Recently I noticed that I hardly ever listen my MP3 music collection – mainly because I don’t like my music players (both on mobile and on the desktop). So, let’s look for a nicer player!
I had only two constraints: 1) it should be able to use the files from OneDrive and 2) it should be able to cache them (in case of no connectivity). And as I went through the candidates, I stumbled across Navidrome:
Navidrome allows you to enjoy your music collection from anywhere, by making it available through a modern Web UI and through a wide range of third-party compatible mobile apps, for both iOS and Android devices.
Navidrome also supports Playlists and Internet-Radio! Nice. So why not let it run on a RaspberryPi at home and make it available through my VPN? But would I have enough RAM left? I just tried!
TL;DR: RAM / Memory requirements: ~40 MB
Installing
Don’t forget to simply checkout the documentation about Installation at the Navidrome site!
Install Samba and mount Music
Navidrome can only stream from a local file source. So, let’s mount the music from the NAS.
sudo apt-get install samba-common smbclient samba-common-bin smbclient cifs-utils
sudo mkdir /mnt/music
Mount the NAS directory on startup:
sudo nano /etc/fstab
//diskstation/music /mnt/music cifs user=...,pass=...,iocharset=utf8,rw,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
uid and gid should be the same as your pi user’s uid/gid. Well according to the documentation, it would be better to run Navidrome as its own user, just ensure that the user has read permissions on the music folder:
$ id
uid=1000(pi) gid=1000(pi) groups=1000(pi),4(adm), .....
Then just mount:
sudo mount -a
If you want to put the credentials into a separate file:
nano ~/.smbcredentials
username=...
password=...
chmod 600 ~/.smbcredentials
And change the entry in /etc/fstab to:
//diskstation/music /mnt/music cifs credentials=/home/pi/.smbcredentials,...
I find it quite handy to reboot the RaspberryPi at this stage to ensure that mounting on startup REALLY works.
Install Docker
curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
Log out and back in after installing docker.
Install Navidrome
I install Navidrome in my home directory. This may not be the best choice, feel free to change it to suit your needs.
mkdir -p ~/navidrome/data
mkdir -p ~/navidrome/backup
Create a ~/navidrome/compose.yaml:
# check the options in the Docs: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/configuration-options/#available-options
services:
navidrome:
image: deluan/navidrome:latest
user: 1000:1000
ports:
- "4533:4533"
restart: unless-stopped
environment:
ND_SCANNER_ENABLED: true
ND_SCANNER_SCHEDULE: "0 19 * * *"
ND_SCANNER_SCANONSTARTUP: true
ND_LOGLEVEL: info
ND_BASEURL: ""
ND_LASTFM_APIKEY: ...
ND_LASTFM_SECRET: ...
ND_SPOTIFY_ID: ...
ND_SPOTIFY_SECRET: ...
ND_BACKUP_PATH: /backup
ND_BACKUP_SCHEDULE: "0 20 * * *"
ND_BACKUP_COUNT: 7
volumes:
- "/home/pi/navidrome/data:/data"
- "/home/pi/navidrome/backup:/backup"
- "/mnt/music:/music:ro"
Instead of putting the configuration into the compose.yaml, you could also use a config file. Checkout the documentation for it (I somehow just put it into the compose.yaml without special reason). Also refer to the excellent documentation for how to get the API credentials for LastFM and Spotify.
(Re)Start Navidrome
cd ~/navidrome
docker compose down
docker compose up -d --remove-orphans
And after a successfull start, Navidrome should be available under <hostname>:4533.
Logs
If you need to check the logs (because something is going wrong):
docker compose logs
Client
As mobile client I currently favour Symfonium. It looks pretty nice and the caching mechanism looks good so far. Nothing overly fancy – just simple enough for me. Other apps are listed on the Navidrome page and as Navidrome supports the Airsonic API, you can use any Airsonic compatible player as well.
Have fun!