My Jellyfin Setup

AndyH

When liberating my data from Google I started storing my music on Dropbox. I was able to save some music from iTunes and Google Play Music, and have been adding to it from own CD collection as the whim takes me.

My home server is a Beelink EQi12 mini-PC running Jellyfin on Linux Mint (until I replace it with Endeavour OS at some point likely this year). I use syncthing to perform a one-way sync from a desktop machine with the Dropbox drive mounted. Recently I installed FLAC tools to ensure Jellyfin could play lossless FLAC files.

Anytime I add new music to the Dropbox folder, it's synced over to the Jellyfin server automatically.

To avoid having open ports on my home network, I use Pangolin's cloud service. I have a Pangolin tunnel running on the Jellyfin box that tunnels out that. My domain points to the IP address of the Pangolin service.

I have the Jellyfin app installed on my phone, laptop and desktop, so I can stream my music from my house, whenever I want. So far it's been pretty reliable and low maintenance.

In the long run, I intend to replace Dropbox with a NAS. I will probably just mount storage from the NAS to my Jellyfin box at that point. I may also run my own Pangolin setup.

Video is not really working on this setup yet. I haven't debugged it fully but playback stalls. I think the Mini PC should be more than capable of streaming the video over Jellyfin.

jukebox

Haven't tried Jellyfin for music, yet. Was experimenting with Navidrome. It required futzing with metadata. This was just too time-consuming for 5,000 tracks. Even with MusicBrainz Picard. If Jellyfin has some magic sauce for music, I am here for it, AndyH

petrosophia

I love Jellyfin. I use it almost exclusively for video, though it's all local-only because I don't presently have a solid way of accessing my local network from outside. I'm hoping that a new ISP that's moving into my area (with fiber, no less!) will make it easy for me to access stuff from outside, at which point I'll be able to allow my partner's parents to access our video library so they don't need like 40 streaming services or whatever (seriously they have almost all of the major ones, it's insane).

My home server is an old micro-ATX PC (Intel i5-6600K, 16GB RAM, removed graphics card to increase storage to _26TB) that I was using as my main desktop before I downsized, so it's got plenty of oomph for basically whatever. It's currently running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, though I intend to upgrade it to 26.04 LTS once that lands. I may swap it over to Debian 13 though, idk. Or maybe just distrobox for the like one app I'm interested in that won't run on Ubuntu lol

ktneely

Question about your setup: Have you devised a way or found software that makes it easy to sync a substantial portion of music to a phone or mp3 player?

My imagined workflow is that I'd have some sort of application on a laptop or desktop that can access the music repository for listening. Maybe it syncs the library, maybe it streams it. Then, I'd have some number of playlists that I've created for certain moods. Finally, I'd be able to sync those playlists, with all their files, over to my phone so they can be played by Musicolet or some other audio app (or sync to a mp3 played connected to the laptop via USB).

jukebox

ktneely Playlists are especially hard. I haven't found any way to easily port playlists. Mainly due to the lack of a standard. There is an .m3u format, but it is also based on a path to a music file, not a canonical recording identifier.

I've had to let go of playlists as a personal music organizing concept. Especially since playlists are an artifact of the streaming model I'm moving on from. The artist's album, the local radio DJ's, or the carefully curated compilation (movie sound track) served my needs for years. Going back to these is not difficult leap, for me.