Media

Self-Hosting Navidrome: Personal Music Streaming Server (Spotify Alternative) Spotify costs $12/month, owns the relationship between you and your music, and can remove albums from your library without notice. If you’ve built a music collection over the years — ripped CDs, purchased albums from Bandcamp, curated FLAC files — Navidrome turns that collection into your own streaming service, accessible from any device, anywhere. Navidrome is a lightweight, open-source music server written in Go. It scans your music library, reads metadata, serves a modern web interface, and speaks the Subsonic API — which means dozens of polished mobile and desktop apps work with it out of the box. It runs comfortably on a Raspberry Pi Zero, handles libraries with hundreds of thousands of tracks, and uses around 30-50MB of RAM for typical collections. ...

Self-Hosting Kavita: Digital Library for Books, Comics & Manga If you’ve got a collection of ebooks, comics, or manga scattered across folders and cloud services, Kavita brings them all under one roof with a fast, beautiful reading experience. Think of it as Plex for your reading library — it scans your files, organizes them with rich metadata, and serves them through responsive web readers that work on any device. Built with .NET and Angular, Kavita handles epub, PDF, cbr, cbz, zip, rar, 7zip, and even raw image folders. It supports multiple users with role-based access, reading progress tracking, and an optional Kavita+ subscription for external metadata, reviews, and scrobbling integration. Whether you’re managing a personal library or sharing with family, Kavita scales elegantly. ...

Self-Hosting Audiobookshelf: Your Own Audible Replacement Audible charges $15/month for one audiobook. If you already own audiobooks (or know where to find DRM-free ones), you’re paying for a streaming app you don’t need. Audiobookshelf is a self-hosted audiobook and podcast server that gives you everything Audible does — streaming, progress sync, mobile apps, chapters, bookmarks — for your own library. It’s free, open source, and genuinely polished. What Audiobookshelf Does Stream audiobooks from any device (web, iOS, Android) Track progress across devices with automatic sync Chapter support with skip and navigation Podcast management with auto-download Multiple users with individual progress tracking Metadata fetching from Audible, Google Books, OpenLibrary, iTunes Bookmarks and notes for any position in a book Sleep timer and playback speed controls Offline download in mobile apps Series and collection organization It’s not a compromise — it’s genuinely better than Audible for managing your own library. ...