag.
Ultimately, I would recommend just using mp3tag and spending a few minutes setting up an action that replaces 'feat.' with a delimiter, such as a '|'. Run it through your current library and you should be good.
Thank you for the info. I might try this, however I'm already having a 10x better experience now that I've set up Navidrome, and then tried the Symphonium client.
I did this for a while, and only switched back to Jellyfin/Finamp while degoogling (needed for paid version). I thought it was definitely worth it while I was using it. I also listen to music on the TV and Jellyfin handles it better than other options I tried (including side-loading symfonium).
I currently use a separate music library manager on my server to organize my music collection, then Jellyfin just does the server work.
I think you'll be very happy with the setup you are using.
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Oh, you have 10 random singles in the same directory? That must be an album all from the same artist!
I still use Samba to do everything related to filesharing (including music streaming). I haven't needed to touch my media server in years. It just continues to work. 🤷♂️
Since it's just normal network filesharing, pretty much any music player that has samba support works. On a PC, I like Winamp. On my phone, VLC.
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Navidrome with Symfonium for Android and the Web interface or my new favorite Feishin for Desktop Linux
Same, no complaint for Navi and Symfonium.
Use some service like lidarr or beets to tag the music before it goes into jellyfin
I meticulously use Picard to curate my collection. I'm 99% certain it's not me or my library, it's the assumptions Jellyfin makes about specific artist related tags, and the inability to override said assumptions.
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SD Card on my phone. i don't stream it anymore. storage is so cheap now i can easily hold all of my flac files, no problem.
edit don't look for solutions to problems you don't have. most ppl don't NEED to stream everything over the internet.
go back to local.
I have over 3 TB of music. SD cards aren't quite that big yet.
sure, then in your case, if you absolutely must have access to it all at one time, then home streaming makes sense.
for me, and i do imagine most ppl (tho i could be wrong!), it doesn't make sense compared to just returning to local.
genius that i am, i only realized that AFTER i setup a jellyfin server on my home server for streaming my music. XD derp.
I use navidrome. And what's nice about it is, there are 3 people in my household, they can all access that. We all have our own favorite tracks saved in our preferred player, and we can still save a good chunk of them to our phones.
In my case, I have a random mood playlist of 200 tracks that gets updated every morning before I wake up, my phone app caches all 200 of them, so I can play them without network access.
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The only reason I still have a s20fe. The last of the sd card phones... sigh
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Indeed. My collection is on my phone's memory, my old phone "music player", and just a back up SD card in my laptop.
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Gonic for server, Ultrasonic for client (android)
I would use Navidrome if it supported browsing by folder structure, but they refuse to implement it. My metadata is so scrambled it might as well not exist and it would take months to fix it. I pretend it doesn't exist, because I don't use it.
Just curious, why folder structure? Are your directories not artist/album?
It's .../music/artist/album/song.flac
This does not work with Navidrome if the metadata is weird. I have a lot of songs that Navidrome refuses to even list because their metadata is bad.
I browse my music by folder structure, not metadata. Folder structure is universal and does not care about inconsistent metadata.
Ah, I write the metadata on import in lidarr, so kind of a non-issue for me.
It can't handle radio shows or VA mixes well either.
I also switched to gonic over navidrome (even though I liked it a lot) because iirc I couldn't get navidrome to pull Artist pictures in correctly. gonic i could just connect to lastfm and everything worked - and i could still connect to listenbrainz for my actual scrobbling.
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1TB SD card on my phone.
beets for library organization, gonic for serving, Tempo for consuming
did you know, that the gonic developer sentriz is developing a beets alternative in go https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag
it works quite well, but lacks a lot of the features of beets
I'll keep an eye on that, thank you, but I've been using beets to maintain a very large library for 10+ years and I'm very happy with it. It was the only software I found to cure my foobar2000 addiction way back when
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I use Jellyfin but I download all my songs from Tidal, Qobuz or Deezer and tag them automatically right then and there in a clean format so Jellyfin does not have to guess at all.
I also have some automatic checks in place to convert incorrect metadata to a proper format. Like moving artists from the title (feat. Somebody else) to the artists tag Somebody; Somebody else and a bunch more.
Together with Finamp on desktop and mobile everything is pretty much working as expected.
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.
At the moment I'm trying out Ampache. It seems to have more features than Gonic.
Gonic works very well with symfonium
Jellyfin.
On the phone it's only usable at home because I don't have a VPN in place.
But I could stream via the web ui which is not convenient.
Careful curation of mp3 tags and a short leash.
My Plex and Jellyfin libraries are the same files and they are both handled identically because I don't let them think about the files.
I used a tool to export my Plex playlists as XML, then wrote a little python to convert them into M3U, jellyfin recognizes the M3 use and just makes playlists.
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