Here’s my “low complexity, medium effort, full legal, full quality” solution:

Start actually buying your music. I go down the list in descending order of convenience:

• Bandcamp
• Qobuz
• Apple iTunes (not Apple Music)
• Physical CDs (for ripping)

Tag all your music with Picard (or wrtag if you only buy full releases, there’s a GH issue for other cases) or beets. Picard is the simplest and most feature complete right now and has a nice GUI. Then upload your tagged music to your Navidrome.

Then use a tool like

• https://github.com/WilliamNT/tunesynctool
• https://github.com/blastbeng/spotisub (check my fork for a better functioning version) These will match songs from your spotify playlists to songs in your subsonic-compatible server (which Navidrome is) and recreate your spotify playlists using the music it finds in your Navidrome. These syncing tooks can have misses and you may need to do some log-digging or issue-opening to find out why, but I’ve gotten them working fairly decent and plan on doing some work to improve them some day.

It’s a nice, fully legal, fully self-hosted stack. Not NEARLY as convenient as having them auto-ripped for you from youtube, but like you said, there are quality and metadata concerns when ripping from youtube.

Maybe Louis Rossman will see this and beat FUTO back into shape? Maybe? Please? I just want one good outcome here!!

Am I totally off-base in thinking that MagicDNS and pluggable DNS nameserver overrides are a huge feature of tailscale?

I love that I can refer to my tailnet devices just via their machine name. I use it everywhere. And also that I can just slot in my NextDNS ID so that any device running tailscale now automatically uses that, and I don’t have to mess with my shared router settings or per device settings. Is all that actually really easy to set up outside of tailscale? Cuz if it is and I just somehow missed that when doing all my research, I’ll happily give plain wireguard or other mesh orchestrators like NetBird a go.

And I already know that mDNS is not the answer. That protocol is simply not reliable enough.

95% of my homelab lives on a single server, and everything I do is within containers. So, my documentation is just keeping all my compose files in a git repo and writing in comments when necessary. It’s fairly self-documenting, and I haven’t found the need to break out of just using containers for everything, besides a couple things like setting up mergerfs or cockpit, but that’s all plug and play nowadays with stuff like https://projectucore.io/

Of course, I don’t have any other things set up in my physical layout or network stack… but all that stuff would probably just go into an entry in my notes (obsidian/wiki.vim).

I use picard, which works great, but is by no means automatic. Keep an eye on https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag, I think it’ll be really clean and highly functional in the near future.

I didn’t think I’d get as much of a kick out of knowing that my random shuffle is truly random, but I do.

Self hosting music that I purchased is a really liberating feeling

Yes! This is the developer of gonic, if anyone didn’t know, which is a delightfully simple, fast, and stable opensubconic compatible music server. Been using it for years, I recommend. I’m very excited for wrtag to grow, as I really want something simpler and more automated than picard and beets

I’m sure you meant to sound more analytical than anything… but this really comes off as arrogant.

You make the claim that Anubis is negligent and come and go, and then admit ton only spending minutes at a time thinking of solutions yourself, which you then just sorta spout. It’s fun to think about solutions to this problem collectively, but can you honestly believe that Anubis is negligent when it’s so clearly working and when the author has been so extremely clear about their own perception of its pitfalls and hasty development (go read their blog, it’s a fun time).

It really stinks that nowadays whenever I find a cool project that achieves exactly what I'm looking for or a solves a problem I didn't know I had, I have to temper my excitement and look for markers of heavy AI usage (commits, reading md files, the writing and graphical style). it's really taking the wind out of the hobby, I think. Hopefully it's mostly just a phase

You give up some control, but you gotta check out https://www.pikapods.com/

On a per-app basis, the price can’t be beat, especially at this level of convenience. I host exactly uptime kuma and beszel on there. The owners are also super responsive to things like adding more env vars.

I agree with everyone saying you can run what you want on most any hardware. Only thing I’ll throw in is that with older/more used parts, you’re at a slightly higher risk of hardware failure, so if you wanna store data on there that you really don’t wanna lose, consider looking into online backup storage services. I’m not sure of their international availability but some good ones:

• borgbase
• backblaze

if it’s not a lot of files that you actually want backed up you might be able to get away with free/cheap tiers of google drive/one drive using rclone

Good luck!

Every spotify downloader I’ve seen just matches to youtube and uses yt-dlp in the backend. I may have missed a new one though.

Those last two bullets would be huge. I have a personal tailnet and another for my org. Switching between them is just annoying enough that I might even pay for that feature.

I mean, that helps justify buying the game again. Fresh performances, possibly with tweaks or new content.

I’ll spin it around: why would you buy the game a second time if it just used all the same files?

yeah this is the way. as part of my borgmatic script I bring down all the stacks that have databases, let the backup run, then bring those stacks back up. as long as the containers aren’t running (and as long as the container properly closes itself down, not usually something to be worried about though), any method of data back up should be fine.

I do this with quadlets and systemd targets now but before I was doing it with a bunch of docker compose down commands.

It is quite convenient for restoration, as you say

It’s still worth using, IMO. They present themselves as very privacy respecting and technologically savvy. I can say after years of using it, it feels that way. They never get in my way and consistently release quality, stable updates.

Well I can agree on the fact that the arms race situation we’re in sucks. It’s an old problem, seen in malware attacks and defenses. I’m just glad we have people fighting on our side in their spare time :’)

And it’s all good on the tone, thank you for your clarifications

Good luck 🫡 I made the switch about half a year ago and went all in on rootless quadlets while I was at it. It was a pretty nightmarish couple weeks figuring out things like user id mappings and rootless permissions, but I got there eventually. Landed on a super neat Traefik config that should work for anyone and makes spinning up new quadlets with their own reverse proxied subdomains really simple. I should really post it somewhere…

In the end I wouldn’t exactly say it was worth it… but it sure feels cool to be fully moved into a more open/native container implementation.

I have some guilty pleasure apps that I refuse to get rid of because they’re just so dang good. Many of them are on Apple devices… forScore is one of those apps

Looks great! It’s tough for me to choose between this, amperfy, and narjo. I think arpeggi has the cleanest UI, but amperfy and narjo have gapless playback, which I really care about. Plus amperfy is fully open source, which is cool. narjo has a bunch of neat features/customization, though, so I’ve been sticking with it lately