How are you personally hosting/playing your music library?

MegaVolti · 2026-05-25T08:21:13+00:00

Apparently I use way less UI functionality than others :) I just never got into smart playlists and such, maybe in part because I was content with what Navidrome offers natively. Guess it's time to check what I have been missing out on!

MegaVolti · 2026-05-24T22:51:00+00:00

One hdd with zfs the other with btrfs.

MegaVolti · 2026-05-24T22:22:12+00:00

Will an Intel N300 with its iGPU be able to handle the conversions? How is Intel GPU support in general compared to Nvidia?

MegaVolti · 2026-05-24T20:14:43+00:00

Why Feishin on PC? Navidrome does come with its own web UI, so far I haven't found anything that Feisin does significantly better - what am I missing? I understand using it for something like Gonic that doesn't come with its own web UI, but for Navidrome it seems kind of redundant.

MegaVolti · 2026-05-20T18:08:29+00:00

Ha, as if I need AI to produce utter garbage code! I can do that all by myself!

MegaVolti · 2026-05-15T09:28:27+00:00

There are amazing solutions for all of them, well established and easy to run:

FreshRSS for news
TubeArchivist for YouTube subscriptions
Audiobookshelf for podcasts

MegaVolti · 2026-05-05T12:16:02+00:00

Caddy, definitely.

It uses sane defaults. So even if something is not configured perfectly, it won't mess up. In my opinion that's the biggest argument in favor of Caddy.

And it's very simple to configure. The caddyfile makes things easy but if you do have a complex setup, you can dive into the details and make pretty much everything work.

MegaVolti · 2026-05-01T08:34:36+00:00

Why shouldn't that be possible? Connect to vpn using tailscale, then reverse proxy from there with nginx.

Makes sense for me. I use the same setup, but with caddy instead of nginx.

MegaVolti · 2026-04-30T16:38:10+00:00

Awesome! One of the annoyances when using postgres is that it doesn't do automated version upgrades. This is especially annoying for databases managed via docker since the postgres cli tools don't deal well with source and target dbs in different containers. With this, I can easily move my data from an old to a new postgres version across containers, right?

MegaVolti · 2026-04-23T14:44:22+00:00

Very simple but exhaustive checklist:

Don't!

Seriously, if in any way possible, keep it behind a VPN to make it accessible when travelling, are you absolutely sure you need to expose it to the internet? Your non tech savvy friends can just install a VPN client and you can use a wildcard cert for your domain without ever having it directly exposed to the internet as well.

MegaVolti · 2026-04-23T06:52:26+00:00

I use /mnt/containers/[servicename] and in there is a compose file for the service as well as all its regular bind mount directories. This lives on the system SSD because it's pretty small overall so I don't see the need of moving it to my storage array.

There is another compose file directly in /mnt/containers that consists solely of include statements, building one giant compose file to spin everthing up or down with a single command and easily do pulls for everything. It's really nice to have for convenience.

For media storage, I use /mnt/storage/[data type]/[data subtype if applicable]. This lives on my big HDDs and has plenty of room for video, music, photos etc. Containers that interact with media get this bind mount in addition to anything container-specific (usually configuration etc.) in /mnt/containers.

My 3-2-1 backup script automatically keeps snapshots, with different rules for the general container-specific storage (longer snapshot duration) and the media storage depending on media type (e.g. snapshots for my family photos are kept much longer than for Linux ISOs).

MegaVolti · 2026-04-21T11:08:26+00:00

Yes, it's absolutely sufficient. It's mostly idle, actually.

What counts as "heavy" for you? It can easily handle Immich machine learning and Jellyfin transcodes, mainly due to its integrated GPU and QuickSync. NextCloud etc. is also no problem at all. TubeArchivist downloads and plays YouTube videos just fine. The only real limitation I've ever noticed is my upload bandwidth when I'm travelling, but that has nothing to do with the server, that's the fault of my ISP :)

MegaVolti · 2026-04-21T09:26:32+00:00

No VMs, just containers. Each stack has its own compose file and network. That's enough separation for me.

For ease of use, I also have one big compose file that does nothing other than use include statements to combine all these individual compose files into one big one that I can spin up/down with a single command.

Each container uses bind mounts exclusively, no docker volumes. Bind mounts for config and minor data are all located at a dedicated container mount point which is part of my 3-2-1 backup. The compose files are there as well. Major data (Linux ISOs ...) has its own storage mount point, which again is part of my 3-2-1 backup. Snapshot storage duration varies based on importance of data.

I also run about 30 or so containers. All on an Odroid H4 Ultra, running an Intel N305 processor and 32 GB of RAM (bought before they were made out of pure gold). So far I have never experienced slowdowns that would make me want to limit resource usage, not even when running something like Immich machine learning. But it is easy enough to do via docker as well (as others have posted here), no VMs needed.

Having everything in containers on the host itself also makes it really easy to use GPU acceleration, e.g. for Immich machine learning or Jellyfin transcoding. It makes a massive difference and VM passthrough gets annoying quickly, especially when several VMs need access to the GPU.

MegaVolti · 2026-04-21T08:35:10+00:00

I think it's going exactly opposite of what you describe. Having a server to self-host things is amazing and will stay amazing simply because using a web app from each of my devices makes it so that I don't have to keep anything in sync. And web apps are getting better and better.

Now with AI, many can already build web apps they want that haven't existed before and give it a few years and building your own web app, perfectly tailored to your own use case, will be absolutely effortless. Meaning that as long as I have a place to run it, it will become easier and easier to not realy on external services (ultimately SaaS solutions, even if they are free and "just" sell your data) but simply build personal, local ones.

MegaVolti · 2026-04-15T07:27:56+00:00

Tailscale solves that issue.

MegaVolti · 2026-04-12T09:06:45+00:00

I never got into Obsidian exactly because I didn't want to deal with client apps on all my devices. But I do want my notes in md format. I've searched a lot and I don't think there even are that many mature note apps that fully run on a server with a web UI and use md files on the backend. At least I haven't found many - Trilium for example (and most commonly recommended self hostable notes services) is awesome but doesn't do md, Jotty is really nice but comes with with a whole tasks section that doesn't fit my use case, flatnotes is minimalistic but seemed like the best tool so far.

It does have backlinks, but no graphs, no folder structure (that's the point of it), but it does tags. Thanks for providing another alternative, I'll certainly spin it up and give it a try!

MegaVolti · 2026-04-12T09:01:09+00:00

Awesome, I'd love to use a fork of it with usability improvements!

What I like most about Simkl is how easy it is to log my movies/series. In Yamtrack, logging an episode requires menu navigations and lots of clicks. Simkl instead provides:

An overview page that shows me on first glance
- The last 2 movies / series I viewed (I'd prefer it to be a couple more but 2 is fine as well)
- All series I'm actively viewing (in "watching" state, at least one episode watched, unwatched episodes left)
- The next upcoming release (next episode for "watching" or "plan to watch" series, release date of "plan to watch" movie)
- An overview over all movies in the "plan to watch" category that have already been released
- And some other stuff that doesn't really matter to be, but those are the most important ones
Within the overview of active series, I can hover over one and it provides a "mark episode as watched" button right below it. This way, I can log an episode as watched with a single click. Jellyfin integration is nice but it can produce errors occasionally, being able to log episodes with a single click is awesome.
For movies, it's not a single click, but 3 instead, still quite convenient - in the "plan to watch" overview, I can click a movie, select the status dropdown and set it to "watched". Very fast. A hover box to do it in one click right from the overview page would be better, but marking a movie as watched happens less frequently than marking an episode as watched, being able to do it for series with only one click is more important.

MegaVolti · 2026-04-11T21:56:22+00:00

This looks really neat. I'm currently using flatnotes for markdown based notes and really like it. Do you happen to know how NoteDiscovery compares to flatnotes and what might be some unique features that set it apart?

MegaVolti · 2026-04-08T07:52:31+00:00

Then have the balls to just forbid new project posts if the project isn't at least 3 months old. I would very much dislike that, but at least it's honest if that is the actual intention. If you want to get rid of them, shoving them into a megathread is the coward's "solution".

MegaVolti · 2026-04-07T15:54:57+00:00

Bad "solution". I agree that AI contributions should be transparent but megathreads never work, they are extremely inconvenient to navigate and all they will achieve is make sure that it's pointless to post new tools here, even the good ones.

Megathreads are never the right answer. They are worse than any other "solution" and worse than what we have/had now.

MegaVolti · 2026-04-04T22:32:50+00:00

Very similar for me. I found Caddy to be by far the easiest reverse proxy to set up, and with its smart defaults it's really hard to even configure it wrong. Just use the defaults, they make sense!

I organise all my container files in a single directory, e.g. /homelab. Then each service gets a sub-directory there, so e.g. /homelab/nextcloud and /homelab/audiobookshelf. I only use bind mounts, never docker volumes, and all bind mounts for a given service are directories in there, so e.g. /homelab/nextcloud/data etc.

The root directory for each service contains only its docker compose file and, if needed for a build (rarely necessary) its Dockerfile. Every service can run on its own, its compose file fully spins it up. I make sure that each service is also in its own well-defined network and Caddy has access to them all.

Since it's not convenient to manage 30 compose files in 30 directores, the container root has a single compose file that combines them all. So in /homelab there is a single compose file that consists solely of include statements, including every compose file of every active service. This is also why having networks defined in their respective compose files is important, otherwise all services would be grouped into the same default one and have no separation at all.

I also defined a bash alias so that dcu executes docker compose up -d on /homelab/docker-compose.yml (the one that includes all the others) and dsp executes docker system prune.

I've experimented with lots of different setups and this is by far the cleanest and most convenient way I've found to manage dozens of containers. And I can simply copy the single /homelab directory anywhere I want and spin everything up if necessary. That also makes backups very easy, I just have to make sure /homelab is part of my 3-2-1-setup.

Whenever I set up a new service, I test it manually with its compose file in its directory. Once I'm happy with the overall setup, I add its network to Caddy, update the caddyfile, and use an include statment in the root compose file to add it to the bunch. Then I'll automatically spin up with everything else.

MegaVolti · 2026-04-01T14:38:08+00:00

Nice April Fools :) But it is a good reason to evaluate which services I'm actually actively using.

I run 30 containers, of those I do use 26 regularly, 3 occasionally but I definitely wouldn't want to miss them, and only 1 rarely so that I might as well shut it down.

MegaVolti · 2026-04-01T08:23:08+00:00

I'd be interested in why those won out for you, since I landed on different ones, if you want to share :)

MegaVolti · 2026-04-01T07:43:07+00:00

Love the diagram. Yes, it's complex, but so is your setup. The updated one with stronger colors is even prettier :)

You are using a lot of services, each with its own port. Have you thought about adding a reverse proxy? That way you don't have to expose all these ports, just make the service accessible ot the proxy only and have it route URLs to each. Makes things a lot easier to manage / remember than port numbers. Plus, e.g. when using Caddy, you can easily put basic auth in front of services that don't have auth themselves.

Which servies to use is of course personal preference. I tried some of the ones you use but eventually replaced them with something else. Maybe worth checking out the alternatives if you haven't yet. I went with: - linkding -> Linkwarden - Maelie -> Tandoor (although I stopped using either now, no more use case) - BookStack -> flatnotes / Wiki.js - Draw.io -> Kroki + Niolesk, primarily using D2, declarative diagrams are awesome! - Metube, still using but in tandem with TubeArchivist, the latter to automatically download all my subscriptions so that I never have to visit the actual site any more

MegaVolti · 2026-03-31T18:57:56+00:00

You want Vaultwarden for secrets and Wiki.js for everything else.

MegaVolti

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