Just added my old music collection to my private Jellyfin server on my home network. The UI for music is not as polished as some focused alternatives like Navidrome or FunkWhale, but it's good enough... And I like having both fewer apps installed on my devices and fewer discrete services running on my homelab.
It was fun to go back through the collection of music I've been accumulating since high school and moving from hard drive to hard drive: mostly ripped off CDs from the library or purchased in used bookstores, later purchased from iTunes, Amazon, and BandCamp once DRM-free downloads became the norm. Updating album art and re-curating the collection has been a walk down memory lane --- I'd (back then) embedded most of it at 200x200 to fit on a tiny Sony MP3 player, and then an iPod, without wasting space. The music library holds up better than either my old DVDs or the rips I made of them... Even lossy MP3s don't sound as rough as 480p looks on a large display today.
If you're looking to update the metadata in your own music collection, I can happily recommend:
* https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ for searching for album art.
* https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ for editing music metadata in files.
If you're wanting to replace Spotify or other music subscription services on the go (i.e. from a phone) with something like Jellyfin, Funkwhale, or Navidrome running at home, I've tried and had some success with both tailscale and netbird (though these both require some networking knowledge).
I recently switched to Jellyfin when Plex started charging for remotely accessing my home server.
For anyone considering it, I found Tailscale + Jellyfin work a charm. There aren't great docs for doing so, and I beat my head against it for a little bit, but all you need to do really is to add both your local IP range and the Tailscale IP range to the allowed ranges for Jellyfin.
With that, any device on your tailnet can access it. I went further and set up a cloud VM with a public web address behind an auth, installed Tailscale on the VM, and set it up to reverse proxy port 443 to the Jellyfin tailscaleIP:port on my tailnet. So now I can get to it through any web browser or Jellyfin app on devices that aren't on my tailnet.
I'm extremely happy with the results, and the nice thing is that unlike Plex this setup is never subject to forced changes in the future.
The problem is that PlexAmp is literally the killer feature of Plex. Literally no open source software comes close. It would be great if it did, and I would switch, but it’s the only app that even remotely competes with Spotify for me for that reason.
FWIW, for music in my car and on my phone, I only used Plex and use Jellyfin as a failover. I just use Pi Music Player and I keep my whole MP3 collection on a memory chip, so I don't have to be online at all. Whenever I pull the chip out of my phone and put it into my laptop to copy and remove my photos (cloud backup? no thanks) I update the mp3 folder.
Finamp isn’t there yet but it is closing the gap to Plexamp.
Never used PlexAmp but I'm happy with FinAmp
What's the point of the tailscale setup of you have a reverse proxy open to the net anyway?
The easiest way for the VM to reverse proxy stuff to my home server (without tracking my residential dynamic IP and messing with my router / NAT) is for the VM to be on tailscale too..then I can just proxy calls on the VM to the home server's tailscale address.
If you're asking why I bother to use tailscale on my phone to connect Jellyfin that way instead of just using the reverse proxy, I guess it saves me a little in bandwidth costs and it pings faster.
I suppose that makes sense... I guess tailscale doesn't need NAT config?
I have a dynamic IP in theory, but if I keep the router plugged in with less than 30 minutes downtime, I can keep the same IP for years.
Curious. When are you seeing Plex charging? I am using it remotely from a home server and see nothing about paying for anything.
It’s been that way for years now, it’s all on their website https://www.plex.tv/plans/
If you want to stream from outside your local network you need to pay. Hardware transcoding is also paywalled now, along with a bunch of other things.
I bought a discounted lifetime Plexpass at least a decade ago. Still, I’m gradually moving over to Jellyfin because Plex has made a ton of business decisions that feel user hostile.
Where I live, it was always free to stream from outside your LAN until July 2025. Maybe that's because I had used it for a long time and was grandfathered in, I don't know.
Feishin, used by the author as well, supports Jellyfin.
As for mobile, while Symphonium supports Jellyfin, I prefer Finamp as it maintains the split from multiple music libraries.