So instead of being able to use a wide variety of clients with established providers like jellyfin or plex etc., I’d be limited to koel’s app only? Jellyfin also just works for me.
I’m not opposed to new media servers, but with this starting out freemium, and with a proprietary API, I don’t see much reason to use it.
Your DB driver of choice [MySQL/MariaDB]:
[mysql ] MySQL/MariaDB
[pgsql ] PostgreSQL
[sqlsrv ] SQL Server
[sqlite-e2e] SQLite
> sqlite-e2e
Absolute path to the DB file:
> /home/user/koel.sqlite3
WARN Cannot connect to the database. Let's set it up.
Your DB driver of choice [MySQL/MariaDB]:
[mysql ] MySQL/MariaDB
[pgsql ] PostgreSQL
[sqlsrv ] SQL Server
[sqlite-e2e] SQLite
Installing/maintaining mysql or the others is a pain in the ass relative to sqlite (essentially no cost at all). For a personal media library, all write operations are trivially serializable. Sqlite DBs are the easiest to copy to new machines when you upgrade hardware.
Needing to delve into docker stuff is itself a bigger hassle than using sqlite. Which isn't saying much admittedly, but sqlite is basically hassle free in the most extreme way.
Interesting, I wouldn't consider another DB driver for integration tests if that isn't usable in production. Probably a good reason for it but can anyone clarify why that's done?
And yet the "getting started" page says: "Any database supported by Laravel – MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or SQLite"
The "wizard" also proposes a regular "SQLite" option. But it fails as well.
I wouldn't mind if it was a humble project, but the website is full of marketing BS, including "Koel is a music streaming solution that actually works™"
Basically a simple website for kids where they can select from pre-approved youtube accounts/videos or upload additional conten. Anyone building sth like this?
Another shout-out for Jellyfin. Somewhat unusual in that it's build with .NET technologies and runs on Linux, but it's proven to be an excellent media server for many years now.
And as for letting you or your kids upload additional content, yup that’s what PeerTube is mainly for.
I run a PeerTube instance of my own to host some videos I made. I haven’t tried importing from YouTube to it though. I use yt-dlp to download videos I want to keep.
This is more or less what we do but recently the Jellyfin iPad client has become very flaky. My suspicion is the JS app's memory usage has grown to a point where it's causing the web view embedded in the app to run out of memory in which case getting newer client hardware should fix it.
Why not use one of the more established options to stream music? Like plex, emby, jellyfin?
I'm seriously asking for the best solution because I'm about to return to living in the same home so I plan on bringing back my Synology NAS and digitize my music collection.
I pull music from a wide array of sources (Bandcamp, yt-dlp, etc.), drop each album or release in its own folder in ~/Music, run beets on those files to clean the metadata and consolidate into V0 MP3, then rsync the beets library over to a VPS running Navidrome.
Took a fair bit of scripting and config to get beets working as desired, but the process is pretty close to perfect, and scales well into the terabyte range.
Huh, demo not bad actually, and fair one-time pricing for plus version.
Although it did turn my relatively high-end laptop into the new GE hypersonic ramjet[1] and I couldn't hear the music over the fans... the visualizers were slow (wondering if it doesn't have 3d acceleration?) on Firefox / Linux. (Worked fine on Chrome.)
Looks very similar to Navidrome, plus some UI polish, minus the subsonic integration that opens up to third-party mobile apps. Interesting anyway. I keep returning to Plexamp though, I don't quite like Plex "per se" but Plexamp mobile + the sonic analysis is something I miss when I don't have it.
It's still amazing there is just no all in one solution for viewing and sharing media between people. Having to hook Sonarr/radarr whatever into something to track indexers than a client then some kind of all in one interface that might not even be a media player....
It probably depends on the genre, for metal, almost everything is on bandcamp. The main exceptions are some very old, some very poppy nuclear blast/napalm record stuff, or generally Japanese bands which mostly seem to not care about non-Japanese fans in general.
It depends on the artist and their contracts of course, but for normal (non-indie) artists with labels, this is well-known and you can read all about it all over the internet.
Generally, most bands make most of their money from touring, both from ticket sales and especially from merchandise (T-shirts etc.). They don't normally make much from CDs, and very little from streaming, that mostly goes to the label.
So if you really want to support an artist, go to their concert and buy a t-shirt. If a concert isn't convenient, you can probably buy a t-shirt from their website. This will do a lot more for their personal finances than worrying about copyrights.
Personally, though, I do like to buy CDs of artists I follow, and I normally rip my music in FLAC from those. A lot of the CDs these days are quite nice, with cool books sometimes.
beatport, beatsource, traxxsource, bandcamp. I think iTune store has 256kb/s AAC wich should be equal or better to high quality mp3. And I believe amazon music is similar.
True, but they are pricey ($25+ USD for an album), and force you to choose between hi-res (24 bit FLAC) and CD quality, instead of purchasing rights to a song and offering MP3 as well.
I have an extensive MP3 collection, favorite albums I try to keep FLAC, while others I'm fine with MP3/320 or for stuff I collect but don't listen to all the time, VBR 256 is fine to keep size small.
I have been using Koel for a few months on my server. It was pretty good but not great. Nowadays I have Navidrome running on a docker service, along with a samba server, so I can easily add content and use any Jellyfin client I want (Like Symfonium on Android).
Koel is an awesome product and a great base for any music streaming app or home media server. I see people complaining about the app "costing" as much as a cup of coffee at Starbucks (it can be easily compiled freely yourself https://github.com/koel/player) or how it stacks up to Jellyfin which has a very lackluster interface for music files. Koel does a great job replicating the functionality of Spotify or iTunes with your music library. It is well written, easily customizable and extensible. Nothing even comes close to Koel when it comes to the self-hosted music server category in terms of UX. It may lack some features of Ampache but it's certainly preferable to use when compared to that solution. Music players aren't extremely complicated a ground-up rebuild in this area often makes sense.
I use Plex because I already have it in use, though only on mobile/Windows. With real computers, I just mount the music volume and use mpd. Both work pretty well through a VPN too.
depending on your NAS, you might be able to run [0] Logitech Media Server; I still have it running on mine, and use it occasionally - I use it particularly for "play random album" which I have never seen elsewhere, and is great if you have a large collection of ripped music.
I keep things simple on the serving side and just choose an appropriate client. I just use a NFS share on a Raspberry Pi with attached SSD to make FLAC files available on the network.
Playback is with Volumio on a Raspberry Pi that I have connected to the Hifi, Audivana on my Mac, and the nPlayer app on any iOS/Android devices. nPlayer is really great for video too.
I run Navidrome [1] in a Docker container on my Synology NAS.
It’s lightweight, can handle huge music collections, has a good web interface, supports Last.fm scrobbling, transcoding from the most formats and AirSonic-API for use with a wide variety of players/apps.
I run both Plex and Roon on my Synology NAS. The former is used for videos/photos and to share with the in-laws, while the latter is mostly for my own owned & streamed music. Roon's not cheap, but it works for my various use cases for it.
I wonder if anyone knows if the mobile apps can cache music for offline listening? It's the only feature that's keeping me using YouTube Music's Uploads (formerly Google Play Music).
Symfonium [0] (which supports pretty much anything but koel) is a commercial android app, can cache & export, have rules for doing so automatically, supports a rolling cache, can decide via wifi connection if the cached or online version should be used. You can also choose if you want original files or transcoded ones.
For a personal server, I believe the most common deployment scenario would be a home PC works as a server behind a router/NAT box. However, I didn’t see they mentioned it on their website.
I’m not opposed to new media servers, but with this starting out freemium, and with a proprietary API, I don’t see much reason to use it.