From local Mopidy server to personal streaming service?

[01tot10]

Hello community!,

I’ve been a happy Mopidy user since a couple of years now, and the system has become quite central to my music listening experience without me even noticing it. I really enjoy the way it brings multiple sources of music behind a single front-end, and how it allows me to have a unified user experience no matter where the music happens to be stored technically. This, together with synced multi-room playback on devices connected to the same LAN, has made me wonder how I ever did without.

These positive experiences I’ve had have made me miss the setup whenever I’m not at home, and wanted to listen to the latest additions to my collection, which could mean anything from local files, items on my Bandcamp wishlist, to Spotify and beyond. I know that Mopidy is meant more as a local solution, as it also doesn’t really have any methods for authentication - anybody within the network is basically allowed access.

Since I’m surely not the only person who has ever wondered about these sort of things, I wanted to ask what sort of solutions are there, when going from a local Mopidy setup towards a more general personal streaming service? I’ve done some searching online, and while there are some self-hosted streaming solutions out there, it would feel rather much having multiple fully-fledged servers existing simultaneously for separate use cases, and what I’d really like to see is being able to somehow leverage the good things I already have going with Mopidy, and then just extend to the remote use case. Or, alternatively, have a system that does similar things as Mopidy, but also allows for remote access.

I guess the number one feature I’d be looking for, would be the unified experience of browsing the latest additions to my collection, including my local files, no matter where I happen to be. Heck, even if it wouldn’t be streamable in the first place, but just some browsable / searchable unified collection would be awesome, since it saves you the hassle of checking multiple services when wondering what to listen to next.

I guess that’s enough context to start the conversation. Sorry if it became rambly.

Looking forward to any opinions / ideas!

[jjok]

Have you looked at Plex? I haven’t tried it, but I think it is designed for sharing a media library across the internet to various clients.

[01tot10]

Hey @jjok! Thanks for chipping in!

I’ve come across Plex when I was poking around the topic, but judging by their website it doesn’t feel like my sort of solution. I feel there’s a lot of emphasis on TV and movies, and music barely gets mentioned. Also this paid subscription tier makes me feel it’s more of a consumer product than anything else.

[kingosticks]

I think the latest versions of iris webclient provide close integration with snapcast, including snapcast streaming in the browser. This would let you access from anywhere if you forward the right ports / use a VPN or tunnel (e.g. Tailscale). It’s not a very elegant solution and is over-engineered but it’s probably the easiest way to get going.

Mopidy doesn’t have any real streaming playback support, it’s something we’ve been lacking for a long time. It’s not something we’ve been interested in enough to work on. There’s probably something you could do with the webrtc stuff that’s now in gstreamer.

[01tot10]

Thanks for chipping in @kingosticks, and sorry for taking my time to answer!

Nice thinking with the VPN-based solution / workaround! I experimented with the idea earlier today via adding a VPN-host into my setup, and managed to connect into my Mopidy-instance from outside our LAN. It’s true, it’s maybe not the most elegant way, but definitely achieved what I was hoping for - a view into my collection outside the home base - and wasn’t too hard to setup. Really cool actually!

I’ll experiment with the setup and see how if there are some unexpected caveats, and try to remember to report back! Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.