After 14 years with Plex, I finally moved my video library to Jellyfin. Why rising costs, feature restrictions and digital ownership pushed me towards FOSS.
Despite all of this, I haven’t completely abandoned Plex.
Plexamp remains one of the best self-hosted music applications I’ve ever used.
Lyrion, Music Assistant, and Navidrome are all solid options. And Jellyfin also supports music hosting, along with FinAmp, which has similar functionality to PlexAmp (maybe not as good, but download functionality works).
Personally, I abandoned PlexAmp. Wasn’t worth keeping with the rest and it has been downhill since the loss of Tidal integration. Navidrome clients work great, have solid radio and discovery features for large collections, and support local downloading for on the go.
And for local listening, I’d argue that Lyrion with Blissmix or LastFM “Don’t Stop the Music” plugins are as good and sometimes better than PlexAmp. And Navidrome and/or Music Assistant with AudioMuse-AI plugin utterly destroys PlexAmp’s radio/DJ functionality. Install AudioMuse, scan your library and go, it just works. Especially with recent builds having native Linux, Mac, and Windows now (I deployed with Docker compose before these options were available).
I used it for a bit, but after getting Navidrome up and running, Arpeggi replaced it as my download “away from home” client, and at home I use Lyrion or Music Assistant via Squeezelite since I have Wiims in every room of the house.
JF is damn good for video and has a better interface than plex
Finamp is horrible for big collections. As you ask JF for tracks or artists it loads them a handful at a time. I have 2300 artists 26,000+ tracks, if I want to listen to some NiN, trying to scroll through to N’s is maddening.
Finamp just crashes on me now and then. Play -> shuffle… wtf knows, might go 10m might go 2. Samsung Phone with 6GB of ram.
Finamp is rooted to JF features only, eg: it is incapable of cross fading because it has no ability to tell JF the songs were last played easily. If you want to set up a really large playlist, it’s one at a time, but you can put an m3u in the folder. but once you do that, your playlist is no longer editable through the GUI.
I moved over to Symfonium. It loaded my playlists, let’s me crossfade, everything seems ok, until i add new music or modify a playlist and it has to scrape the entirety of my collection to add a song. It can take hours.
I’m big on my playlists. I have exported years of jackfm and 98 rock to recreate real playlists from different eras.
JF audio is just absolutely stuck in the stoneage and any attempt for clients to work arond it and dig them out still have to deal with their slower than fuck database and api.
I’ve been considering audiomuse, but I have old equipment available.
My options are my media server, which is an old Xeon E3-1275v3 with 32G of RAM, which also hosts Navidrome, my arr stack and the associated downloaders, or my Home Assistant and Jellyfin box, which is a Lenovo M700 Tiny which is an i5 6600T but has only 8G of ram.
Or, an 8G Pi5 with an SSD (using the pi SSD hat)
I’m not sure either of those 3 options would handle audiomuse AI all that well…
The Xeon server would be a good bet. Your other machine would be potentially bottleneck for memory (though it meets min spec if the server isn’t doing anything else). There’s a NOAVX docker deployment available, would be slower but should work fine. Just be sure to disable anything associated with lyric detection, it’s an absolute performance nightmare.
I ran it on a Ryzen 5500u mini-PC with 32 GB RAM with the standard deployment with AVX2 support and scaled up to three worker threads. For a collection of 53k tracks it was processing about 100 per hour that way with lyrics/whisper translation enabled, but once I turned that off it was doing 1300-1400 tracks per hour.
——
Edit - the 6600T would work too. I found with lyrics disabled, each worker only used between 500MB and 2 GB of RAM. Long as the server isn’t under load while scanning I think that would work, and would be faster for having AVX2 support.
That’s cool to know, however the Xeon runs FreeBSD, so I would need to create a VM if it doesn’t work in Linuxulator, (FreeBSD’s Linux compatibility layer, works sorta like wine does)
I have 120k tracks. I like music.
I should do some research this weekend I reckon.
Great, now I have one more thing I gotta do this weekend. Thanks a lot. Lmao.
FinAmp and its beta rewrite don’t really come close to PlexAmp in terms of functionally or polish, but if anyone switched from Plex to Jellyfin and wants a nice aesthetic music player app Discrete has done the job for me. It’s essentially an Apple Music clone so it looks nice and navigates well.
I have Wiim Pro and Wiim Pro Pluses in every room in my house that I’d stream to, and send via Squeezelite or DLNA (with Chromecast and AirPlay as available, but IMO inferior options). Plus virtual squeezelite software allows for local PC play the same way if needed (wife uses this on her Mac Mini, I don’t generally play music on my PC, just direct via the Wiim to my amp).
I predominantly use Lyrion, but my wife convinced me to try Music Assistant and it’s growing on me. MA has a lot of options for sending the audio, as well as various DSP, normalization, and crossfade functionality.
I’m not sure about those devices, but with a paid account it unlocks speaker grouping and casting to various devices or rooms, or play here on current device function. I don’t have their device, just a raspberry pi with the OS.
The UI is objectively better but it still looks like a 10 year old material UI student project. I’ve been keeping an eye on it but it might not be worth giving up the stability for
Lyrion, Music Assistant, and Navidrome are all solid options. And Jellyfin also supports music hosting, along with FinAmp, which has similar functionality to PlexAmp (maybe not as good, but download functionality works).
Personally, I abandoned PlexAmp. Wasn’t worth keeping with the rest and it has been downhill since the loss of Tidal integration. Navidrome clients work great, have solid radio and discovery features for large collections, and support local downloading for on the go.
And for local listening, I’d argue that Lyrion with Blissmix or LastFM “Don’t Stop the Music” plugins are as good and sometimes better than PlexAmp. And Navidrome and/or Music Assistant with AudioMuse-AI plugin utterly destroys PlexAmp’s radio/DJ functionality. Install AudioMuse, scan your library and go, it just works. Especially with recent builds having native Linux, Mac, and Windows now (I deployed with Docker compose before these options were available).
There’s Feishin that can connect to Jellyfin or Navidrome, on Android I use Symfonium
I personally really like FinAmp. I use it every single day during my commute and work, it works incredibly well with FLAC files.
I used it for a bit, but after getting Navidrome up and running, Arpeggi replaced it as my download “away from home” client, and at home I use Lyrion or Music Assistant via Squeezelite since I have Wiims in every room of the house.
JF is damn good for video and has a better interface than plex
Finamp is horrible for big collections. As you ask JF for tracks or artists it loads them a handful at a time. I have 2300 artists 26,000+ tracks, if I want to listen to some NiN, trying to scroll through to N’s is maddening.
Finamp just crashes on me now and then. Play -> shuffle… wtf knows, might go 10m might go 2. Samsung Phone with 6GB of ram.
Finamp is rooted to JF features only, eg: it is incapable of cross fading because it has no ability to tell JF the songs were last played easily. If you want to set up a really large playlist, it’s one at a time, but you can put an m3u in the folder. but once you do that, your playlist is no longer editable through the GUI.
I moved over to Symfonium. It loaded my playlists, let’s me crossfade, everything seems ok, until i add new music or modify a playlist and it has to scrape the entirety of my collection to add a song. It can take hours.
I’m big on my playlists. I have exported years of jackfm and 98 rock to recreate real playlists from different eras.
JF audio is just absolutely stuck in the stoneage and any attempt for clients to work arond it and dig them out still have to deal with their slower than fuck database and api.
I’ve been considering audiomuse, but I have old equipment available.
My options are my media server, which is an old Xeon E3-1275v3 with 32G of RAM, which also hosts Navidrome, my arr stack and the associated downloaders, or my Home Assistant and Jellyfin box, which is a Lenovo M700 Tiny which is an i5 6600T but has only 8G of ram.
Or, an 8G Pi5 with an SSD (using the pi SSD hat)
I’m not sure either of those 3 options would handle audiomuse AI all that well…
The Xeon server would be a good bet. Your other machine would be potentially bottleneck for memory (though it meets min spec if the server isn’t doing anything else). There’s a NOAVX docker deployment available, would be slower but should work fine. Just be sure to disable anything associated with lyric detection, it’s an absolute performance nightmare.
I ran it on a Ryzen 5500u mini-PC with 32 GB RAM with the standard deployment with AVX2 support and scaled up to three worker threads. For a collection of 53k tracks it was processing about 100 per hour that way with lyrics/whisper translation enabled, but once I turned that off it was doing 1300-1400 tracks per hour.
——
Edit - the 6600T would work too. I found with lyrics disabled, each worker only used between 500MB and 2 GB of RAM. Long as the server isn’t under load while scanning I think that would work, and would be faster for having AVX2 support.
That’s cool to know, however the Xeon runs FreeBSD, so I would need to create a VM if it doesn’t work in Linuxulator, (FreeBSD’s Linux compatibility layer, works sorta like wine does)
I have 120k tracks. I like music.
I should do some research this weekend I reckon.
Great, now I have one more thing I gotta do this weekend. Thanks a lot. Lmao.
mpd server. Although mainly, so I can use the beautifully named ncmpdcpp client
FinAmp and its beta rewrite don’t really come close to PlexAmp in terms of functionally or polish, but if anyone switched from Plex to Jellyfin and wants a nice aesthetic music player app Discrete has done the job for me. It’s essentially an Apple Music clone so it looks nice and navigates well.
TBH I don’t recommend FinAmp, but it’s an option if you only want to deal with Jellyfin and not run multiple servers.
Lyrion (LMS) and Navidrome server/clients though, absolutely. They’re great.
Does Volumio suit your needs? I haven’t used Plex audio to compare
Not for me, but I could see the appeal for some.
I have Wiim Pro and Wiim Pro Pluses in every room in my house that I’d stream to, and send via Squeezelite or DLNA (with Chromecast and AirPlay as available, but IMO inferior options). Plus virtual squeezelite software allows for local PC play the same way if needed (wife uses this on her Mac Mini, I don’t generally play music on my PC, just direct via the Wiim to my amp).
I predominantly use Lyrion, but my wife convinced me to try Music Assistant and it’s growing on me. MA has a lot of options for sending the audio, as well as various DSP, normalization, and crossfade functionality.
I’m not sure about those devices, but with a paid account it unlocks speaker grouping and casting to various devices or rooms, or play here on current device function. I don’t have their device, just a raspberry pi with the OS.
I do this with my Wiims already, no account needed. They support speaker linking and whole home playback, or just linking individual devices.
Nice.
If anyone goes with finamp, sign up for the test version as it’s UI is significantly better than stable.
The UI is objectively better but it still looks like a 10 year old material UI student project. I’ve been keeping an eye on it but it might not be worth giving up the stability for