Koel: A personal music streaming server

Same here; I have been listening to streaming stuff less and less...but my reasons are: 1. Between so many work/day-job meetings, seldom in front of a laptop with the opportunity to work with headphones, and music in the background. 2. When I'm mobile - and on my mobile/away from laptop - I'm just too stingy with my mobile data plan. (Maybe its my age, or cuz of family, but priorities of data plans change with growing families ;-)

Nope. Since I signed up for rdio several years ago, I listen to much much more music than I did before. If I was listening only to stuff I owned, I'd get sick of it pretty fast. People who listen only to music you own: isn't it really expensive to buy enough that you don't get bored?

I use iCloud for my 30k+ songs music library and it works great. Genius mixes fill the void when it comes to music discovery. I have a lot of albums I have never listened to.

Opposite for me. Someone turned me onto pandora 7 years ago and I listen to it all day at work (via headphones). I have it on my phone and use it in the car. I actually ended up paying for Pandora|One.

Only in the last couple years, when I started flying for work, did I realize I had virtually no mp3s anymore. So I've been working on gathering music to use in offline mode at airports.

Yes! I'm so stuck between different streaming services that I Haven't been able to fully consolidate my library on either one.

Moreover once I have done that I'm not even sure where my library will begin or end, does it end at the temporary stuff i'm listening to on the discovery radio or stuff that I have added to a playlist but not my library.

At least with MP3s it would be "I'm downloading these songs and they will be in my library because I enjoy them." Now i'm not even sure if I have a library.

I consumed huge amounts of music during the golden age of Turntable.fm (and later plug.dj, to a lesser extent). Since totally losing my playlists during each shutdown, I'm wary of any future similar services.

Discovering Bandcamp has been great, though. On the listener side you have a "collection" of music you've bought, a "wishlist" of music you haven't paid for but plan to at some point (most albums are fully streamable before buying), and a "feed" where you can follow artists you like to keep track of new releases. You can also follow other listeners with tastes similar to yours, for which the Bandcamp site provides recommendations. When there's nothing new in the feed, the "discover" tab and the Bandcamp Weekly podcast are both good ways to explore new music.

I would love a device like the one you describe. Having shopped for dedicated MP3 players recently, the current gold standard seems to be the Sansa Clip+, and even that device is relatively dated. As long as it supports normal USB-stick-like file/folder management, without some iTunes clone to wrestle with.

I listen to a lot less music now, but I am not sure of the reason. My listening technology certainly changed a lot, but I also went through a serious bout of depression around that time. I would try listening to music, but it just made more anxious and unhappy, regardless of the style or content. Since that time I really haven't listened to music like I used to. This all, of course, coincided with me growing up, leaving college, leaving grad school, and getting a job. So it's tough for me to really say if my decline in music listening comes from any of those factors.

When I was streaming with pandora, grooveshark, and spotify I was constantly hearing new songs.

But that's just because before I was content with listening to the same stuff repeatedly, never did look out for more music on my accord.

Stopped doing streaming, but open to getting back into it, found some great music that way.

I don't know if there's a real market for simple audio-players, but I surely would buy one. I don't need e-ink display (simple LED like Sansa Clip+ is nice), or even 10TB of memory. Hell, thinking of it, Sansa Clip+ with Rockbox is almost perfect. The only thing I don't really like is form-factor. And rockbox itself isn't prefect. But there is no real choice: I don't know any other player that would support every necessary audio-format and just play music. Granted, ability to sync tracks/playlists over the internet with what you have on your server it huge improvement, but I still cannot convince myself that it's worth carrying my phone around all the time.

I don't see any real need for a "new iPod" now though. Yeah, SSD slots for new phones are a bit less common than they should be, nut it's still bearable. For me the phone itself is what's inconvenient, not the absense of your whole audio-library on it all the time (browsing it on the phone would be painful anyway).

I have the same feeling. That also might have to do with that I earlier was a DJ that played regularly on different underground electronic parties. But the thing talking against that is that the music I listened to at home has never been the same that I've been playing when I DJed.

The conclusion that I've made is that before i had to _curate_ my own music. Go and search for new releases, download new and totally unknown stuff that I later went through and actually listened to. In a way the whole "setup" forced me to listen to new stuff. Now that I have everything online, i more and more just tend to listen to the same stuff that "i already know" over and over again, hence it gets more and more uninteresting to actually listen to it.

In a way I have everything available, which makes me not forced to go out and search for the music I like and find interesting.

edit: A lot of talking about recommendations and music discovery further down. My input on that; I'm fortunate to have been using last.fm, even from before they changed name to last.fm. So I have a large history in there. That is the place that gives me the best recommendations and discovery so far. Their recommendations are spot on, and a good way to find new and good music is to go to "people like you" and see what they are listening to that is unknown for you.

I always have a MP3 player with me and i couldnt agree more.

> Anyone else find that in this new streaming age they listen to a lot less music?

Yes, +1. Bulk of my tracks are same old tracks that I used to tune in a decade ago in CD or cassette form. Radio is closest to what introduces me to new music, but they are limited and the decay is quick. May be quantity is lot more than what I(/we) can consume.

for tomahawk, the RFP is coming along nicely: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=649287

not sure how this relates with the parent though...

I've been using ampache, because I hate java, but it's pretty much the same thing. Both products work really well

Subsonic is great.

I switched to Kodi with the chorus web application that allows controlling and streaming your music to the web browser. Not as feature rich, but together with yatse on my android devices it means a raspberry pi with only kodi running can be a total home media server.

I've been happy using Subsonic, though just this week I upgraded the server and got jetty db corruption. The forums have a few other people complaining of this (on Linux) and no solutions. Very frustrating.

I just want to echo the love for Subsonic (and the iOS iSub app). I happily used Google Music until I hit the (at the time) 20k track limit. Now that I've been running and using Subsonic for a couple years, I consider it a complete upgrade in terms of features and performance.

I had not heard of koel or ampache until today, but choices will always be welcomed.

Subsonic works well enough, if you ignore the fact that it requires Java, frequently corrupts its own database, doesn't properly cache certain file formats on the client side even though it sends transcoded files (this one is inexplicable to me), and has many other strange quirks. Worst of all, though, is that it bills itself as free software, but requires activation after a short period of use, and patches to circumvent the ransomware anti-features have been taken down (not sure why tho). Recently, the pod catcher has been crippled and made ransomware as well.

A good replacement would be welcome.

Subsonic is nice, but I'm running it on a Raspberry Pi 2 and you really can feel how haevy Java is on a machine like that. It would be nice to have a lightweight server with the same API but no webfrontend and written in C or go or something for speed. Right now, when I want to start playing a song it sometimes takes up to a couple of seconds what should be instantanious in for example Clementine.

I am looking for a music player that plays playlists in a more intelligent way. If I rated a song with 5 stars it should be played more often in a random fashion then a song with 3 stars. And I never want to hear again a 1 star song, and rarely a 2 star song. If I press the next/skip button while a song is playing, it should decrease the star rating after the second time. If I play a song two or three times in a row it should increase the star rating.

I used to use Pandora before they cut off the UK due to licencing. I kept discovering great new songs using Pandora that I just haven't been able to recreate in any other service (I use Spotify regularly).

I've no idea if that would still be the case as we're looking at about 5+ years ago now when I used it.

You might want to look into http://www.last.fm

I've found those recommendations much better than Pandora or Google Music, and you can hook into it with many different services/players.

You should try Spotify's "Discover Weekly" personalised autogenerated playlist, it's been built by the Echo Nest team and learns directly from what you listen to.

https://press.spotify.com/uk/2015/07/20/introducing-discover...

That's what last.fm does. You don't need a paid account for that, just add a last.fm scrobbling plugin to your music stack.

Have you tried last.fm?

I am not sure whether this is a problem that can be solved entirely with software. Oftentimes it is not so obvious what's the relationship between what you have and what you'd like to discover.

In fact, one of the biggest issues I have with current methods is that they recommend me more of the same. When I look for new music I want - to some extend - something that is unlike what I've heard before.

Say you listen to Blue Lines by Massive Attack. Chances are, the recommendation engine will recommend you Portishead or Morcheeba. (User likes genre trip hop? let's play more trip hop). But maybe I'd like to explore different forms of UK rap music now...

Totally agree. But, as usual with "nice things", this one doesn't align with Spotify's best interests. If it did, this would have been solved a long time ago - it's not like they haven't acquired the tech/skills to do so.

Those nice little lists Spotify helpfully shows are almost guaranteed paid-for inclusion (apart from the chart-style lists, to a degree, but that's another ball game). Labels/Record Companies/Promoters etc are almost certainly paying for inclusion there as it drives huge awareness and subsequent merchandise, ticket etc sales. Much like radio airplay, where the station controls the programming, this is where Spotify gets access to the same revenue stream.

So giving me perfect recommendations filtered through an exclusion list for which, let's be honest, the maths and data science for have long been sorted out via standard ad-tech and e-commerce recommendation engines, is simply not going to aid in the value proposition for a nicely curated list they can charge to be in.

Not a recommendation engine, but for music discovery, I loved Twitter Music (ex: WeAreHunter) and it's down now.

As a replacement, I subscribed to popular blogs (popjustice, stereogum...) playlists on Spotify.

For the last month or so, every Monday I open up Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist. I generally listen to it in the background all week long, giving the songs time to grow on me. I usually find 3-4 songs that I want to add to my "real" playlists, which I consider to be a pretty good ratio.

Shameless plug, but we are doing exactly that here at http://milq.com. We are attempting to organize the world's media into collaborative playlists, which you can then subscribe to for a feed of content uniquely tailored to your personal taste. Subscribing or dismissing a playlist helps us recommend better content to you. Give it a look! :)

I've run a music blog for the past 8 years and I've used a ton of different discovery methods. In the earlier years blogs provided me with most of my content. As of the past year Soundcloud has really shown me a whole new world of music. When you play a single track it goes straight to a recommended track, generally right in the same vein as the previous track. I've found hundreds of great tracks I would have otherwise never known existed.

On an unrelated but interesting note: I'm still trying to figure out their recommended algorithm, it seems to be a mix of tags, and cross-referencing your account with who's liked/played a song. What I don't understand is if I listen to a folk song, it will generally play another completely unrelated folk song but with no folk identifiers (tags). I've concluded it's magic.

Personally, I find music discovery a very interesting problem. So many variables to play with! If user listened to artist X, should we recommend more of it or would it be too much? How important are recently played songs vs long term trends in listening (e.g. listening to genre X most of the time over the last year, however, this week I'm listening to Y only)?

Unfortunately, it requires to be running at spotify-like scale to do something useful, have a large enough library and gather feedback quickly enough :( oh well. I will continue dreaming about it though.

I've given up on discovering new music using technology and gone back to curated lists. No matter how hard I've tried to exploit technology, friends/bloggers who are obsessed with music are always the best sources.

Subjective tastes tend to diverge too rapidly with machine learning.

If (fingers crossed someone is doing this) there was a really easy and non-spammy way for people to build a playlist using _any_ source material into something like muxtape (or opentape) I would use it. Until then, I will just continue to ask them for youtube links and bandcamp profiles.

I do most of my music discovery on Soundcloud these days. That plus Bandcamp covers most of my needs.

Many artists are starting collectives which publish albums with a variety of artists approximately monthly, which also is great for discovery.

Of course this only works if your preferred genres are there - if you like future funk, nightcore, and hip hop you're golden.

I've found Apple Music to be better at music discovery & recommendation but Spotify to still have a superior product (iTunes is a mess now)

Check out The Echo Nest API for some inspiration - I'm pretty sure Spotify and some similar services use it for their recommendations. http://developer.echonest.com/docs/v4

I'm looking for a program that can look at my music library and group it up in a coherent way. It would make finding something to listen to so much easier, as genre is often woefully inadequate to reflect listening mood. I know there are some things like that (and iTunes has a feature) but they all miss the mark.

For new stuff, I'm fine with a combination of best of 20## lists, following some interesting soundcloud accounts, and idle searching the internet / various subreddits.

Two things the 1990s got right and (in my opinion) have never really been replaced: Pointcast and Moodlogic.

Moodlogic worked on my library, I could choose any song, then it would craft a variable length playlist based on that song's mood and instruments. There was a crowd-sourced set of metadata, and I was able to fill in the gaps or correct anything I didn't agree with.

If anyone knows of anything along these lines, I'd be grateful to hear about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoodLogic

Have you tried http://www.gnoosic.com ? It is run by a HN user who does a whole lot of discovery research over at http://www.gnod.com

This is like asking a chef to make new food based on what you like to eat.

You will never discover anything really new, your experience will be narrowcasted. Avoid this and let dj's, friends, musicians, people, and just surfing around the internet help you find new music.

Whenever I hear someone excited about automated music discovery a little voice goes off in my head going ..."ohh no".

I've found youtube's related videos list to be quite good at this (and I bet they must be already using some AI for recommendations?)... So you could look for the song title/id and get what youtube thinks are the related songs/artists:

https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/search/list#re...

Last.fm worked well with me in terms of music discovery. They kept shooting themselves in the foot, removing features where I found value and terminated my subscription (living outside US/UK).

Nothing wrong with this comment, should not be downvoted.

Did you also run into the problem of playing .ogg's in Firefox when sending the file content via sinatra?

Searching a solution for that for my own sinatra-based html5 webplayer (https://github.com/onli/music-streamer, not even close technically and from the UI) since a long time.

Tried hacking on a mobile skin last week and gave up. Cherry music is very minimal but works on mobile.

The yellow on that homepage is painful.

Ampache Providor + Just Player works on mobile for me. It's not a great solution, but it gets the job done.

Enable the Subsonic API[1] and use DSub[2]. Work amazingly well. Not sure if you're not on Android, although I imagine there must be a decent subsonic client for most mobile platforms.

[1] https://github.com/ampache/ampache/wiki/API#subsonic-api

[2] https://github.com/daneren2005/Subsonic

Ampaches inability to handle like named Albums (https://github.com/ampache/ampache/issues/807) was my reason to drop it and start Roadie https://github.com/sphildreth/roadie

I guess it's persistence.

You want to remember playlists across machines? no longer static You want to modify song info / update cover art? no longer static

But gosh a static music player would be incredibly fast. Put it up on gh-pages and watch it fly!

You have a very good idea there. Generate json files with music files metadata and you are well on your way.

I'm working on an insanely similar project, also in angular, except mine's exclusively backed by youtube. Interesting how many similar projects pop up like this.

I've solved this in my house and a friends house with a bunch of Airport Expresses and a multi channel amplifier.

1 Airport Express for each zone - I have 3 currently - Patio, 1st floor, 2nd floor. (installed 6 in my friends house)

Each "zone" is a named Airplay point on each Airport Express

Airport Express connects to the multi channel amp via headphone > RCA left / right > RCA left right to 1 RCA

Then the amp is hard wired to each in wall speaker.

iOS devices can only stream to 1 Airplay point at a time but iTunes / OS X can stream to multiple at a time.

So the wife or I could be cooking in the kitchen, listening to 1 stream and the party can be outside on the patio listening to another stream

Not cheap at $100 (ish) per Airport Express + amp + speakers but by far cheaper then Sonos and their in wall speakers - not book shelf so theres no clutter.

It's cool to stream from iTunes and fill the entire house with 1 synced stream.

Linux has had network audio support in various forms for a long time.

The default sound server for most distros (PulseAudio) supports TCP or RTP streaming. RTP supports multicast (and multiple multicast groups so you can break down your endpoints into multiple groups).

If you want airplay streaming, then there's shairport-sync ( https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync ) that also has multi-room support; each room can map to an ALSA target (which could be a virtual PulseAudio device pointing to a network target). Reportedly (at least when I last checked a few years back) there were some issues experienced compiling with PulseAudio - alternatively you could just run shairport-sync and native ALSA on each of your targets.

Just add a few Raspberry Pis, (and maybe some dedicated DAC boards if you're bothered about sound quality) and you're good to go.

There's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logitech_Media_Server .

You can use a headless client called softsqueeze (eg raspberry pi). The source media is actually streamed and the clients have to decode it. The protocol handles multi-room sync which I haven't seen elsewhere.

There's also an abandoned implementation of the server in python (LMS is perl) on sourceforge somewhere.

Groove Basin (http://groovebasin.com/) has a feature like that. I haven't tested multiroom in the same place, but have used it to stream at home from the office server for example.

Depending on how much work you want to put into it, I believe MPD can solve this via multiple outputs. I use it to follow me from room to room.

I find it pretty trash for discovery and things like playlists. I have 368 artists of stuff and it's quite unwieldly. Looking at Koel now.

No, but The Pirate Bay does.

An acquaintance recently counted up their list of mp3 downloads and had ~150,000 songs, representing 15 years worth of downloading and a relatively narrow music interest spectrum.

I imagine that it is easier to auto download all the new releases from your favorite genres than it is to try to download everything from all release dates from all the genres that you don't even enjoy.

Unfortunately even if it did, it's unlikely to have the subset of music a lot of us listen to.

For example I listen to a lot of music from Japan and a lot of smaller artists who aren't a part of the big labels.

As such I have a few thousand tracks that make up most of my listening time and aren't at all available on Google Play Music, Apple Music or Spotify.

> (Added bonus: no PHP.)

It uses Java, a pile of (insert swear word) so high that nothing comes close.

I use subsonic and like it a lot. However, it could use a webinterface update.

The default is old and ugly, but works very well. Jamstash (another web interface) looks nice but doesn't work well.

Great minds discuss the product, small minds belittle the language it was written in.

Have you actually even looked at the source code for this project before you jumped in with the snark of it being written in PHP?

not at all, you mean more like 1999 at the earliest.

It's a visual clone.

I think it's more about the UI - which looks near-identical to Spotify's.

Spotify is: a library, a streaming service, and a web/desktop player. This is: a streaming service and a web player. You have to provide your own library, which I think goes hand in hand with self-hosted.

I agree. This is like producing a clone of the Google homepage with another logo, and sleeker textbox, and saying "This is a Google clone!"

I definitely agree - in fact, the Spotify player itself was the main reason I switched to Google Play Music. I hated the interface.

Without saying that it's a Spotify clone, marketing the product will take the devs a lot more effort.

BTW, I seeked for an open source clone of Spotify GUI. Maybe I can take this can translate the integration with Spotify?

>interestingly, the product itself doesn't mention Spotify anywhere.

The wiki page does mention the spotify inspiration, though.

>Using the client component of Koel is dead simple. If you’ve ever used Spotify, you should feel right at home. As a matter of fact, Koel’s client interface is a shameless rip-off of Spotify’s.

I mean, I think clone is the polite way of describing how this looks.

    > It's like calling VLC self-hosted netflix clone.

Only with a VLC skin to make it look like Netflix. And even then, what about library browsing? They're fundamentally different. Netflix recommendations are awful, but they do exist.

Surprised it wasn't "Spotify killer" - now that's clickbait

We changed the title from "Self-Hosted Spotify Clone", which was arguably both misleading and baity. Since the original title was neither of those, the submitter should have used it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Stop making sense.

Everyone always nitpicks the title, because titles are the bikesheds of HN: it's easy to have something to say.

Why?