Navidrome
FreeTurn your own music library into streaming, uploaded to nobody
A self-hosted music streaming server. It indexes the music library on your disk and serves it to a web interface or mobile apps from anywhere, with multiple users, playlists, favorites, smart suggestions and on-the-fly transcoding for weak connections. It speaks the Subsonic protocol, so a wide range of third-party clients work.
Why we picked it
A lot of people are stuck in the same awkward position: thousands of tracks collected over a decade sitting on a home disk, but only streaming available away from home, because 200 GB of FLAC does not fit on a phone. Uploading it all to some cloud drive and using that provider's player is usually a miserable experience.
Navidrome solves precisely this: run a music server at home. 22,876 stars, GPL-3.0, a single Go binary with a footprint so small a Raspberry Pi comfortably serves a library of tens of thousands of tracks.
How it works in practice:
- Point the server at your music folder and it scans and indexes it, reading tags, artwork and album structure.
- Open the web interface and listen. The UI is genuinely modern rather than the bare-bones look self-hosted software often has.
- Install any Subsonic-compatible app on a phone — Symfonium, Tempo or Substreamer on Android; play:Sub or Amperfy on iOS — enter your server address, and your library travels with you.
- Automatic transcoding: original FLAC over home Wi-Fi, automatically down-converted to a lower bitrate on mobile data to save bandwidth without stuttering.
- Multiple users, each with their own account, playlists and favorites.
Its advantage over commercial streaming is direct: your music is yours. An obscure album will not disappear when a licence lapses, will not be silently replaced by a re-recording, will not stop working when a subscription ends, and nobody is profiling your listening habits.
To be clear about:
- You need an always-on machine — an old PC, a NAS, a Raspberry Pi or a cheap cloud VM. Official Docker images and per-platform binaries are provided.
- Access from outside your home takes one more step: port forwarding plus dynamic DNS, a mesh network tool such as Tailscale (simpler and safer, and the route we would recommend), or a reverse proxy with HTTPS. That cost is inherent to self-hosting.
- It provides no music, only playback of files you already own.
- Good tags make a good experience. It organizes albums and artists from file metadata, so a messy library looks messy. Tidy the tags first with Strawberry or MusicBrainz Picard.
- No video. For a self-hosted film and TV library, use Jellyfin.
If you have both a pile of music files and a desire for streaming convenience, this is the least troublesome way to get both.