Everything I have is either for entertainment or home automation. Most of it is running on a mini-PC running Proxmox.
And I’ve got a containerized Audiomuse-AI instance for music analysis and instant playlist generation.
This is pretty cool, and I’m guessing the hardware doesn’t even break a sweat.
My entire setup runs on two AMD mini-PCs, one running a Ryzen 5700u with Proxmox for VM hosting, the other is a 5500u running bare metal Ubuntu.
Proxmox server hosts:
Probably a few other things I forgot about…
The bare metal Ubuntu server currently just runs Audiomuse-AI for music analysis, but when not scanning it’s generally idle. Only set this up because early versions of Audiomuse-AI didn’t play nice for me in a VM even when r running with CPU in host mode.
When the hardware gets cheaper I wouldn’t mind a full size server again with a dedicated GPU (I decommissioned my old one due to defective RAM), but for now the mini-PCs have been great. They’re quiet and absolutely sip power, so efficient and quiet.
Yo, that’s awesome!
Pro tip for you, ASR (whisper - lyric detection/transcription) can be kind of bad, but if you have some spare resources, it takes very little to host a local LRCLIB database and clone lrclib.net (they have a GitHub page). This massively speed up lyric analysis for me using the API against a local site instead of getting 429s against lrclib.net or relying on ASR.
Lyrics are the biggest longest part of the scans. My whole collection was like 3+ weeks with lyrics stuff on, but only 2 days with just MusiCNN and CLAP.
Take the drawbacks with a grain of salt, I’ve seen good professional installations, a lot of buildings in my area (both residential and commercial) use this kind of flooring. The good stuff is durable, can look really nice and hold up well with lots of foot traffic and doesn’t need the extra maintenance when done right. But you gotta pay more for the better stuff, like anything else.
My house was custom built on a reasonable budget during the pandemic, “builder’s special” kinda thing. We made it work, but there were definitely corners cut in places. Some things are quality, some things are cheap but work, and I guarantee the flooring was one of the things they cheaped out on. 😅
Floating floor planks. Generally wood laminate / artificial planks that sit on top of existing flooring or subfloor, and generally click together at the sides and ends. They’re pretty common for newer homes and for cheaper floor replacements.
They’re not a bad option. They’re cheap and benefit from individual planks being relatively easy to replace if damaged, but the drawback is they tend to shrink and expand a bit and can shift with temperature and humidity fluctuations.
I have floating floor in my home and every few months as the temp and humidity changes occur with the seasons have to use a suction gripper and mallet to knock closed gaps in a few places where they can shift anywhere from 1/16 to up to 1/4 inch if/where the ends have separated in places. But it means caulking under the toilet was a bad move because they’re designed to be able to shift slightly, and sealing them down that way can cause issues and eventually the seal will break from the pressure of the planks shifting. And doing it caused a few gaps to form where there were none previously.
I’m not a big fan of this flooring application, and am considering going with glue down engineered wood in the future when it needs replacing.
If you have floating flooring in your bathroom don’t caulk, it will move and separate. Ask me how I know. 🙃
I do this with my Wiims already, no account needed. They support speaker linking and whole home playback, or just linking individual devices.
I used it for a bit, but after getting Navidrome up and running, Arpeggi replaced it as my download “away from home” client, and at home I use Lyrion or Music Assistant via Squeezelite since I have Wiims in every room of the house.
The Xeon server would be a good bet. Your other machine would be potentially bottleneck for memory (though it meets min spec if the server isn’t doing anything else). There’s a NOAVX docker deployment available, would be slower but should work fine. Just be sure to disable anything associated with lyric detection, it’s an absolute performance nightmare.
I ran it on a Ryzen 5500u mini-PC with 32 GB RAM with the standard deployment with AVX2 support and scaled up to three worker threads. For a collection of 53k tracks it was processing about 100 per hour that way with lyrics/whisper translation enabled, but once I turned that off it was doing 1300-1400 tracks per hour.
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Edit - the 6600T would work too. I found with lyrics disabled, each worker only used between 500MB and 2 GB of RAM. Long as the server isn’t under load while scanning I think that would work, and would be faster for having AVX2 support.
Not for me, but I could see the appeal for some.
I have Wiim Pro and Wiim Pro Pluses in every room in my house that I’d stream to, and send via Squeezelite or DLNA (with Chromecast and AirPlay as available, but IMO inferior options). Plus virtual squeezelite software allows for local PC play the same way if needed (wife uses this on her Mac Mini, I don’t generally play music on my PC, just direct via the Wiim to my amp).
I predominantly use Lyrion, but my wife convinced me to try Music Assistant and it’s growing on me. MA has a lot of options for sending the audio, as well as various DSP, normalization, and crossfade functionality.
TBH I don’t recommend FinAmp, but it’s an option if you only want to deal with Jellyfin and not run multiple servers.
Lyrion (LMS) and Navidrome server/clients though, absolutely. They’re great.
Even with a 4k TV, 1080p is fine. Most TVs these days will upscale 1080p and 480p content, and even if not, 4k is an exact integer scale of 1080p (3840x2160 is 2x 1920x1080).
4k content is a bit sharper, but I can barely notice the difference, in games or video content at TV viewing distance.
I have a 5 TB NAS (technically 4x2 TB of SSDs in RAID5, plus float space for backups of my servers), but it’s shared for music, video, books and audiobooks, and retro game ROMs, plus other necessities (personal documents and such). Those disks were $600 at the time total, $150 each in 2024. Now would cost $2k ($500 each), it’s insane.
I mostly enjoy older stuff, and don’t bother with 4k. I let the TV upscale it, don’t really care. Looks like I’ve got about 1.5 TB worth of video (movies, TV, and anime) at the moment, plus another 1.4 TB of music.
If I need to, I can add some additional storage via dual NVMe slots on the NAS, but I don’t think it’s currently worth it at today’s prices. I still have a bit over 1 TB free, will keep it that way likely.
Despite all of this, I haven’t completely abandoned Plex.
Plexamp remains one of the best self-hosted music applications I’ve ever used.
Lyrion, Music Assistant, and Navidrome are all solid options. And Jellyfin also supports music hosting, along with FinAmp, which has similar functionality to PlexAmp (maybe not as good, but download functionality works).
Personally, I abandoned PlexAmp. Wasn’t worth keeping with the rest and it has been downhill since the loss of Tidal integration. Navidrome clients work great, have solid radio and discovery features for large collections, and support local downloading for on the go.
And for local listening, I’d argue that Lyrion with Blissmix or LastFM “Don’t Stop the Music” plugins are as good and sometimes better than PlexAmp. And Navidrome and/or Music Assistant with AudioMuse-AI plugin utterly destroys PlexAmp’s radio/DJ functionality. Install AudioMuse, scan your library and go, it just works. Especially with recent builds having native Linux, Mac, and Windows now (I deployed with Docker compose before these options were available).
That’s great if you have a Roku or Shield. I don’t. I’ve owned both in the past and don’t want either because they’re both an absolute mess of advertising. I currently have an Apple TV and an Android tablet. Jellyfin is okay on Android (and I emphasize okay and not amazing or great), but the Apple TV is may main viewing device and Swiftfin is the best option and still miles behind Plex.
Particularly because on Apple TV with Plex you can override built in subs with the closed caption styles, meaning literally all subs that aren’t explicitly burned into the image can be made consistent and easy to read. Haven’t seen that feature anywhere else, including on the Shield TV/Pro (I used to own one, got rid of it when Android TV updated to the ad-riddled version it is today). It’s a really amazing feature IMO to be able to have full control of subtitle font, size, style, color, outline, and spacing, no matter what you’re watching.
I have a Jellyfin server as backup, but its clients are shit for anything that uses subtitles. I bought plex pass years back for $80 on sale, can’t complain, but I’m never going to wholly rely on something closed source that requires online credentials.
Just keep a stash of healthy butterflies around, and occasionally get one to flap its wings.
Interesting, thanks for the info. I didn’t know about the GE fork.
Re: Lutris and RBR, it’s just how it worked out. When I originally set it up, it wouldn’t work properly when I tried running the install via proton and I could only get it to launch with Lutris and WINE. Could be things have changed, last time I set it up was like 2023 or something. I just ran into the problem a few months back when trying to update.
For now I did set up a windows partition for some of this stuff (WRC 10, Gens, AC Rally, RBR, Moza firmware updates), but I just hate booting into it.
It’s pretty cool. I have it integrated with Lyrion via a plugin so I can generate a list of related tracks to a song, album, or artist in my play queue, and with lyrics and CLAP analysis it can also generate a music queue via text prompts via phrases like “classical music with cellos” or “relaxing ambient without bass” “aggressive melodic rock” “soothing female vocals” and so on.
As a bonus, we use Wiim Pros and Pro+ units at home to integrate with Lyrion and they can be linked and synced for whole house playback across multiple audio setups.