I have spent the afternoon getting my mind around how to make the music on my hard-drive available to the local network. (Yeah, I know this is all a bit old school but, hey, I am 67 and I am allowed to be old school).
For many years, I used Logitech Media Server (LMS) for this sort of thing because I had a Squeezebox Boom. I loved that device: it sat in a corner of the kitchen and played music happily, controlled from my phone by the excellent Orange Squeeze app. Sadly, after getting through two new power supplies, the Boom’s tiny screen faded to invisibility and the thing became unusable. Nevertheless, I carried on using LMS with a uPnP plugin to talk to a new, much cheaper, speaker. This sort of worked but not reliably.
All this came to a head on account me changing OS to an arch-based distribution and so having to re-install all infrastructure. LMS is available and installs OK but I could not get it to talk to my phone or the speaker. Time for a rethink: since the Boom doesn’t work anymore, there is no need to use LMS so are there any alternatives?
The interwebs threw up Jellyfin as a possibility so I gave it a spin and was very impressed!
- It installs easily via
pacman(you need to get bothjellyfin-serverandjellyfin-web). Enable and start the service fromsystemctland you are (almost) good to go. - Now head to
localhost:8096and discover a clean web interface to help you set things up. - I then spent ages trying to work out why
jellyfinwas not visible to the rest of the network. Eventually, the penny dropped that you have to open some ports on the firewall (doh!). - At this point, my phone sees jellyfin as does the uPnP speaker and everything is golden.
Why do I like it so much?
- It works.
- The web interface is really pretty. It does the “Wall of
Album Covers” thing very well:
- It gets its metadata from musicbrainz.
- It also serves videos and photos.
- It is free as in both freedom and beer and looks like it will stay that way.
- Did I say It Works? It really does.