Just gonna repost my comment from the thread on the Technology community yesterday for suggestions and discussion: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/21273053

I used Navidrome and Symfonium with Picard for metadata and relied on a combination of Bandcamp, Rutracker and yt-dlp with a YTM free trial, along with the Spotify data export and manual python scripting elbow grease to fetch, tag all the music from my Spotify and recreate every playlist as m3u8 to be imported inside the Docker, then more elbow grease to actually make the playlist semi-accurate.

Despite Symfonium constantly losing its silly always online DRM license check and locking me out of both my cached and remote (via PiVPN to Nginx on home server to Navidrome) songs due to me having multiple Google accounts on my phone and the app freaking out because it would check the wrong account, forcing me to log out of all accounts and reset the app - losing all my customization and my credit card access for payments until I signed into the right Google account again, I had a fairly functional setup, even with playlist cover art and everything on Symfonium (despite it not being a feature in Navidrome itself).

My playlists were just as they were on Spotify down to each specific song title, album cover and most importantly of course metadata correctness and song order (I have never used shuffle in my life).

Unfortunately I went back to Spotify in the end because most music i listen to is niche and fairly Indie and thus either a pain in the ass to pirate or simply outright unavailable externally anywhere, and to maintain consistent proper metadata for what is there was like a full-time job even with some automation through Picard. I still did this for half a year. Mostly because I just did it while WFH.

I eventually simply gave up downloading more music and listened to the same few thousand songs in my transferred playlists on repeat which for me led to a feeling of stagnancy and eventually depression in life, after I begrudgingly came back to Spotify I immediately discovered several hundred new songs and created multiple new playlists just during my walks to and from the grocery store alone.

My ultimate problem is that on Spotify if I look something up I can just listen to it right away and immediately add it to my library or to a playlist of my choosing.

In contrast, when self-hosting I would have to first look up the music on Google, go to YouTube to listen to it in dogshit quality, look up album/artist on Rutracker, pray that it’s there when a lot of the time it is not, filter out albums/songs I don’t want from the discography torrent and add it to my qbittorrent-nox on server, mount the NFS share on my main windows PC with my music staging folder, add metadata with musicbrainz Picard and have it move to the finalized folder, then rescan on Navidrome webui, rescan on Symfonium local cache, then add to a playlist, then listen.

This is like, 2-3 hours of conscious effort just for me to skip to the middle of the song, listen for 30 seconds, decide I don’t like the song and delete it from the playlist, never to be heard again.

It’s way too much.

The unfortunate truth is that despite feeling good about whatever miniscule amount of effect I might have on stopping this wealth transfer from artists and listeners to Spotify and our corporate overlords while those same overlords win elections and take away my human rights while I can’t even easily get a fitting new song in decent quality to listen to when attempting to find some peace in that mess, the alternatives just aren’t worth it for me.

Yes I could just accept to have less, to just make do with the music I have, but that requires motivation that’s frankly hard to maintain if you look around and see how the rest of society behaves, eagerly falling for whatever corposlop becomes available.

Felt like I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face tbqh.

I would love for it to work as it does with Jellyfin and Immich, I have replaced GDrive, Netflix, Google Photos and damn near everything, Spotify is my only subscription left, but it just hasn’t worked for me to move off of it long-term. I’d love suggestions on how this problem can be fixed though.

Some ideas of mine:

1. Musicbrainz metadata is awful. Half the time the cover art is someone’s photo of some shitty Japanese vinyl with stickers. Pull covers off YT or Spotify. In fact - pull all metadata off Spotify via scraping, with Musicbrainz volunteer metadata serving only as intermediary to connect the audio to the musicbrainz id which should connect to a Spotify option and potentially a fallback option if somehow the music isn’t on Spotify.

2. There should be an intelligent playlist creator of some sort where I can give it my Spotify account export data and it can go off song titles and albums in the playlists within to create playlists in navidrome by finding matches in my library and automatically downloading missing ones and it should be at least 99% accurate (most “Spotify playlist downloader” type websites are 99% inaccurate for instance).

3. Navidrome or one of it’s clients should have a plugin to get suggestions at the bottom of playlists like Spotify via last.fm and play music instantly directly from Spotify/YTM, with a button to add a song to your playlist, when you do so, it automatically downloads it, copies metadata off Spotify, and adds it to whatever playlist you added it to.

All that should hopefully ease the pain and make it so you can discover, listen and add to your library without so many barriers.

The reasons for dropping Spotify are obvious, however pretext of this guide is that Spotify doesn’t give enough back to artists. So the solution is to pirate it? I mean yeah sure, but don’t kid yourself with the pretext.

How about a guide on ripping owned CDs?

If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.

Having your own collection is great. But it doesn’t provide the service Spotify does (or any streaming service). 80% of the time I listen to discovery-type generated playlists. I want to find new music. This is fundamentally impossible with the music I own. This is something you can’t self host. Even if you have a vast collection of music you don’t know (by whatever means your get it), you still need the algorithms to pick the music that you’re likely to like.

I really wish I could. I self host basically everything else. Even tried some local music similarity training for “smart playlists”. It’s kinda neat at best, but no where remotely close to the music discovery of Spotify and other online services. You need the massive amounts of users to derive that data.