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


I have a lot of music in folders, could you elaborate a bit on that? I’m kinda interested in doing something like this sometime instead of copying music all the time lol but if it ignores folders I’ll check another solution
Navidrome exposes the folder structure via the subsonic api, and any compatible app can then display folders if they want. Both symfonium (mobile) and feishin (desktop) have folder support.
I’ve tried using collections in Jellyfin to mimic my folders, but it’s not great. Collections are very slow when you get a lot of content in them, plus they only take albums, not songs. Took a weekend to script the stuff in using the API, but wasn’t worth it.
I’ll try navidrome soon.
I see, thank you, I’ve always just used my tree structure as my playlist, as I typically listen to whole albums at once, so I’ve used simple audio players like 1by1 on Windows or Deadbeef on Linux where I can just browse my file system and play music. It seems most things nowadays use playlists
same, tree structure is how I listen and find stuff, ever since my winamp days