Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by branon 1571 days ago
Consider alternatives to Plex (Jellyfin being the main competitor).

With Plex, you may own the media, but Plex, Inc. owns the authentication. You're not allowed to access the service running on your own hardware unless you can log in with a Plex account.

Also: losing What was indeed a massive blow, but there are others still carrying that torch...

2 comments

Unfortunately, nothing currently beats Plexamp in terms of quality music listening, shuffle, smart playlists, etc.

You can still set up local login for Plex to avoid their auth on your own network or list of allowed IPs. It's not 100% what people want, but it's something.

Navidrome [0] has been a solid replacement for me. It has all the features I want aside from Keycloak/generic oidc integration, and the author is very responsive.

0: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome

I haven't seen this before, but at a quick glance, here's what I love about Plexamp that's missing for me:

* Similar artists, tracks, etc * Auto-playing similar after listening to an album * "sonically similar" tracks/artists - not just some arbitrary decision that some artist is in the same genre, but that the songs have similar sonic profiles * Artist/track radio based on all of the above * "library radio": smart shuffling * artist mix builder: creates playlists based on some artists that you choose (and includes tracks from similar artists automatically)

I have too much music to know what I want to listen to all of the time and I don't want to sit there carefully curating playlists and trying to discover things: Basically, I want a system that's smarter than I am to tell me what to listen to (but with my own music that I own, obviously)

Fair enough, I don't really use features like that as I manually explore artists. I use discogs credit lists + wikipedia entries to find albums based on a particular person or a rhythm section in a time frame.

In navidrome I view the random albums page until I find something I want to listen to. The only algo that I've found to bear fruit is youtube's recommendations, occasionally. I mostly just listen to music on there while working and occasionally it just drops great albums.

Second this. Navidrome is an impressive piece of work. Solid UX, decent core feature set, good performance, trivial to deploy (it's a single statically linked Go binary). I've definitely had some glitches with playback and so forth, so it's not flawless, but it's still very good.
Navidrome uses react-music-player [0], which unfortunately the author has very little bandwidth to maintain it. I've opened an issue about a bug where if you scrub the player to a different timestamp, and then move the mouse out of the tab so it unfocuses, it stutters. The issue got auto-closed as wontfix after inactivity, so yay...

Other than a few UX bugs I haven't had any real issues, so I'm happy with it.

0: https://github.com/lijinke666/react-music-player

1:

I just checked their demo, do they really completely ignore genres? I can neither find a node for music by genre, nor are they shown in the tables by default.
It does show genres if they're set in the files' metadata.
Found it now. Certainly looks like a second class citizen
AFAIK genre support (or maybe support for multiple genres) for a song was added relatively recently. Work is being done for genres, though.

0: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/issues/850

Emby is pretty good.
Emby unfortunately decided to take their code closed-source a year or two ago. Jellyfin is the resulting fork.

I will agree that they're pretty good, however Jellyfin has grown to become better in terms of both licensing model and feature set.