Navidrome

 I was thinking about improving my POC app to play my album collection.  It allows you to play tracks or albums in a browser window and so will work on mobile devices.  However it is very rudimentary, ugly and troublesome to use at the moment.

I happened to google "google self-hosted music streaming".  After a little browsing, particularly to find out peoples prefernces, Navidrome appear to be popular and widely used.  They have a demo-site which is great as you can see what you are getting.

It is available as a docker image so I installed it to try out.  Initially I had a technical problem which meant a five minute task took two hours.  The problem was that the navidrome app couldn't use its data directory because it was owned by "root" rather than "dockuser".  It isn't a common issue, I suspect it may be related to my OMV docker configuration.

On completion of the installation I had a nice browser interface but no music.  All I had to do was to add my NASmusic shared folder to the navidrome compose configuration file.  I restarted navidrome and by magic there are all my albums, beautifully presented.

What is really brilliant is that Navidrome uses a standard API "subsonic".  Any mobile client app that supports subsonic can use Navidrome music.  I chose substreamer from the list of relevant apps as it is free, popular and versions are available for both IOS and Android.  It works very well and makes the system look very professional.  I can always install another client if I want something different.

Of course the purpose of the app is to list on amobile phone or iPad outside the home.  To make this happen I just had to direct port 4533 on the router towards the navidrome container.  This also has the benifit of avoiding the "not secure" browser message, I get with external browser access as I haven't fully mastered https yet.

The app has been successfully tested off-site by Annette in Portugal so we are all set for the summer.