Navidrome

Navidrome addresses the need for personal music streaming without the drawbacks of commercial services, where monthly subscription charges accumulate indefinitely, library availability depends on licensing agreements that remove albums without prior intimation, and audio quality is often compressed to cut down on bandwidth expenses, instead of maintaining the high fidelity that listeners who have invested in quality recordings anticipate. By hosting their own music streaming service, users retain perpetual access to purchased music, ripped CDs, and downloaded content irrespective of any changes in licensing, service shutdowns, or policy alterations impacting commercial platforms.

Common Use Cases

Music enthusiasts can stream their personal collections of purchased albums, ripped CDs, and carefully selected downloads from any location, instead of being restricted to listening at home where their physical media or local files are stored. This allows them to access decades of collected music from their workplace, while travelling, or at friends' residences, without the need to carry devices laden with extensive music libraries. Audiophiles stream high-quality FLAC and lossless files that commercial streaming services do not typically provide at similar quality standards, thereby maintaining the audio fidelity offered by premium recordings while simultaneously enjoying the convenience of streaming access, free from the quality compromises introduced by lossy compression or loudness normalization often applied by commercial streaming services. Families can share music servers where parents and children keep their individual playlists and listening histories distinct, all accessing a shared music library, thus circumventing the need for multiple subscription charges that commercial services impose for family plans while ensuring each member's preferences are independently managed. DJs and music professionals curate their working libraries of tracks specifically arranged for performances, enabling them to access their collections from venue sound systems, rehearsal spaces, or portable setups without having to transport physical drives laden with music files to every single location. Podcast listeners can arrange their downloaded podcast episodes alongside their music, utilizing Navidrome's playlist functionalities to queue content for their daily commutes or workout sessions without depending on dedicated podcast applications that might cease operations, alter features, or result in the loss of downloaded content during system updates. Users across the globe can access their personal music libraries irrespective of geographical licensing limitations that render content inaccessible on streaming services in specific territories, thereby ensuring uninterrupted access to their music collections while travelling or during relocation.

Key Features

• Web-based music player interface
• Subsonic API for mobile application compatibility
• Support for MP3, FLAC, AAC, OGG, OPUS formats
• On-the-fly transcoding for bandwidth adaptation
• Automatic metadata extraction and organization
• Album art display and management
• Playlist creation and sharing
• Multi-user support with separate libraries
• Smart playlists based on criteria
• Scrobbling to Last.fm and ListenBrainz
• ReplayGain support for volume normalization
• Lyrics display
• Star ratings and favorites
• Recently played and added views
• Genre and year browsing

Why deploy Navidrome on Hostinger VPS

Deploying Navidrome on Hostinger VPS provides music streaming from datacenter infrastructure with reliable uptime and bandwidth that home servers behind residential internet connections cannot match, ensuring music remains accessible even when home networks experience outages, ISP maintenance, or the dynamic IP changes that disrupt self-hosted services on residential connections. Unlike cloud music services that analyze listening habits for advertising profiles and recommendation algorithms that prioritize promoted content over user preferences, self-hosted Navidrome keeps listening history completely private without any data transmission to third parties. The VPS deployment enables streaming to multiple devices simultaneously without the upload bandwidth limitations that residential connections impose when family members stream from different locations concurrently. Self-hosting eliminates the perpetual subscription costs of commercial music services that accumulate to significant amounts over years while providing inferior access to personal libraries compared to streaming services' rotating catalogs. For users with large music collections accumulated over decades of purchases and curation, VPS storage provides scalable capacity that grows with collections without the device storage constraints that limit local playback options. The Subsonic API compatibility means investment in mobile apps carries forward regardless of server changes, avoiding the lock-in that proprietary streaming services create when accumulated playlists and listening history become inaccessible after cancellation.