Hey guys, so I have been searching for the different ways to self-host a music-server and don’t really know whats the best/most elegant way to go.
I know that there is navidrome and many also use jellyfin for it. Now I have a few questions:
- Are there any good apps for android for navidrome/jellyfin respectively?
- how easy can I add songs to them/do they pull metadata from somewhere (like jellyfin does for movies)
- how do they (or any other options) compare in terms of ease of setup/maintainability?
- do you have any overall recommendations?
Thanks a lot for any tips/recommendations and your help :D
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My recent improved flow is:
- Put my new music in a ‘import’ folder
- Run a beets container and tell it to import from the ‘import’ folder to my ‘music’ folder (beets tags all music with prompts before moving to my final music folder ofc).
- Jellyfin (which already has a music library set up and pointing to my ‘music’ folder) automatically refreshes after a few seconds.
- Listen and enjoy through jellyfin app/site OR through finamp (on android).
The best part is you can rip your music into the ‘import’ folder, or torrent, or get it direct from youtube. Thanks to the modularity provided with this setup, it doesn’t matter.
Tempus is phenomenal. I switched to navidrome on my server to use it. Chora is also good, and I use it on my TV (works well on any screen). If you don’t mind closed-source, Symphonum is excellent.
If you are using Jellyfin, it works well on PC, with Fintunes on mobile.
You can find a number of good apps for navidrome here. I quite like Strawberry, which is cross-platform. I use it locally for library management.
I connect everything with Tailscale, which is dead simple.
Thanks for the Chora recommendation, I recently pushed the Tempus apk to my tv as the dev has been working on better landscape screen support, but navigating it on tv still requires a mouse unfortunately.
I’ll definitely give Chora a try when I get home
Are you me? Cause I have exactly the same setup. Navidrome, tailscale, the whole thing. I also use strawberry. It’s OK but a bit basic. I recently tried Nocturne for desktop, looks promising, but still somewhat buggy.
Navidrome works best with a library that is already well-organized, but it can do some things in terms of library management, particularly with the use if plugins.
There are some good tools for organizing your library, such as beets, Picard, etc. I did not have good luck with beets because I find it a bit complex for a CLI tool, and a lot of my library is composed of singles and mixes. It seems to do better with whole albums. I use Strawberry player for local library management, which has tools like Picard built in, and also connects to lots of things like lastfm if you want. You can also add lyrics with a tool like lrcget.
If you have existing playlist files saved, Navidrome will automatically import them. It can also make new playlists, and there are plugins for smart playlists, etc. Once you set up Navadrome, you shouldn’t have to touch it very much because it will automatically monitor and update your library if you set it up correctly, which is not difficult at all. It’s a little bit more specialized and so has a little bit better setup for music than Jellyfin, in my opinion. And it has far more front-ends on various platforms. I do use Jellyfin for all of my TV and movies, though.
For using navidrome on android I use the tempus client. Which is a fork of the now dead tempo client.
Navidrome/Feishin
I really like jellyfin with finamp on android but I don’t have any really specific requirements. It just acts like an old media player and works really well
You should try the beta, if you haven’t yet!
I personally use Navidrome, so everything I suggest will be based around you using that as well, however Jellyfin is probably a good option too.
Navidrome has been incredibly simple, and there are numerous great options on android for player apps. Metadata can come with the music as you get it, or you can use tools like beets or musicbrainz Picard to tag them in bulk. Navidrome has been set-and-forget for me, as I’ve set the download folder for slskd (self hosted version of soulseek) to be the library folder for Navidrome.
do you have any overall recommendations?
Go to a Hifi shop and buy a separate amp and speakers. It’ll do more for your enjoyment of the music than anything else.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Plex Brand of media server package SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native VPN Virtual Private Network
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
[Thread #37 for this comm, first seen 2nd Jul 2026, 19:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
My favorite client on android is symfonium. Also has support for more sources:
Local
Plex
Emby
Jellyfin
(Open) Subsonic
AudioBookShelf (Experimentell)
Kodi (19+)
OneDrive
box
Box
Google Drive
Dropbox
pCloud
WebDAV
SMB/SAMBAStrictly Jellyfin:
Had good experiences with Finamp before switching to Symfonium.Metadata (Jellyfin):
ID3 Tags
Musicbrainz (1st party plugin. Manual 1-click install) (optional) Apple Music as a pluginMaintenance/Import:
Done via lidarrEffort:
Besides having to create album entries on Musicbrainz (can be done automatically with the webtool ‘Harmony’), waiting 7 days to get them auto-approved and then importing it on lidarr?
Very low.Recommendation:
Jellyfin + LidarrIf you like tracking data:
You can track your listening history on listenbrainz (part of and operated by musicbrainz) and generate pretty graphs and get listening recommendation made from users with a similar taste.Disclaimer: I havent tried subsonic or anything else than Jellyfin. So I can’t speak pro/cons
Music Assistant is an excellent Home Assistant addon. Works with all streaming platforms, internet radio, and local files. And easy to stream to multiple devices (either different streams or synced for multiple speaker setups). I mostly play Qobuz for lossless audio straight to my sound system by soldering an SPDIF optical audio connector to my Home Assistant Voice device. Streaming music to Android devices or any device with web interface works as well, and you can do this on the go if you’ve configured remote access to Home Assistant.
Best stack I’ve seen so far is Yubal + Navidrome + Tempo. If you don’t mind paying for your client then Symfonium is hard to beat.
I use Navidrome + audinaut as my android app (I only just checked to find out that development on audinaut stopped 4 YEARS ago), so will be looking at this thread for new suggestions…
Have been using easytag on linux and kid3 on mac (kde app - not sure what other free ones there are there) for adding trackinfo so far anyway
beets + navidrome is the answer. beets organises music collection and enriches metadata with thinks like lyric and images. navidrome just serve it.
I use navidrome and jellyfin but mostly navidrome. Jellyfin is useful to fetch lyrics.
I like tempo to use navidrome. You can use jellyfin on your phone…I’ve used finamp once…it was good but seemed like useless since I had jellyfin to watch my shows on my phone too.
You can set navidrome to get info from Spotify or musicbrainz. I used both but I can’t really tell which one is better. Spotify seems better at getting artist info but I’m not sure.
Both are pretty much set up and forget.
I’m happy with navidrome and tempo on my phone.
I personally use Navidrome to host the music, and there are multiple android clients; personally I use Symfonium, but there is also Tempus and Tempo.
Jellyfin can also do Music.
The Music I put on Navidrome already has correct metadata, so I haven’t worried about that aspect.
Its easy to maintain because I run it with docker.
Fyi, it’s best not to recommend Tempo these days as it’s no longer maintained. Tempus is the fork of Tempo that’s still receiving regular updates (at a really good pace!)
Good to know! Thanks for sharing. Tempus seems quite nice. Though Android Auto didnt work for me last I checked even with the update.
I think since Android Auto compatibility requires proprietary Google binaries embedded in the apk, the degoogled version distributed on f-droid (as per f-droid’s terms) isn’t compatible. There’s a “full version” distributed in the github releases if you’re okay with those being included.
You can keep apps from github updated using Obtainium if you like.
Thats where I got mine, GitHub, ubdating with Obtainium!
You might still want to double check its the right version as the degoogled version is also distributed in the github releases alongside the “full” version.
If the package name is `com.eddyizm.degoogled.tempus" it’s the wrong one and won’t be compatible with android auto
Yeah, I manually copied the link to the full package. As well as manually reinstalled
