JF is for all of my media, I do have navidrome for music in addition to JF though (they sit side by side and share access to the same music media directories), in part because I have some other stuff I put together to work with navidrome a while ago, and I don't feel like changing it. Otherwise you can pretty much just use JF.

Can't help with Jellyfin, tho there are many here who use it, so maybe someone will chime in. I do use Navidrome, and it checks all my boxes. It's a pretty comprehensive package, and recently they have introduced a plug in environment. I have not got into the plug ins yet. If your music collection is rather haphazard, I'd recommend Beets. Turn it loose on your music collection and let it do it's thing.

Out of those two, I would go with Navidrome. Jellyfin is more monolithic of an app, and navidrome (more specifically, subsonic clients) is more Unix-like (or modular). You can't edit the tags as easily as with Jellyfin, but beets works really well for tagging and embedding everything from album art to synced lyrics. Beets has great plugins to do all this, including a web app plugin and an auto update plugin.

Edit: I forgot to mention all the frontend choices. Many frontends work for both apps, but I believe subsonic clients have more options.

Navidrome for easy UPnP. Symphonium on Android. Foobar2000 on windows. Deadbeef on Linux.

I have a bunch of WiiM Mini devices and this setup works well for multi room playback.

Navidrome on PC + Symfonium (one time payment, worth it) as my mobile interface so I can listen on my phone easily.

Welcome home

Like others, I run both. Jellyfin for music was alright, but I didn't love how it handled some metadata and my collection now is around 28,000 songs (without bootlegs) and I wanted something dedicated to music.

Absolutely love Navidrome. When I'm at my PC, I'll open it, hit the "Random" option under Albums and select something from the first page. This way I'm always surfacing things I would normally ignore and engaging more with my collection.

Then, again as others have mentioned, I have Symfonium on Android. There's a "Track Mix" option that shuffles your entire library, or you can create dynamic playlists. The one I use gives me 50 random tracks, but filters out classical and tracks shorter than 45 seconds. Same idea though, listening to parts of my collection that would never be my first choice.

@InternetCitizen2 Longtime Jellyfin user, brief and erstwhile Navidrome user.If you are complete on top of your collection's tags, and enjoy managing your tags, and have some solution besides Navidrome to do that management with, you might enjoy Navidrome. Navidrome is intensely dependent on your tags being correct, and it offers no way to edit tags itself, that's entirely your problem. I come from the age of Winamp, which allowed you to edit tags with quite a bit of flexibility, it took me a while to even realize that someone had the audacity to release a music server that didn't manage what it relied on.Oh, and forget about using a folder-based view on Navidrome, it is not a planned feature. The main dev is fixated on tags, but not enough to implement editing them. It's an absurd hill to murder your app on.Where I landed: Jellyfin serves your music collection just fine, and offers a folder view even, and I paid 8 bucks CDN for an Android app called Symfonium, which offers every feature you could want, using your Jellyfin server as the media store. It also connects to Navidrome and many other sources, but Navidrome became completely unnecessary once I got Symfonium.

Today I learned that Jellyfin does music. Had Jellyfin and Navidrome both for years, never even tried sticking my music library into Jellyfin. I use Substreamer on my Androids.

You asked for personal setups so I'll answer with what i have. Jellyfin does my video stuff. TV, movie etc. And for audio I use navidrome. I tried to use jelly for all of it but the music playback sucked (for me). Navidrome is subsonic api compatiable and gives you more options for clients therefore. I even wrote my own tui player :)

If I were you I'd set up jellyfin (not exposed to the internet) and see how it goes. If the music work then awesome, you have a one stop shop for all your media. If not, then add navi on top.

Have fun :)

Literally watched the YouTube video from click and switch that goes over replacing Spotify with this. Getting my server ready!

Whichever you go with, I highly recommend looking into https://github.com/NeptuneHub/AudioMuse-AI, which does analysis on your music so you can generate playlists/mixes from a specific song or from moods/genres

I haven't tried navidrome, but my only gripe with jellyfin for music is that I can't find any non-subscription apps that work with android auto (if someone wants to point at one, let me know!)

I know jellyfin itself at least used to have android auto compatibility, but it was absolute shit and didn't have even some of the basic music controls when I tried, and I am unsure if any version of the app still has that even.

Until about a year ago, I was just using Jellyfin for all of my media. For music I was using the phone app FinAmp.

I set up Navidrome when I ran into a bug that made music playback unreliable. Jellyfin fixed the bug and it's back to being rock solid, but I still mostly use Navidrome for music.

Honestly I think the only reason why I stuck with Navidrome is that it has better playlist support. Building playlists still sucks but it sucks a little less in Navidrom as it can actually import playlists made elsewhere. Other than that, Navidrome has a better web interface for music.

I was using just jellyfin for a while but navidrome got around some issues I was having, or rather the primary user of the music library was having with various things being wrong such as duplicate artists, incorrect album art, albums split into duplicates with opposite missing tracks. Once things went wrong in jellyfin it was a pain to figure out what the cause and fix were. Navidrome seems to base everything off the embedded tags and using lidarr to rewrite the tags, and for some albums rename the files, made everything show up correctly, then a delete missing files in navidrome cleans up the evidence and everyone is happy. The playlists are stored on the server too so if you don't like a particular client app you don't have to remake them if you try another, or just having them persist between mobile and desktop.

Dude, there are multiple replies for Symfonium. $5, and 100% worth every penny.