I spent many years with large amounts of Music, and I don't mean Napster Music, or Limewire Music, I mean music that we legit purchased. You figure, I am 57 years old, CD's came out when I was still in High School.
RCA and Columbia House were still a thing ... so there was an abundance of music just waiting to be digitized. Through the years I have done that in mostly high quality lossless audio formats.

I have had issues with the crap quality that spotify seems to provide in music, but the volume always increases to normal for their advertisements.
I cant really call this a project, and its not music, but it is music related, so that is where I shall categorize it.

I spent a bunch of time setting up a home lab for learning experience but in reality none of the hardware actually served me. I mean it is still all there for learning purposes, and that is why I built it... but a machine just sitting there running without a functional purpose is really not very smart in this day and age.

So I did some quick research earlier today and arrived at Navidrome.
I mean 3000 + Albums, why should I pay for a premium streaming service when I can set up my own server, install a client on my laptop, on my phone, on my wife's phone and even allow a few friends in if I so desire. To make it better, I can play what I want when I want without listening to advertisements or having someone's political agenda shoved into my head when fact of the matter is that is the last thing that I want.

I have been around long enough to have witnessed many controversial changes in the fabric of this nation. My opinion on those changes is my opinion and not something you should be subjected to just because you checked to see what I had going on. I feel the same when it comes to listening to music. Your opinion or agenda is yours and I refuse to have it injected into my head unless you and I are engaged in a discussion that specifically relates to it.

The Navidrone server runs from my Mac, that has religiously sat here running since I bought it in December of 2025. I used to for an ethical hacking class, only because I fought so hard with the virtual machine that the class used, that there was no way I was going to just let it idle and end up broken again in the process of numerous updates. But once class was over, it went right back to idling.

I mean it was great having it here to learn how to integrate it into my network monitoring stack, and I like having it here when I am doing other coding projects, but it was just sitting here eating power, nothing else.
The installation was pretty smooth and flawless.

Then came choosing a client for the phones. Substreamer it was...
Allowing the music to index really wasn't that painful either, but I sure figured it would be. Log in to the back end of navidrome, create the necessary user accounts, set the accounts up on the mobile devices and you can take your music with you and not be subjected to all the other trash.

The linux client, since that is all that i use is Feishin...

Not a technical write up at all, just something to say I was here.

I may edit it tomorrow and add in the step by step, but it is all really straight forward.