After 14 years with Plex, I finally moved my video library to Jellyfin. Why rising costs, feature restrictions and digital ownership pushed me towards FOSS.
Despite all of this, I haven’t completely abandoned Plex.
Plexamp remains one of the best self-hosted music applications I’ve ever used.
Lyrion, Music Assistant, and Navidrome are all solid options. And Jellyfin also supports music hosting, along with FinAmp, which has similar functionality to PlexAmp (maybe not as good, but download functionality works).
Personally, I abandoned PlexAmp. Wasn’t worth keeping with the rest and it has been downhill since the loss of Tidal integration. Navidrome clients work great, have solid radio and discovery features for large collections, and support local downloading for on the go.
And for local listening, I’d argue that Lyrion with Blissmix or LastFM “Don’t Stop the Music” plugins are as good and sometimes better than PlexAmp. And Navidrome and/or Music Assistant with AudioMuse-AI plugin utterly destroys PlexAmp’s radio/DJ functionality. Install AudioMuse, scan your library and go, it just works. Especially with recent builds having native Linux, Mac, and Windows now (I deployed with Docker compose before these options were available).
FinAmp and its beta rewrite don’t really come close to PlexAmp in terms of functionally or polish, but if anyone switched from Plex to Jellyfin and wants a nice aesthetic music player app Discrete has done the job for me. It’s essentially an Apple Music clone so it looks nice and navigates well.
The UI is objectively better but it still looks like a 10 year old material UI student project. I’ve been keeping an eye on it but it might not be worth giving up the stability for
JF is damn good for video and has a better interface than plex
Finamp is horrible for big collections. As you ask JF for tracks or artists it loads them a handful at a time. I have 2300 artists 26,000+ tracks, if I want to listen to some NiN, trying to scroll through to N’s is maddening.
Finamp just crashes on me now and then. Play -> shuffle… wtf knows, might go 10m might go 2. Samsung Phone with 6GB of ram.
Finamp is rooted to JF features only, eg: it is incapable of cross fading because it has no ability to tell JF the songs were last played easily. If you want to set up a really large playlist, it’s one at a time, but you can put an m3u in the folder. but once you do that, your playlist is no longer editable through the GUI.
I moved over to Symfonium. It loaded my playlists, let’s me crossfade, everything seems ok, until i add new music or modify a playlist and it has to scrape the entirety of my collection to add a song. It can take hours.
I’m big on my playlists. I have exported years of jackfm and 98 rock to recreate real playlists from different eras.
JF audio is just absolutely stuck in the stoneage and any attempt for clients to work arond it and dig them out still have to deal with their slower than fuck database and api.
I used it for a bit, but after getting Navidrome up and running, Arpeggi replaced it as my download “away from home” client, and at home I use Lyrion or Music Assistant via Squeezelite since I have Wiims in every room of the house.
Lyrion, Music Assistant, and Navidrome are all solid options. And Jellyfin also supports music hosting, along with FinAmp, which has similar functionality to PlexAmp (maybe not as good, but download functionality works).
Personally, I abandoned PlexAmp. Wasn’t worth keeping with the rest and it has been downhill since the loss of Tidal integration. Navidrome clients work great, have solid radio and discovery features for large collections, and support local downloading for on the go.
And for local listening, I’d argue that Lyrion with Blissmix or LastFM “Don’t Stop the Music” plugins are as good and sometimes better than PlexAmp. And Navidrome and/or Music Assistant with AudioMuse-AI plugin utterly destroys PlexAmp’s radio/DJ functionality. Install AudioMuse, scan your library and go, it just works. Especially with recent builds having native Linux, Mac, and Windows now (I deployed with Docker compose before these options were available).
FinAmp and its beta rewrite don’t really come close to PlexAmp in terms of functionally or polish, but if anyone switched from Plex to Jellyfin and wants a nice aesthetic music player app Discrete has done the job for me. It’s essentially an Apple Music clone so it looks nice and navigates well.
TBH I don’t recommend FinAmp, but it’s an option if you only want to deal with Jellyfin and not run multiple servers.
Lyrion (LMS) and Navidrome server/clients though, absolutely. They’re great.
If anyone goes with finamp, sign up for the test version as it’s UI is significantly better than stable.
The UI is objectively better but it still looks like a 10 year old material UI student project. I’ve been keeping an eye on it but it might not be worth giving up the stability for
JF is damn good for video and has a better interface than plex
Finamp is horrible for big collections. As you ask JF for tracks or artists it loads them a handful at a time. I have 2300 artists 26,000+ tracks, if I want to listen to some NiN, trying to scroll through to N’s is maddening.
Finamp just crashes on me now and then. Play -> shuffle… wtf knows, might go 10m might go 2. Samsung Phone with 6GB of ram.
Finamp is rooted to JF features only, eg: it is incapable of cross fading because it has no ability to tell JF the songs were last played easily. If you want to set up a really large playlist, it’s one at a time, but you can put an m3u in the folder. but once you do that, your playlist is no longer editable through the GUI.
I moved over to Symfonium. It loaded my playlists, let’s me crossfade, everything seems ok, until i add new music or modify a playlist and it has to scrape the entirety of my collection to add a song. It can take hours.
I’m big on my playlists. I have exported years of jackfm and 98 rock to recreate real playlists from different eras.
JF audio is just absolutely stuck in the stoneage and any attempt for clients to work arond it and dig them out still have to deal with their slower than fuck database and api.
I personally really like FinAmp. I use it every single day during my commute and work, it works incredibly well with FLAC files.
I used it for a bit, but after getting Navidrome up and running, Arpeggi replaced it as my download “away from home” client, and at home I use Lyrion or Music Assistant via Squeezelite since I have Wiims in every room of the house.