I'm sold, thank you will install it.

Navidrome's killer feature is its simplicity, and not just the dead simplicity of setting it up: Jellyfin has everything and the kitchen sink, which is nice - especially for video, whereas Navidrome offers a well-honed, long matured, music search/browse/play standard API, namely Subsonic which opens a world of clients for a multitude of platforms and all tastes... On that front Jellyfin feels narrow in comparison.

Smart Playlists mainly. They let you add logical filters to create playlists. Think IF song_name NOT contains "live". That's not syntactically correct but that's the idea. Also lots of apps can connect to navidrome so you can import everything easily. Like Feishen is a desktop music player, and

I use and like plexamp but I also think it's a low bar to set; Winamp 2 streaming from a file share is a better UX experience and less work than the funky ux Plex and plexamp has.

A docker container is a way to easily install software on a server without having to install dependencies yourself.

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a way of securely connecting to your home network without exposing it to the world.

FLAC and Opus are audio formats. FLAC uses lossless compression and offers the best uncompressed quality while not being as huge as a broadcast wave (.wav) file. Opus is similar to an mp3, that means it is a lossy compression, but it sounds extremely good at small bit rates/with bad connections. The transcoding-on-the-fly-bit means the user opens up the private Navidrome website running in their home from the road and the Audio they play is compressed and sent over on the fly as they play it.

Self hosting sounds scary, but it is an essential skill nowadays and extremely useful. Things I self-host (besides websites) include a partskeeper instance which is essentially a stock keeping system for electronics parts, jellyfin as a netflix replacement for films and series, my mailserver (mailcow), paperless-ngx (hooked up to a scanner, allows automatic text-recognition and tagging of invoices, letters, etc.) and homeassistant (smart home).

That probably makes it appear like I have to spend all my free time on this, but it takes surprisingly little of my time to maintain this, with a lot of it running on a single Raspberry Pi.

It has always been clear that people who are scared of performing a few google searches wont use these services.

I'm curious how you came to find your self on Hacker News without either a passing knowledge of some of the things mentioned above or an innate curiousity to learn about the rest.

Self-hosting has its price, one of which is knowing what you are doing. Just keep using Spotify, there is nothing wrong with that.

Yes but you have to use the S1 player and run a second container with middleware, bonob. At least that's what ended up working for me.

Yes my bad

Those aren't competitors of Spotify/Netflix; they're alternatives for people who are willing to tolerate small inconveniences to have full control over their library.

Of course it's not as easy as signing up for Spotify/Netflix, but setting them up is easier than ever (even easier for tech people).

Disagree. With a little bit of technical knowledge which I’m assuming most people browsing hacker news have, these services are easy to spin up and use.

If you can read a README you can set up Navidrome and point it to your local library in 5 minutes.