Does Music Get Better Than What I Have?
Hello all,
I spent some hours this weekend working on a music stack. It's currently offline, but that's just because I couldn't get into it. I currently use Usenet for my media downloads and this is how I set it up.
We're using Lidarr to connect to my indexers, AudioMuse for taste and local radio, navidrome for a media playing client, and Sonobarr for artist discovery and library building. Ollama works within these to let me build playlists easily like 'whisky country from early 2000s' etc.
This was OK. I'm not going to try and hide it, I'm trying to chase a Spotify like experience. The issue is that when all put together, it just kind've sucked and felt like friction. Here's what was wrong:
- Radio stunk. I'd be doing pretty good, and then all of the sudden I'd get a Frosty the Snowman cover because I could only really download in bulk.
- I couldn't search individual songs anywhere, I wasn't interested in downloading from YouTube, even though I set up the API and everything with Expo - I ended up deleting it. I didn't want music video audio downloaded. It just wasn't clean enough.
- I have a love/hate relationship with Spotify's DJ X, I tried to get close to that experience here with Explo & Sonobarr w/ Ollama, but it came back to that issue of downloading from artists, and then it not knowing to avoid Christmas Music in May. I love that DJ X sort of knows what music I like.
I understand that I'm not going to get all the way there to what Spotify is giving me. Totally get it, but I don't know if this is as good as it could be?
This setup was missing no automation, I could index and grab thousands of songs within a few minutes from artists I like. But I was really just missing a sort of smart playback feature & the ability to download single songs all from the same platform on mobile. I don't want my wife to have to come to me, say I want to listen to X song, and then I have to download a FLAC from that artist and hope it contains it! My entertainment arr's is great because we go on Seer, find the movie, request it and it downloads & populates on Plex like an hour later. Music is challenging because we're not treating it the same as other entertainment. I'll listen to hundreds of songs in a week, but I'll only download one show and watch it for a month. Almost no friction.
What do you guys do?