[csmattryder]

Not enough people realise you can spin up a cheap Hetzner instance, install Navidrome and use that as very functional Spotify-like experience. Bring in your music you've got on a USB, Bandcamp and others in one place.

Then you get to pick a player that works best for you, I use Feishin which you'll find familiar if you're a Spotify user.

I know I'm pulling a Dropbox with "just spin up Navidrome" but if you've got an afternoon to get it going, you can save yourself a lot of cash with price hikes to pay for AI DJs.

https://github.com/jeffvli/feishin

[intev]

Unfortunately the spotify music discovery is so good that I can't imagine leaving the platform :/

[jonathankoren]

That’s odd. I was just talking about how Spotify falls into the same cul du sacs that all similarity based recommendations fall in. Like it might show you some decent stuff for a few days if you give it a hard kick by finding something outside of Spotify first, but soon it’s the same three bands and two albums.

[intev]

That has definitely not been my experience. The Made For Your section shows me tons of artists I've never heard from. I suppose it could be limited if you listen to a very specific niche where they don't have a large dataset on. I love finding new artists and then suddenly diving into a rabbit hole of discovering their older stuff.

[jonathankoren]

Weird. As an anecdote my "Daily Mix 1" has 50 songs, and only two bands I didn't recognize. 62% of the songs are by artists with more than one song in the list. The most songs by an artist? 7 songs over 3 albums. Of the 50 songs, only 4 were put out this decade, only two bands did I not recognize.

"Daily Mix 2" is better with 30 bands, with the top band having 4 songs across 2 albums. Coincidently 62% of songs are also by artists with more than one song in the last, but the most common artist only has 4 songs across 2 albums. 19 unrecognized bands, so that's something.

[anderber]

I've found that Deezer and Apple's discovery to be equally good. But then again, this is very personal in how good it is.

[happytoexplain]

Are you saying that this will take a few hours for somebody who doesn't know what Hetzner, Navidrome, or Feishin are, or are you implicitly speaking to the subset of HN with experience broad and deep enough to already have the skillset represented by this stack?

[csmattryder]

> are you implicitly speaking to the subset of HN with experience broad and deep enough to already have the skillset represented by this stack?

That's the one. To follow the above, knowledge of a public cloud (take your pick) and installing software are going to be needed.

[Aachen]

Demo for Navidrome: https://demo.navidrome.org/

That web UI on mobile is so good, I don't know why I'd ever want anything else. Who needs an app when you got this right in the browser! I also fell in love with the first song I picked, Sad Robot by Pornophonique (what's that name though lol) and, eh, added it to Spotify

Conversely, though, trying to search for something from my Spotify (like 30 Seconds to Mars) on Navidrome, it predictably comes up with no results.

It is not as simple as "just spinning up". It is starting a new hobby because that money spent does not solve your problem. You first have to deal with getting your hands on the music and discovering what music you even want to be buying. Someone sends you a song name (that they discovered on whatever platform) and the first thing you have to do is see if it's on an ad-supported platform somewhere like in YouTube or if you can find the artist's website to preview it before buying it outright to even listen once (and the age of 30-second previews is also mostly gone)

That's very different from typing it into your subscription service and 95 out of 100 times being able to listen to it without further complications, or being able to click "more like this" on the song you're currently loving and getting music with at least some resemblance, even if 3/4ths that Spotify suggests does not share the quality I was looking for it is still the source of most new songs I add to my favorites list

[eddd-ddde]

Wow I tried the demo and not only I loved navidrome, I also fell in love with the first album I clicked on: https://demo.navidrome.org/app/#/album/0f2181c7f5c19f786b44f...

[throwaway5959]

The time spent setting all that up would be equivalent to years of Spotify subscriptions and would have way less content.