I just want an ad-free music listening experience on my phone - is that too much to ask for. I heard about navidrome from this video. It’s simple and really easy to setup.
The documentation even provides a docker-compose file for me to paste. It’s literally just that simple.
But, the harder part is downloading music legally. (ALL MY METHODS ARE LEGAL). After searching online on how people download their music, I decided to go for yt-dlp. It’s basically a package that lets you download videos from YouTube in the command line. This works because YouTube does not enforce DRM.
However, this also brings about a challenge - metadata. Because YouTube isn’t a music streaming site, the metadata of albums, songs, and artists are not available. So, I would have to do these manually. (Well, not really manual; I wrote a script)
After downloading these songs legally, I now have my very own ad-free music streaming experience.
To use this server on my phone, I downloaded Symfonium and use OpenSubsonic from Navidrome to connect to the server. It has no subscription and no ads. Just a one-time purchase of its license and it’s mine. Also, side note, it. looks. amazing.
I’ve been using for a couple of days now, and it’s been a great experience - it’s smooth; it’s seamless; it’s very customisable; overall, it’s been great.
