🎧 Why I Built It
Over the years, I found myself surrounded by audio content — recordings from music classes I personally captured, a deeply curated music collection, and a growing archive of audiobooks and spoken-word material. But accessing all of it was chaotic. Files lived across hard drives, cloud folders, Telegram chats, and half-forgotten directories. Listening to something often meant searching, downloading, syncing, and sometimes giving up.That’s when I decided to bring it all together under one elegant roof — with a **self-hosted Navidrome server** that now acts as the command center for my entire audio library. Today, I can securely stream all my music, class recordings, and audiobooks — from any device, wherever I am.
One of the main reasons was to better manage my music class recordings. I regularly document my bansuri and Carnatic saxophone lessons, and over time, these files had accumulated in a haphazard way across devices and folders. With Navidrome, I’ve been able to organize them by raga, teacher, and session. I can easily stream a past class, bookmark a phrase I want to revisit, or line up a practice playlist without ever moving files around manually.The second motivation was my personal music library — a rich collection that includes Indian film songs, jazz recordings, rare concert clips, and some of my own experimental takes. Earlier, this archive sat across hard drives and was hardly ever listened to in a structured way. Navidrome changed that. With proper album art, metadata, playlists, and search, it feels more like a carefully curated listening space than a folder of files.The third piece was audiobooks. Over the past few years, my reading habits have started to include more audio formats — especially when I’m on the move. Some of these are full-length audiobooks, while others are recordings of notes or text-to-speech conversions of articles I want to revisit. Hosting them on Navidrome allows me to stream longform content, resume playback where I left off, and organize material by theme — all within the same unified interface.
📱 Listening on the Go with Symfonium
While Navidrome powers the server, **Symfonium** is what makes the experience complete on mobile. It’s a beautifully designed Android app that connects seamlessly to self-hosted music servers. Whether I’m revisiting a class recording, listening to a playlist of film melodies, or diving into an audiobook, Symfonium delivers a fast and fluid experience — offline access included.What I appreciate most is how polished and intuitive the app feels. There’s no friction — just clean playback, excellent library browsing, and the sense that my audio world is finally in order.
🔒 The Backend: Simple, Secure, and Fully Mine
The server setup itself is straightforward. Navidrome runs on an Ubuntu VPS, indexing my audio files stored under neatly organized folders — one for music, one for classes, and one for audiobooks.To make it accessible with a friendly URL and proper security, I configured an **Nginx reverse proxy** with **Let’s Encrypt** for SSL. For those unfamiliar, a reverse proxy acts as a gateway — it routes web traffic to the correct application (Navidrome, in this case) and ensures secure, seamless access. This setup also opens the door for hosting other services like ebook readers or RSS feeds, all under their own subdomains, using the same server.
🎬 Closing Thoughts
Setting up Navidrome has helped me simplify and strengthen how I engage with audio — not just for music, but for learning, reflection, and practice. What was once a scattered mess is now a thoughtfully organized system that works quietly in the background, serving me exactly what I need.In a world where platforms change constantly and subscriptions multiply, there’s something deeply satisfying about building a space of your own. For anyone who values their audio library — whether for art, education, or habit — a self-hosted server like this offers both freedom and control.