I did this in 2024! I use Finamp on my phone for music.

I bought a lot of albums on bandcamp, bought CDs for those that weren’t on bandcamp, and pirated those that weren’t available in either format (looking at you still woozy, stop releasing tapes lol).

Used CDs are a great deal and can be shipped all over the world for cheap.

Users on jellyfin can be allowed access to selected media libraries so just divvy stuff up that way, simple as folders.

Spotify replacement? Oh, hey, that’s me.

I’m working on Tapesonic, a subsonic-compatible self-hostable streaming service. It won’t stream your local library, but it can import stuff from YouTube and Bandcamp (and probably other sites yt-dlp supports, but I didn’t bother testing) and stream those. Started making it because Lidarr can’t download basically anything and also can’t manage anything that’s not in MusicBrainz even if you download it yourself.

As for discovery - Tapesonic can scrobble your listens to ListenBrainz and, since a couple of days ago, last.fm. Those in turn provide recommendation playlists.

• ListenBrainz playlists are already incorporated, but Tapesonic can only match the songs you already have in your library - everything else is ignored; completely useless for actual discovery and the recommendations aren’t great anyway to be honest
• last.fm recommendations are pretty good and I’m actively working on importing those; last.fm provides a YouTube URL for each track and Tapesonic can import YouTube URLs - you see where this is going, yeah? I expect to push a somewhat working implementation in a couple of weeks as I already have a prototype that works surprisingly well

Caveats:

• Tapesonic is still in it’s “prototyping phase” (what do you mean it’s been more than a year since I started it…) - everything gets changed all the time, only core features get implemented, UI sucks, all that jazz
• breaking changes anytime - expect having to completely wipe everything and start anew at any moment
• no multi-user support for now and I have no idea when it’ll come; you can host multiple instances I guess

Want to give it a try?

• docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 -e TAPESONIC_USERNAME=user -e TAPESONIC_PASSWORD=pass ghcr.io/sibwaf/tapesonic
• http://localhost:8080/, username/password from the previous command (“user”/“pass” in this case)
• “New tape” -> paste any Bandcamp album URL -> “Import” -> “Add all” -> “Next” a couple of times
• Connect a subsonic client (Feishin, Sonixd, Ultrasonic for desktop, Tempo for Android) to the same address, same credentials
• Enjoy!

Any other configuration parameters, persistency, stuff like this - sorry, you’ll have to study the code. No docs and no support for now.

One thing navidrome cannot do is to have different music available per user. A workaround for that is yo host multiple instances using docker and have them access different folders for music but that’s obviously not ideal.

Not the best solution, but I use a free Spotify account and IFTTT to pull a list of songs added to certain Spotify playlists, like the new rock one, to a Dropbox TXT file to find new bands. Takes some effort, but let’s me see what’s coming out.

I put my music collection (40gb) on my phone, listen to it with musicolet. One of my playlists is 72 hours with no repeats, so I don’t get bored with the same music like the radio.

Simplest is to use syncthing and just sync everything to your phone but this won’t cover a lot of your use cases and is probably best for a one user experience.

Lidarr for new music + a subsonic server such as gonic will cover a lot of what you need. The idea is to find and download music(lidarr+dl client) and run your own streaming server(gonic or other implementations). On mobile you use an app which supports the subsonic protocol (such as substreamer or tempo) too listen. You can also just use jellyfin server + it’s client, but AFAIK, the music experience is not as good.

From my experience with sonarr and radarr, I thought lidarr would be great, but it’s garbage.

Bandcamp isn’t what it used to be, apparently there’s a better service for music now, I’m sorry I can’t recall the name.

Navidrome should serve you well for Spotify replacement. It uses the subsonic api, so you can use any app that supports that, and there are many.

Regarding sync phone with server, you might want some thing like synching or nextcloud with a local player on your phone. My music collection is 1.5TB, so I simply stream and have only a few select albums downloaded locally on the phone.

It’s on my “short” Todo list to write an app that looks at your current library (Plex, for me) and finds related artists through other apis (like Spotify) and exposes a UI to show what things to check out. Maybe some tracking of what you’ve accepted as interesting and still missing so you can grab off Bandcamp or wherever else you get your music. But at least it would help track/expose WHAT bands to seek out

I used lidarr to sync my followed artists from spotify and then just use plex and plexamp for music, all my plex users have access to it also but I think most people still have spotify so it’s just mainly me using it

Replacing any of the paid-for recommendation services is hard in my experience (I loved the Google Music recommendation engine, RIP). Anyways you sort of have two paths of travel to intertwine if you want to stay away from The Big Boys™:

(a) Find independent streaming sites like SomaFM, Big Sonic Heaven and DKFM ([1], amongst many others) which fit your genres as they routinely have “new tracks weekend” besides the broad exposure you get to hearing bands you’ve never heard as the volunteer DJs rotate their preferences. These are your old school original Shoutcast / Icecast streams run solely on donations, there are a lot of them out there for every genre.

(b) Look into something like https://audiomack.com/ - I don’t use it (maybe I should!) but it “feels like” it might be a fit for your needs based on your OP details. Maybe not, at least give it a glance and see what’s going on with it as it does look interesting. Something else might catch your eye at: https://bandcampalternative.com/

[1] some sites from various genres:

• https://somafm.com/
• https://www.bigsonicheaven.com/
• https://decayfm.com/
• https://thevoiceofdoom.com/
• https://darkasylum.co.uk/
• https://www.4zzzfm.org.au/
• https://brokenbeats.net/
• https://badradio.nz/