I started using Jellyfin for my music library so I can access it anywhere I can get a connection to the Internet. I don’t support streaming services that charge subscriptions and I’ve spent over four decades building my music collection, and I add to it frequently.
I’ve been using Apple’s iTunes/Music/whatever it’s called now, and often copying some (or all) of my library locally to multiple devices but I thought I’d give Jellyfin a try. I know people who use it for video but I’m strictly here for the music.
A guy I work with uses Jellyfin running on his home NAS with a zillion videos files. I thought about where to get it running, but ended up just running it on my primary desktop computer. It’s already basically a server, and it’s always on (except when it kernel panics a few times a year) and since my music files were already there, it was simple. I just have it set to launch at boot.
One interesting thing about Jellyfin versus a lot of other open source projects is that they seem to have money!
So it’s been a few months (I started this post in July!) and I’ve been mostly pleased with Jellyfin. There are a few things that are annoying, but overall it’s pretty good. The annoying things are mainly stuff that is different from the old way I did things. Like there are no star ratings. I used the 0-5 star ratings a lot in iTunes/Music.app and I miss it. (A plugin could probably be written but no one has done it yet.) It does handle all my scrobbling so the data goes to Last.FM and Heard just fine.
Another nice thing about Jellyfin is that I could (in theory) share my server with others by making accounts that they could use to login and listen to my music library. I have not done this yet but it’s a nice feature for sure.
I’ll plan a follow-up post talking about clients for Jellyfin, because honestly servers are kinda boring by design (when they work well) because they just sit there and run and you shouldn’t even see them much.
Stay Tuned!