Today's Deep-Dive: Navidrome

Have you ever thought about how weird it is that in this world of streaming

music, all of this music that we've collected over the years,

it's actually kind of hard to enjoy it.

Like it's stuck in one place.

Like if you had a bunch of vinyl records, but only one record player.

So today we are diving into a potential solution to that,

which is essentially setting up your own personal streaming

service from all your own music.

Yeah.

And to do that, we've been looking into this project called Navidrome,

a software called Navidrome.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we found some information on GitHub about this and also just on their

website to understand how it works and why it might be interesting for you.

If you want to have more control over your digital music life.

Absolutely.

And speaking of digital life, a huge thank you to safe server for

supporting this deep dive.

They're really into this kind of stuff.

Yes.

They provide hosting for this kind of software.

So you can take back control of your digital sovereignty.

Yes.

If you're interested, you can find out more at safeserver.de.

So what is this thing, Navidrome?

What is it all about?

You can kind of think about it like this.

You have all of your music files on your computer, right?

You install this piece of software.

It's pretty straightforward, even for beginners.

And it essentially turns that music library into a website that you can

access from any device with an internet connection.

Okay.

So instead of like relying on Spotify or Apple music, you know, YouTube music,

you're setting up your own version of that.

Exactly.

Using your own files.

Yeah.

It's your own music, your own streaming service, and it's living

online ready for you whenever you want it.

Yeah.

And it's free to use.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

It's open source.

Okay.

So there's like a whole community of people who are constantly

working on this thing, making it better.

So it's like community driven, giving you more freedom with your music.

So that means like, I could listen on my phone or my laptop.

I can even listen on a smart speaker if it has a web browser.

Yeah.

Pretty much anything with a web browser.

Okay.

So it's really accessible from anywhere.

Exactly.

Goes to traveling at a friend's place, whatever your music's right there.

It's always there for you.

I like that.

I like that a lot.

Yeah.

And all of your listening habits stay with you.

They're not on some big corporations server, but for people who might be

listening, who aren't super techie, the idea of setting up a server might

sound a little bit daunting.

Yeah.

Is this something that is actually relatively easy to get started with?

It is.

It is.

One of the really cool things about Navidrome is it's very lightweight and fast.

Okay.

It's built using these modern computer languages that are known for being efficient.

It runs really smoothly.

And they even say on the website that you can run it on a Raspberry Pi.

Oh, wow.

Which is like this tiny little computer that's very inexpensive.

So you don't need a powerful setup or anything like that.

What about people like me who've been collecting music for decades?

Can it handle a huge library?

It can.

It can.

They say that they've tested it with libraries as large as 900,000 songs in

various formats, including high quality ones.

So you probably won't run into any limitations there.

That's good to know.

Yeah.

Now when we're streaming music, especially in our phones, data usage can be a big

concern.

Does Navidrome do anything to manage that?

Yeah, they have this feature called transcoding on the fly.

And so what that means is if you're on a slow internet connection where you want

to save your mobile data, it can actually shrink down the size of the

music file as it's sending it to your device.

Okay.

Which means you'll use less data and the music will start playing faster.

I see.

Yeah.

So you can control that balance between sound quality and data.

Yeah.

You can choose how much you want to shrink it down.

Okay.

Very cool.

Very cool.

Yeah.

Now you mentioned some techie terms like react JS and material UI.

Yeah.

Can you break those down for us a little bit?

Yeah.

So essentially what that means is the website that you use to access your music.

Yeah.

It's probably going to look modern.

Okay.

It's going to be easy to use.

Okay.

It's going to work well on different devices, whether it's a big computer

screen or a smaller phone screen.

So it's designed to just be really easy to use.

And yeah, it should be a really smooth experience.

Okay.

Yeah.

A lot of people have favorite apps that they use already for listening to music.

Yeah.

Would they have to switch to a completely new app?

That's a good question.

To listen to their Navidrome library.

That's where this compatibility with something called the subsonic API comes in.

So subsonic is basically like a standard way for music servers and apps to talk

to each other and Navidrome is designed to work with a bunch of existing music

apps that already use subsonic.

Okay.

So things like mad sonic or air sonic.

Okay.

So you might already have an app that you love that will connect to

your Navidrome server.

That makes it much easier.

It does.

Yeah.

Okay. Now like any software you want to know that it's being taken care of.

Exactly.

So tell me a little bit about the development of Navidrome.

Yeah.

So it seems like from both the GitHub page and the website, they're very

actively working on this, so you can expect updates, new features, the bug

fixes, if anything comes up, they have a whole history of many releases.

So it's an active project.

So it's not going to be left to.

It's not going to be abandoned.

Gather dust.

Exactly.

That's reassuring.

Yeah.

So I spent a lot of time, you know, organizing my music library, making

sure all the metadata is right.

Does Navidrome use that?

It does.

It does.

Navidrome will read and use all of that information that's in your music files.

Oh, good.

Yeah.

So all that effort you put in is not wasted.

Okay.

And it even handles things like compilation albums, you know, where you

have different artists on the same album or multi-disc sets.

Yeah.

It treats those correctly as one unit.

Well, that's good.

Yeah.

That's a relief.

Yeah.

What if you have multiple people in a household who want to use it?

Yeah.

So Navidrome does support multiple users so everybody can have their own separate

account with their own playlist, listening history, all that stuff.

That's good.

So it's perfect for families or shared living spaces.

Yeah.

Everyone has their own personalized experience.

We talked earlier about how it uses very few computer resources.

Yeah.

What's the benefit of that?

That's important because it means you can run this on less powerful hardware, like

that Raspberry Pi that we talked about.

Yeah.

And it's not going to slow down or cause problems.

And also if you're running it on your main computer, it's not going to hog all

of the processing power and make everything else run slowly.

So it's very efficient.

Yeah.

And it doesn't matter what computer I'm using.

Right.

It works across different operating systems, Mac, Windows, Linux, and they also

provide these things called Docker images, which makes it even easier to set up.

And of course it runs great on a Raspberry Pi.

Okay.

So we've got it all set up.

How do we keep our library up to date?

So luckily you don't have to do that manually.

Okay.

Navidroom can watch your music folders and anytime you add new music or change

information about your existing music, it's going to detect that and update

the library automatically.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

So how about the look and feel of the app?

So it's a web interface and they say that it's modern.

It's responsive, which means it adapts to whatever screen size you're using and

you can customize it with different themes.

Okay.

That's good.

Yeah.

What about different language options?

Yeah.

They have a bunch of different languages that it's been translated into.

So there is a strong community behind it.

Yeah.

An international community.

Okay.

So if somebody wants to check this out, where should they go?

So the best place to start is their website, which is navadrome.org.

Okay.

And there you'll find all the documentation guides on how to

install it on different systems.

Okay.

And then they also have a GitHub page, which is github.com

slash navadrome slash navadrome.

So I also noticed they have a live demo.

They do.

Yeah.

You can actually try it out.

Yeah.

You can get a feel for how it works.

Without having to install anything.

And for people who don't want to install and manage it themselves.

Right.

There's also a cloud hosting option.

Yeah.

There's a service called Pika pods that offers hosting specifically for navadrome.

What about people who want to contribute?

So because it's open source, you can contribute if you want to.

Okay.

They have information on the website and the GitHub page on how to get involved.

Okay.

And they also have communities on Reddit and discord where people are discussing it.

So it seems like Navadrome is a really cool way to take control of your music.

Yeah.

It's like having your own personalized streaming service.

Exactly.

That's always there whenever you need it.

And a huge thank you again to safe server for supporting this and for making

software like this accessible.

Yeah.

If you want to learn more about them, it's safe server dot D E E.

So I want you to think about your music library.

Yeah.

What would it be like to really, truly own and manage how you listen to it and

have it set up perfectly for all your different devices and your own listening

habits?

It's pretty powerful when you think about it.

It is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What new possibilities does that open up for you and your music?