hunting for a music solution for the family
I will be honest it has been a while since I dug into this. But the last time I did the solutions was either
- a single library with smart playlists, this was a jank work around that was not clean or intuitive on any platforms
- setup dedicated streaming instances for each person in the family. this included having separate folders for each persons music.
I ended up going with the second solutions and it has worked for the most part but issues that still bug me.
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hard to share music between users. You either end up with depicted music stored in multiple locations for users that want the same song.
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A convoluted folder structure and script that searched for duplicate songs and added it to a folder dedicated for music we both liked" - this worked for a while but each user added complexity exponentially.
What I'm looking for is basically a self hosted Spotify replacement. I want to create a single music catalog out of everyone music stored and mixed together in a single location preferably in something like file structure like "music --> band-name --> Album (year) --> song-name"
Then each user account has access to browse and search the full music catalog. and have their own private library where they can save what music they want into it. Example would be
- Follow entire artists discography, this would add all of the music tagged with this artists into their library and automatically add any new music that is added to the "music catalog" to the users library
- add an entire album to their library
- just add a single song to their library
Browser app that works with the phone is enough. but a phone app that allows local offline playing of saved music and android auto support are big bonus points
Is their anything like this out there now days, or any projects I should be looking at and helping out or funding that has something like this on the road map?
TLDR - looking for a Spotify replacement with support for a combined master catalog of music and then each user can pull from that catalog to create their own curated library and playlists of music.
Posted Mar 8, 2026, 8:06 PM UTC