Adding Music Streaming to My Raspberry Pi

I bought a Raspberry Pi 5 awhile ago and so far I’ve been using it to host the following services:

• FreshRSS, an RSS feed reader. I can pull in YouTube Videos, Bluesky accounts, along with traditional RSS sources
• Calibre & Calibre-Web, for storing eBook files and then accessing them (ps, I hate calibre)
• Audiobookshelf, for storing audio books & podcasts and accessing those as well

I’ve been casting about for other things I can use this little computer for, since I’m nowhere near maximizing its capabilities and resources, and I have another Pi that handles all my network apps, so I don’t need it for that sort of thing.

I’ve been re-acquiring my old CD collection and ripping them to FLAC when it hit me that I could just use the Pi for music streaming. It seemed like a good idea, but when it comes to Linux and the Raspberry Pi in particular, the choices are limited and nothing is quite ideal.

The first obvious challenge was finding a program that I could actually install on the Pi, but didn’t look janky or cobbled together in that peculiar Linux fashion. I settled on Navidrome, which has a decent GUI and could be installed easily via docker compose on my machine.

I transferred my music collection to the Pi, pointed Navidrome at the directory, and it all just worked.

And immediately realized that while all the CDs I’ve ripped are tagged just fine, all of my older music files are a jumbled mess. Some don’t have any meta-tagging, some have whatever tags the file came with, while others are just flat out wrong.

It’s a bit of a mess.

So now I have to go through all my files and get the correct track, artist, and album information (at a minimum). This meant finding and installing another app.

I found and installed MusicBrainz Picard, and installing it on a Pi involved installing Snap (yet another package manager/store from Canonical) first, which then allowed me to install Picard.

The task before me at the moment is immense. I’ve spent a few hours so far just going through maybe a third of my music collection at this point to properly tag everything, and the database that Picard uses often doesn’t grab the correct album, so there’s a lot of extra hoops to jump through to get everything right, but the cool thing is the whole thing works.

I can access and play music from Navidrome on my phone, which was the goal of this whole thing. The organization and tagging is slowly improving, and at the end of it, I’ll be able to create playlists and have an option to enjoy my music on the go in case Spotify enshittifies to the the point of uselessness.

Likes

• 👍 Andri