Listen to Music for Free – Nuclear, Navidrome and Your Own Server

I promised I’d share free alternatives to paid apps, so here we go.

Nuclear – why is it a gem?

I recently stumbled upon a little gem called Nuclear Music Player. Why a gem? Well, it lets you listen to music for free and without ads. It’s open source software with extra plugins that let you search and import playlists from Spotify or YouTube. A wonderful alternative to the paid services of the big players.

What about music on the road?

But hey – we pay for Spotify or YouTube because we want to listen in the car, away from home, out in town and while travelling. Unfortunately the app doesn’t solve that problem yet, because it’s not available on Android. But while we’re at it, let me share something I’ve learned recently.

Here in Poland the law allows you to legally rip music from CDs you’ve bought. You can even share those ripped albums with your family and close friends. (Rules differ from country to country, so check how it works where you live.) So what, you ask? Well, there’s a server app called Navidrome – lightweight and open source. It’s written in Go and you can install it on Windows, Linux, macOS or in Docker, so it runs quietly in the background on your computer.

What does Navidrome do? It serves your music collection to a client – in this case, for example, Substreamer, an app with an interface pretty close to Spotify. You install Substreamer on your phone, and that way your CDs can stay on the shelf so they don’t get damaged, while you listen to your favourite music in the car, on the road, in town or at home. Your family and closest friends can listen too. Ah, open source is beautiful. Takes me right back to the early days of the internet and the 90s.

Isn’t that a wonderful way to support the artist without supporting Spotify? I’ll leave that one to you. One more question. Do you still have CD collections on your shelves that you actually reach for?

An old/new computer as a music server

Since I’ve got to CD collections and ripping music, let me go one step further – I recently managed to buy a few Dell OptiPlex 7040 SFF computers with a 6th-gen i5 for a pretty low price. They were sold off by an institute because they can’t run Windows 11, and Windows 10 has already lost security support.

And a machine like that is the perfect mini server – for ripping and streaming music, for starters. Linux will support it for a good 10 more years. These computers have a DVD drive, and Linux has good programs for ripping whole albums almost with one click, metadata included. Oh right, I almost forgot – Navidrome uses that metadata and builds album libraries just like Spotify.

Isn’t an old/new computer like that a wonderful piece of kit to refresh your CD collection and set up your own music server? You tell me. I have these computers available to order on my site oftionn.com – you can’t buy directly there, but you can send an enquiry. And this computer is good for more than just music – the specs are pretty decent.

But this isn’t a blog about computers – it’s about freedom, free alternatives to corporate apps, and travel. Take care, and see you in the next post!

P.S. I’m working on adding comments to the posts, because I’ve heard they’d come in handy.