Self-Hosted · Music · 28 Years of Library

I Took Back Control of What I Listen To.

I'm a man approaching forty. I've always loved music — deeply, obsessively. But growing up in a Latin country, the music I actually liked rarely made it to the radio. What I wanted to hear was whatever MTV decided to air that day, and not much else. No algorithm back then — just limited access and a lot of waiting.

That frustration pushed me toward technology earlier than most. If the system wouldn't give me what I wanted, I'd find another way.

I remember when the internet was still version 1.0. There weren't many pages. Search engines weren't common yet — you had to use Yahoo, AltaVista. And then, much later, Google appeared.

I remember the first days of YouTube. When YouTube was ugly and uncontrolled by any algorithm. When it was just people uploading things and other people watching them.

But music? Music was its own journey.

If I wanted to listen to something, my options were the radio, MTV, or a CD. I walked to school with a CD player in my pocket or backpack. Then came the burned CD and the MP3 CD player — and suddenly I started to feel something I hadn't felt before with music: Control.

I was choosing what I listened to. No DJ. No playlist curated by someone else. Just me and what I actually wanted to hear.

Before I had a CD burner, a friend gave me one CD. One. I listened to it so many times I grew to hate it. But it was my only option. When I finally started downloading my own music, something exploded. It wasn't just convenience. It was discovery.

I had two The Offspring CDs. If I wanted to switch between them, I had to physically get up, open the player, swap the disc, and find the track. Later, the home stereo had a 6-disc carousel — which felt like a revolution. Except changing from one disc to another took about 35 seconds. Per disc change. That was the cost of control.

That spark never went out.

A library built song by song since 1998. It's passed 10,000 songs. Every one of them was chosen deliberately.

Around that same time, I started building something without fully realizing it. A library. Song by song — from Napster, then iMesh, then LimeWire, eMule, eDonkey, online radio station rippers. Every tool that existed, I used. Not to collect everything — to collect what I liked. What I actually came back to.

That library has been growing since 1998. It's passed 10,000 songs. It's not a competition — it's a history. The evolution of what I've liked, from adolescence to now.

Then life got busy. Work. Responsibilities. No time to sit down and browse a library. And that's when the services arrived — first Google Play Music. Then Spotify. Then YouTube Music Premium.

And for a while, they were great. Convenient. Fast. Available everywhere.

But slowly, without me noticing, I stopped listening to what I wanted to hear. I'd pick the first song — the right song — and then the algorithm took over. Five songs in, I was somewhere else. Listening to what they decided I should listen to next.

I became a victim of the algorithm.

The Data

I exported my YouTube watch history and analyzed it. Out of 51,543 unique titles, about 28% were classifiable by category. Of those:

• 37.8% — Shorts and viral content
• 23.4% — Music
• 12.4% — Gaming
• 11.6% — Tutorials
• 6.1% — Comedy and memes

1 in 4 classified videos was music. But YouTube decided which music, when, and in what order. I wasn't choosing. I was being served.

That was enough. That's when I found Navidrome.

The Setup

Navidrome is the brain. Nobody sees it. Nobody touches it.

I installed Navidrome without being entirely sure what I was walking into. When it came up, it was just another web player. And from my perspective as a designer — the interface was ugly. That's an honest assessment, not a complaint. It works. It does exactly what it needs to do.

Before any of that could matter, I had to invest time cleaning and organizing my library. Fixing tags. Running everything through MusicBrainz Picard to repair metadata, match albums, correct artist names. That's not optional with a library that's been growing organically for 28 years — it's the foundation everything else sits on.

Navidrome running in Docker — silent, no interface, doing its job.

Once that was done, Navidrome became what it was supposed to be: a silent engine. It just works.

Then I started looking for the front end. First install: DSub. It works — but the interface carries the same visual weight as Navidrome. Functional. Forgettable. I kept reading.

Then I found Symfonium. Clean UI. Loaded my Navidrome server without complications. Suddenly I had everything — the functionality and freedom of Spotify or YouTube Music Premium, but running on my own hardware, with my own library, under my own control.

On Windows, Feishin does the same thing. Modern interface. Connects to Navidrome in seconds. No configuration friction.

Feishin on Windows — Stratovarius playing, Auto DJ active, 28 years of personal genres on screen.

The Ecosystem

I didn't install three apps. I built a personal music ecosystem.

Navidrome is the brain. Feishin is the face on the desktop. Symfonium is the face in your pocket. Together, they feel like one app — not three.

I create a playlist in Feishin for a specific mood or route. I open Symfonium, the playlist is already there. I mark it for permanent offline cache — and it downloads. The entire Navidrome library metadata lives in Symfonium even without a connection, meaning I can keep building and organizing playlists for later even when the server is unreachable. When it comes back online, everything syncs.

Likes. Favorites. Play counts. Statistics. All of it synchronized between Feishin and Symfonium with a single tap. Nothing complicated. Nothing manual.

Symfonium in action

Screen recording from the phone

External shot — the real experience

I don't have exact metrics. But I have my last 10 days of history. Music actively searched: three tracks. Algorithm deciding what I listen to: zero times.

Before, I opened YouTube to find something to listen to in the background. I'd pick the first song — and then the algorithm took over. Ads. Recommendations I didn't ask for. The quiet question the platform asks every few minutes: are you still there?

Now Feishin opens almost automatically on Windows. No ads. No unwanted playback. No passive consumption. Just music I chose, playing the way I want it to play. And when I leave the desk? I load the playlist into Symfonium and keep listening in the street.

It feels cleaner than it looks. And now I want to expand the library, activate WireGuard so it follows me anywhere — not just on the local network. It feels like a new kind of freedom.

A note on Auto DJ

Feishin has an Auto DJ mode that generates suggestions from your own library — and it works incredibly well. But only if your tags are clean. A file with youtube.com/watch?v=... as the album name tells the system nothing. The quality of your experience is directly proportional to the quality of your metadata.

The Honest Conclusion

I'm not going to tell you how to get music. That's not my place.

My library isn't vast by anyone's standards. 10,000 songs isn't a flex. But it's mine. Every song in it was chosen deliberately at some point in my life — whether at 16, or 25, or last month. It maps my moods with a precision that no recommendation engine has ever matched.

What I will tell you: when you have your library — whatever size it is — the step you cannot skip is MP3Tag. Cleaning and structuring your metadata is tedious. You do it once. And you enjoy it for life.

There's something quietly powerful about pressing play and knowing — with absolute certainty — that what comes next is something you actually chose. Not predicted. Not served. Chosen.

That feeling is worth more than any algorithm. And the next step? Activating WireGuard so my library follows me everywhere — not just on the local network, but anywhere I go.

Have a library sitting on a hard drive somewhere? There might be more there than you think. Drop your questions below.

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