I know the self hosted communities are very pro open source, with which I largely agree, but PlexAmp is such a good player it makes sense to at least try it.
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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Annoyance: Can't scan your music library from the PlexAmp app, can't scan it from the Plex app either. Super frustrating when music as added and you have to struggle with pop-up navigation on the Plex desktop site on mobile.
Game breaker: maybe it's just really hard to find and undocumented, but there doesn't seem to be a way to use profiles with PlexAmp, either to have individual play history and playlists, or to age restrict some music content.
Dunno about plexamp, but Plex has an auto-scan built in. Its disabled by default, but works like a charm. It listens for new file events and general finds things before you complete a download or copy
Unfortunately, directory monitoring doesn't work if your music is on an NFS share.
A quick search shows alternatives to keep the functionality: https://github.com/TRaSH-Guides/Guides/blob/master/docs/Plex/Tips/Plex-media-server.md#scan-my-library-automatically
YT video linked in that post. Ultimately just takes a bit of effort to figure most things out IMO.
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There definitely can be profiles. You can either create fully new users (with their own logins, etc) or home users. Assign them restrictions as necessary. Of course this is all done in the plex web app, but user switching is done easily in PlexAmp.
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I see nobody mentioning airsonic, the open source fork of subsonic. I tried navidrome but there you can't browse through folders or start a 'radio mode' (i.e. play related stuff in your library).
Another problem I found with navidrome are duplicate files in your library: since it is not folder but tag based, you'll end up with every track double, and there is no nice quick way to just play an album each track played once.
Is there a reason why people prefer navidrome over airsonic? Since I switched I feel so much more in control what I want to play.
Many don't run into dir structure issues because they have already organised their libraries with beets or an equivalent. I don't personally have any issues with playing albums either. Some of the issues you are talking about seem to be client side, are you only testing the web interfaces?
Fantastsic post!
FWIW I suspect Jellyfin is the better choice for libraries with both music and movies. That said, we live in a world where multiple FOSS options exist to serve these roles. That should be appreciated and noticed by waaaay more people.
all the jellyfin music clients have weird glitches with band names and metadata. this has been with almost every (android) jellyfin client on 3 different Jellyfin servers over the years
i was almost completely sold on Jellyfin being my music server but it wasn't quite ready for me, or possibly there is something about my library it doesn't like.
What?
Just have your files properly tagged by picard/lidarr.
Improper tags = Weird behaviour you caused.
Using Finamp and Symfonium on my phone.
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Is this your personal blog ?
this is incredible! petty much exactly what i did for myself, minus the *arr part (yet)
also i am dabbling with tempo, and it's been forked with active development!
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One of the main advantages of Spotify for me is the AI. I could host the music myself just fine. But having an AI come up custom playlists is another thing entirely.
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So the first sentence says TV and movie streaming replacement is trivial... Can you elaborate for someone who still uses the pirate bay for movies?
I would imagine they mean something like jellyfin/plex, which don't necessarily get you away from torrents. Unless you want to go the slightly more legal route of ripping DVDs and Blu-rays and re-encoding everything for yourself. I say "slightly more legal" because while you are legally allowed a backup or archival copy of your own media (in the US), you still usually have to violate the DMCA to break encryption so you can rip your archival copy.
Don't forget the Arr stack.
Question: did you consider Funkwhale , and if so why did you choose this other stack instead?
EDIT: fix link sry
Funkwhale is fucking awful. It's awful to setup, it's awful on resource usage, it's awful to manage with multiple users who may share libraries.
I'm not sure how they could fix it without a rewrite.
TBH I chose Funkwhale for my solution because it looked easy and out of the box, I just add a single Docker and subdomain to my existing site.
It wound up being more or less what you describe.
I may well follow OP's guide and nuke my Funkwhale despite the work I put into it and the fact that it does basically work for its intended purpose
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Yup, been porting all my music to navidrome the past few months and it's pretty sweet. I like that there are native subsonic apps for most platforms (using tempo on android at the moment) and that navidrome also comes with its own web player to use on the fly.
Although my setup is much more simple, just using samba to get files to it and mp3tag to prepare the files if needed.
I initially used nextcloud with its music plugin (includes subsonic server) and its basically remote access + player + server in one, but its not as good imo. I'd rather use software that focuses on one thing and does it well.
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