Your Music Collection Deserves Better Than Spotify

Spotify removes albums all the time because artists pull their music and licensing deals expire, and one day your favorite album is there and the next day it is grayed out and you are paying a hundred and nineteen rupees a month for this privilege. I left, bought my music on Bandcamp and ripped my CDs, and now I host it all on Navidrome and stream it to any device with better sound quality and no ads and no albums disappearing and zero rupees a month.

There are many self-hosted music servers. Plexamp is gorgeous but needs a paid Plex Pass subscription. Airsonic is old and looks like it has not been updated since 2010. Funkwhale is federated but heavy for what it does. Navidrome is the sweet spot, lightweight and fast and compatible with any Subsonic-compatible client, and it scrobbles to Last.fm if you are still into that. It scans your music folder and serves it over a web UI and an API and that is it.

Navidrome reads your folder structure and metadata tags, and while it does not care about file names as much as Jellyfin does, good tags make everything better. I organize my music by Artist Name and then Album Name with the year and then track numbers and titles, and I tag everything with MusicBrainz Picard before importing because it fetches correct metadata and cover art automatically. FLAC is the way to go because it is lossless and perfect, and if you have MP3s your ears will thank you if you convert them.

The compose file is one of the simplest in my collection. One service with a port mapping and two volumes, one for the application data and one pointing at your music directory. You run docker compose up, open port 4533, create an admin account, and Navidrome scans your music folder and builds your library. The first scan takes a while for large collections but after that it watches for changes.

The web UI is good for browsing but the real magic is using a dedicated mobile client that connects over the Subsonic API. Ultrasonic for Android, Tempo for iOS, Sublime Music for web and desktop, all of them point at your Navidrome URL with your username and password and your entire music collection is there. Offline downloads work, transcoding works, playlists sync. It feels like Spotify but with your music.

Navidrome can transcode FLAC to MP3 on the fly for clients that do not support lossless, which means over WiFi you get perfect quality and over cellular you get compressed but listenable files. I set mine to 192 kbps for mobile and keep FLAC for home. You can also configure Last.fm scrobbling if you have a decade of listening history you want to maintain.

The hardest part of self-hosting music is getting the music in the first place. I buy from Bandcamp because the artists get a fair cut and I get DRM-free FLAC files that I actually own instead of a license that can be revoked. Qobuz offers hi-res streaming with download options. Buying CDs and ripping them with Exact Audio Copy still works.

Navidrome turned my music collection from a folder of files into something I actually enjoy browsing, and nothing ever disappears.

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