I use Radarr and Sonarr for my movies/shows, and Spotify for music, but I do know there's another *arr app for that. The question is, is it worth setting up and how easy is it to discover new/similar music as opposed to Spotify, given that Spotify isn't expensive at all. And how do you fellow crewmen go about it?
To replace Spotify for finding new music, I switched to subscribing to radio stations in a podcast app. Free. I can send donations directly to radio stations I like. I can add tracks, albums, or artists to a list to search out further and support them directly through media and merch purchases.
Plenty of combinations, I'm sure, but I use Podcast Addict; it has a section specifically for subscribing to radio stations. From there I'm subscribed to WFUV out of New York, WXRV out of Boston, WBRU out of Rhode Island, KZCR out of Minnesota, and a few others. It's not as easy as searching a genre or song and getting a custom Spotify playlist instantly, but I have enjoyed finding DJs I like, tuning in when they're on air, and effectively getting a recommendation song list from a knowledgeable person. And it isn't even piracy.
I found radio station recommendations online and also by the search function in Podcast Addict that has some ability to search by genre.
If anyone else does similar and has radio stations recs, I would love to hear them.
I would rate radarr/sonarr with 10/10 and lidar 5/10. I dont think its bad, its probably too early stage or too hard to accomplish with music what radarr/sonarr can do with movies/shows. There are many artists/albums that dont exist in lidarr database and sometimes bad imports happen with wrong tracks. Yeah, and there is no jellyseer for music. I dont use it much, but I love it
I use lidarr to manage my existing library and use airsonic to listen to it. For me it works great and I can import tracks from my Spotify playlist. But yeah, it’s more of a nice to have, for me personally. I use it mainly to keep things tidy.
I would say use zspotifyor sum I found that I found it on github.It's Not another app that downloads stuff from youtube music soo
If you setup this script for lidarr https://github.com/RandomNinjaAtk/arr-scripts it'll automatically download music. Combined with navidrome it's very good.
It is better than spotify because spotify doesn't have all music and you can choose the front end and don't depend on them.
You are right, now that I think about it Spotify was only good on macOS and Android for me. The official app wasn't even available for Linux on my platform. And I wasn't able to find all the music I wanted with it anyway, so I might give it a shot, thank you!
Set it up and add one artist. See how it goes. It fetches info from musicbrainz and then works its magic. If the info is not on musicbrainz, add it with a greasemonkey script (or however you want to add it). Don't overload it.
Once I discovered the Ad-Free patch for Spotify I shutdown my Lidarr. Much less hassle, and it freed up a solid 300GB of space on my NAS.
I've tried it before but found it to be too cumbersome. I went back to just doing it all manually. Music isn't pirated and organized in the same way TV and movies are.
I just switched to using Lidarr(+Deemix)+Plexamp exclusively, and I'm really happy so far. I also scrobble to Last.fm and have a small script that imports their recommendations to Lidarr. The important bit imo is that you have to collect a lot of music you might never listen to, just so Plexamp has something to recommend and build playlists from. But once you do it works pretty much like any other music streaming service.