• 2 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • To answer your question, most people don’t have just one device. Do you have only one device? You must have at least a desktop computer and a smartphone? What if you want to have something stored in your computer when you are not at home?

    Music for example. If I don’t want to pay Spotify or whatever, and I want to listen to my music on my phone at work and on my computer at home. Other than making two full copies of the entire music library, I think I have to store them on a 3rd location then share it to my two devices.

    If I don’t listen to music at home, then you’re right, there’s no reason to self host anything. I can just store all songs on my phone.


  • There are three reasons that I can think of:

    1. Privacy
    2. Collaboration
    3. Accessibility / cost

    Privacy. This is obvious. People don’t want their private information to be sold by corporations or scraped by AI.

    Collaboration To share information with others, while maintaining point 1, people have to self host. Say, you want to archive a bunch of photos for personal viewing then you can store them anywhere you like. But if you want to share them with family, a self hosted solution is the way to go.

    Accessibility / cost People want to do things for free. Many applications offer free version or demo, but features are often limited and you can’t really customize them to your own needs. In addition, applications often adopt a subscription model these days and people don’t like that.






  • Agreed that there’s no all-in-one solution to play local music and music on Spotify (if I’m a premium user). I vaguely recall there’s a solution to automate playing Spotify music and record it in real-time (since you cannot download music directly) but it seemed too troublesome, so I eventually chose spot-dl4 to download music from YouTube using Spotify playlist, then the folder got imported into Lidarr/Navidrome, then my Symfonium on Android connects to Navidrome to get the songs.

    It’s quite a bit of manual work to add songs to a separate playlist if I like something on Spotify then use spot-dl4 to do the download. At least, I successfully keep a copy of my favourite songs on my server.




  • Between Tube Archivist (TA) and Pinchflat (PF), it seems TA is a better choice (because you want to delete the downloaded videos). TA has a built-in interface to watch and delete the video. But if you are like me, who watches the videos in Jellyfin and don’t plan to delete them afterwards, then PF is a solid archival application.