Plex with a Tidal subscription. Treats tidal as if it is local in your library and seamlessly integrates with your own collection.
Listen with plexamp.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Holy crap. I have Tidal on my phone and Plex at home. I didnt know I could connect them. Thank you!
Question: if you get a Tidal subscription through Plex on the main/admin account, is it available for all users that have access to the music library? Or only for that main user?
The Tidal subscription is only available for the account that subscribed to Tidal. Other users can also subscribe themselves, but it's per user.
Ah thanks so much for the clarification! That's exactly the info I wanted
Can't really answer, but if the library was available to all your Plex users, Tidal probably has countermeasures for that or maybe would ban your account.
Seeing 10 different songs (assuming you had 10 users streaming at the same time) being pulled from their servers from a single account would definitely raise suspicions.
Maybe you can get away with it if you have a Family type account with Tidal.
If there are only 2-3 of you, maybe it's worth a try though.
This post has caused me to fall down a self hosting rabbit hole. Since reading it I have set up a navidrome server and I am starting to work on recommendation methods and acquisition methods to rebuild my library
post your findings after your are done
Will do, working through API connections to streamline some of the process.
How did you structure your library? Did you use lidarr?
Have you looked at lidarr and plex?
Currently using lidarr for library management and... err... acquisition.
Not sure what plex can do for playback/streaming. Looked at it for video streaming, but ended up not using it.
Check out Plexamp, the Plex music streaming client.
This is the way. I went plexamp after GPM died. I'll never pay for another streaming music service. Also plexamp isn't for only Plex pass folk now as well.
Yeah. Take a good look at plex as the server and Plexamp as the client. You can filter the music in an almost infinite way. Even by mood. Not saying it’s perfect but it’s the best self hosted way I have found.
I'm using Plex for all my self-hosted streaming (movies, TV, and music.) I've tried to move to jellyfin for the video streaming in the past, but for music, I've not found anything that works as well as Plex. There are things like Ampache and Navidrome that I have tried, but they didn't fit my needs that well.
As far as finding new music that I like enough to add to my server, I generally just use YouTube or a paid streaming service. There are technically ways to download songs and albums straight from YouTube, if you are okay with opus format, but I normally try to find FLAC or physical media I can rip to put into my Plex.
Lidarr has an option to import lists from spotify and lastfm. I've used it to import the release radar and discover weekly playlists to lidarr, but haven't figured out a way how to get the playlist generated in plex aside from manually importing the m3u file. Lastfm is also really good if you have scrobbling enabled on your plex, so you can keep your recommendations updated.
Plexamp is really nice, especially if you have plexpass so you can take advantage of the sonic analysis. Sonic analysis helps give it a spotify discovery experience with its artist mix, similar sounding artists/albums/tracks and the sonic adventure is always fun.
I'm intimidated by getting this set up.
Ooh, that looks interesting. Thanks.
Navidrome's smart playlists can do some of this. You're basically building filters for songs to be added to a playlist automatically though, it's not as "smart" as Spotify.
Navidrome with play:sub and feishin is what I do
Outside of Plexamp, I'm not sure of any self hosted music solutions that can generate random & context-aware playlists, most of the ones I'm aware of (Navidrome and the various apps that support it) appear to be mostly classic media players as you mentioned. There's also Funkwhale, but that's more of a self hosted, federated SoundCloud alternative I think.
Music discoverability is something I kind of stuggle with when looking to expand my library, so I tend to rely on apps to do this. I personally use Newpipe, as it works for YouTube, SoundCloud and Bandcamp, allowing me to jump between the platforms looking for remixes and the like.
For a more spotify-like discovery experience, the Spotube app combines Spotify's API with YouTube Music to play spotify-suggested playlists, and there's another app SimpMusic that does the same for YouTube music
There's also Funkwhale, but that's more of a self hosted, federated SoundCloud alternative I think.
It's also primarily for self-publishing. When sharing music that's not your own I suspect you quickly run into the same issues as with torrents. With probably similar solutions.
I'll check out Spotube and SimpMusic, although the local music part is missing from your description.
What a good timing, I was looking for a YT music replacement.
Navidrome seems like a good choice but is exactly what you're are saying "classic media player with a webUI". I like the convenience of YT music recommendations and all the music available even the music I don't usually listen to. I would need a much bigger music library or a way to facilitate the music discovery and automate the downloads.
I know there's is Lidarr to automatically download music but I read some people saying music naming scheme is a mess. So anybody has successfully replaced Spotify or YT music with Navidrome or similar? How is your setup?
I use lidarr in combination with these scripts for downloading.
https://github.com/RandomNinjaAtk/arr-scripts
Really nice set up, add music you want in lidarr and it just magically appears for you.
For front end I use plexamp like others have mentioned
Logitech media server (squeezebox) with the don't stop the music plugin. It can use different services for context aware playlists and I found last.fm to be a lot better than Spotify. MusicIP used to be a thing on LMS as well, and probably can still be used, that's completely local but analyzing new tracks is slow since MusicIP servers are down (MusicIP got bought by Spotify ages ago).
Slsk,lidarr and either plex or jellyfin for plexamp/finamp. Other alternative is deemix but it requires paying for deezer if you want 320/FLAC