Sadly, it may not be an option for a lot of people, but on the fortinet firewall you can make policies and set up geoblocking.

Synology with Emby (do not use the connect service they offer) running behind my fortinet firewall. DDNS with my own domain name and ssl cert. Open 1 custom port (not 443) for it, and that’s it. Geoblock every country but my own, which basically eliminated all random traffic that was hitting hit. I’ve been running it this way for 5 years now and have no issues to report.

I am also using Navidrome and Symfonium. It’s about as good as local library playback can get! Thanks for a new one to try Feishin, never heard of it before. I have tried setting up Lidarr, but I never got it to grab stuff and rename it to what i like, so I stopped. I’m sure I probably could, but I didn’t want to spend the time trying.

My current setup is grab from Orpheus or redacted, run it through program generically called tagscanner (been using it for years and love it) then drop everything into musicbrainz Picard with custom setup to only grab genres for everything and will attach up to 5 different ones. From there, i move everything to the music library by artist and subfolder for albums. Once there, i load Musicbee, which is my pc app of choice because of the customization and audio playback quality. Once there, if any album art is missing, it’s easily discoverable and then loaded into navidrome.

The hardest part was discovering that I should organize properly after a decade of collecting music, and it took months to reorganize and tag everything properly. I had to do that once more with genres. Once I figured out how to automate that and would take chunks at a time and have it do it over days, which also took months. It’s been about 10 years of me doing it this way and has worked great if not a bit tedious.

Maybe they just didn’t care?

I honestly don’t have too much to back up, so I run one full backup job every Sunday for different directories I care about. They run a check on the directory and only back up any changes or new files. I don’t have the space to backup everything, so I only take the smaller stuff and most important. The backup software also allows live monitoring if I enable it, so some of my jobs I have that turned on since I didn’t see any reason not to. I reuse the NAS drives that report errors that I replace with new ones to save on money. So far, so good.

Backup software is Bvckup2, and reddit was a huge fan of it years ago, so I gave it a try. It was super cheap for a lifetime license at the time, and it’s super lightweight. Sorry, there is no Linux version.

I learned this the hard way as well… I did a big OS update on mine once and it broke almost every application running on it. Docker worked perfectly still. I transferred everything I could to Docker after that.

I use a combo of Roku and Firesticks through the house. Since I have a raspberry pi with pihole on it all the ads and telemetry is blocked, or at least majority of it is.

I used to use Subsonic, but it’s become too outdated for me sadly. I switched to a fork Navidrome which updates a few times a year and enjoy the improvements it’s been providing. I use it with the mobile app Symfonium and love that they are both improving the API to add additional features and options over what Subsonic offered. I run it on my Synology in Docker so you should have no issues either.

https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome

Everything I do is manual, I don’t really have duplicates unless I get singles then get the album once it releases. Even then, unless the single comes with extra bonus tracks (seems to be a lost past time, never see this anymore) I will delete the singles after.

Here is the forum post I originally found years ago to setup music picard to tag multiple genres, which is the only setup that I have that took extra effort and not just use out of the box defaults.

https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=35975.0

I have a library that’s been growing for about 20 years now. I don’t think I got too serious until around 2009, which is when I discovered music servers to host my library and quickly realized how bad its structure was. It took years of me getting folders done correctly followed by then working on tags. Automation scared me to much since the results were not always 100%. Once it was done I have kept a system to keep it that way the best I can.

So for me once I get new content I use the app tagscanner to edit everything to the way I like, then I drop them into music Picard were I found a tutorial online a few years ago to set it up to just edit music genres. I found the one thing I never got right was music genres so finding this tool was incredible. Took months to run large sections of the library though. Now I got every track labeled with up to 5 genre tags. Once that is done I change folder names to what I want, drop them into my music directory folder which is root > artist > album (don’t care about year since it’s tagged). Scan music into my musicbee app and if any are missing covers I right click and tell it to find them. Then do a scan with navidrome to add it all there.

It’s only a little over a year old by now and even the first release was better than most of the stuff out there, but what it is today makes it better than anything I have ever used before on my phone and that includes premium apps like Spotify. At this point, I can’t even think of stuff I would need anymore, but I can’t wait to see what the next year brings.

Another note, the developer also created yatse, which I used over a decade ago as my remote control for kodi. Also equally as awesome as this is. He is very good at what he does, haha.

I currently use Navidrome as well, but I really don’t use smart playlists like that. For me, I use Symfonium on Android, which offers a ton of options and is incredible. In all my years of using a personal server to host music, this app has been the best by a lot. As for desktop apps, I don’t use them much, but when I do, I use Musicbee, which also offers unlimited customization if you’re willing to put time into it. It used to have a subsonic plug-in, but I have no idea if it’s still active. I just use the local file location and treat it as its own entity. If the subsonic plug-in still works, it may allow you to do what you want since everything seems possible in Musicbee from my experience.

42069 niceeee

I don’t doubt it, but that has not really been my experience. Honestly the only OS I have used that breaks things after updating is Mac… applications, printers, and drivers just don’t work until the developer updates them, which sometimes can be 3-6 months after the release.

As much as I hate Mac from the few times I used it for work and helping my wife I never remember paying for an update.

Also it may not be much but windows does get extra features in the yearly feature update. Recent updates brought built in winrar and the last one let you have tabs in notepad.

Wow that’s still active? I remember getting one when they had a kickstarter way back and realizing quick that it doesn’t matter how nice the hardware is if support is non existent. Glad to hear they are still around and I am guessing the community is much larger these days. I’ll have to see if I can dig my original model up from somewhere and see what I can use it for these days.

Absolutely, I work in a mixed environment with windows servers and Linux ones and without a doubt I would 100% take the Linux one for longer uptime without having issues. It just works and continues working. With that said I do feel like even the stability of windows server 2016 onward has also improved. My only hate for windows servers is the ungodly amount of time they take to patch these days.

Only commenting because of the bad comment. I have supported windows desktops and servers for 17 years now since XP (dealt with systems prior to xp just not for my career), the only thing that has happened in that time is Windows has made it incredibly easy to do most things compared to then. I barely ever see blue screens anymore or an issue that can’t be fixed relatively easily and fast. The worst thing to happen in those years was Vista, now that I can agree was a pile of you know what…

I see the comments here and find it crazy that people who use Linux find Windows harder. I love both because they both offer different things they excel at.