I wouldn't say Rogan is a propagandist, just a convenient idiot that is a platform for fascists. Very slight distinction, but tables with Nazi's making it a moot point.

Depends on how much music you want. I have about 3500 songs at the highest quality free YouTube will let me download songs at, and that comes to around 15GB.

Very much depends. I host the digital music collection for my entire family (6 people) all with very different tastes in music and very large music collections. According to Jellystat, I'm hosting roughly 52,000 tracks taking up just shy of 2 TB. I used to keep track of how many albums I had but I've long since lost track.

On average, a CD ripped to FLAC seems to run around 300MB. MP3 or OGG would generally be smaller (but with quality loss), dependent on the bitrate, call it 50MB - 200MB.

In short, a person hosting a normal sized personal music collection is unlikely to run into space issues.

it's not 2008 anymore. audio file storage space is not a concern, we have larger storage drives now

but I wasn’t sure if Spotify, YouTube, or anyone else will reach out with cease and desists like has happened to me with torrents in the past

Right now Google is more focused on breaking the library that powers downloading from YouTube (yt-dlp). They haven't succeeded yet, but that's definitely an easier path for them than prosecuting piracy.

I doubt Spotify will try to punish you for this since the content isn't actually being stolen from them directly.

No VPN needed. The media being downloaded is coming from YouTube.

I am considering Jellyfin on a VPS host so securing it is a concern (though not a major one; I basically grok reverse proxies/nginx etc)

Interested in your observations as a user and admin

Get friends who also value keeping their music. Everyone uploads; everyone benefits

*arr stack my friend. I use docker-compose files for pretty much everything. Jellyfin as a media server for pretty much everything, many choices are available for a front end, but my symphonium purchase has paid for itself many times over.

This is pretty close to what I set up, but not exactly.

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/26287096

TY. super appreciate comments like this from people who've already done the work and tried stuff out

Plex is freemium and only partly open source correct?

That makes me very nervous.
What parts/features are walled off?

If downloading requires $$, then I guarantee it's just a matter of time before you lose access to "your" music.

Is there a pure open fork?

I had Plex for a long time, but switched to Jellyfin as they've been pushing more paid products even to lifetime-pass users. Very easy to switch, haven't looked back.

Interesting, I hadn't heard of Lidarr.
The github is active, lots of features, cross-platform support,

Lidarr is a music collection manager for Usenet and BitTorrent users

This gives me pause. My user base includes non-technical family members. And the model I am looking for is for us to upload our own music to share (like old-time mixtapes) vs straight-up pirating

Good idea. Also give Qobuz a try. I did that and it went very well.

Jellyfin and Lidarr is a potent combo for managing and streaming a collection.

This is the way! I did exactly this (with Plexamp) and I never want to go back.

Tidal is excellent. Spotify only recently allowed lossless streaming, which tidal has been doing for a long time. There are apps you pay like $5 to and transfer your entire library. Which I cancelled same day. After it gets to know your music preferences, the recommendations are daily playlists instead of weekly, and in my opinion they’re much better.

Not to mention they pay the artists the most out of all streamers, which is why I initially changed.

What's your tech stack look like for this? I've seen some guides on Lemmy here already for it. Always curious to see what other people come up with.

Navidrome/Airsonic with reverse proxy is best. There are lots of Android and iOS apps that stream music from you server. Rather than a reverse proxy, you could try connecting via tailscale maybe? I think at minimum, this would require your phone to be connected to tailscale whenever you want to listen to music. Not sure if this would work or be practical.

Best I can do is jellyfin with a reverse proxy

As others suggested, a simple server with a subsonic api is all you need. tailscale on it and your mobile device and you can stream with a handful of open source apps.

I am using a pi to server my music for years but been self hosting my music since google music died - never got on the spotify bandwagon.

A little docker/podman is all you need. I also work on an free android app for this purpose as well that I just posted an update to yesterday.

You can. I started my Jellyfin server on a RPi3. Not great hardware for video streaming, but it will work fine for music. Could also use Navidrome. For local network only, that would be all you need.

To stream your media collection outside your home network, you'll want to set up either a reverse proxy and set your ISP's modem to forward the traffic to the reverse proxy, or set up a VPN like Tailscale. Tailscale would be the simpler option most of the time and is more secure for the average self-hoster.

Plex, but they're getting big brothery. They do support relay through their own server.

jellyfin + cloudflare tunnel. Still big brothery, but less, pretty easy and not against their tos

Syncthing only works because it's bursty. Once you start trying to run sustained data over it, people will run out of capacity pretty quickly.

Something could probably be done DHT/Torrent style. All the listeners share in the transfers, but the availability might be dicey.

For me, it's Jellyfin + Tailscale. I always connect home and play from my media server and if TS ever gives me any lip, i'll change over to headscale or just wireguard.

Works no problem. They've just changed how it works slightly, but it works fine. It now just directs you at a link to download and already patched app. You can still choose any version you want. It has this long ad before you can get to the link, but you can either block it with blokada or watch it to support the devs.