Well, it is a question of convenience and alternative costs. Still “extra bit of time” and time to get proficient enough to be experienced enough that “a bit of time “ is just a bit, could be spent on other things, and then the cost of storage, backup, hardware failure.
Anyway from all I have seen of online services, this is not the worst and definitely not bad. The risk is more or less only that someone could get to know and sell your music taste, or copy your music.
A crazy idea about the risk:
Imagine, this service was installed from a performing rights organization like ASCAP, BMI, SESAC (GEMA in Germany). They wait patiently for about 10 years until they are properly known.
You upload all your files and they will send you an invoice for all your not-yet-correctly licensed files.
Or they check your files and let the performing rights organizations know it.
(No, this will never happen? At least not too soon, because when this becomes known, nobody will use their streaming service anymore. Never again.)
In short, you cannot upload music which is not yours to upload, you cannot use iBroadcast to share music which you do not own the rights to do so, and more simply, you cannot use iBroadcast to do anything which is illegal.
I'm not sure how they know this? The vast majority of my music is ripped from CD, of which I have thousands. How do they know whether I own them, or if I borrowed them from a friend (illegal) to rip?
AFAIK, there is no way to ascertain if a music file is "legal" simply from the file.
Same here. I was a DJ for 30yrs, now retired, can u imagine the variety I have? I am now trying to organize and up to 90,000 songs. That would be a hell of a bill!!! I don’t believe that is their intention, but can you just imagine?
We are here in the Off-Topic section and also as a side note:
You can not easily remove every metadata with Mp3tag.
You could be very surprised what kind of tags still exists in your music files.
Just as an idea:
There are music files released for free and without any licences.
And there are approx. 98% of music files where YOU would have to prove that you legally own this tracks, like the one you ripped from your (still existing?) CDs.
I'm pretty sure the burden is on them to prove they're illegal. Only if you are using them in some public manner, or for profit, do they have the right to object, and require you to prove provenance.
And if I use them for my own personal use, all of this discussion is moot, since it would never come across their radar.
Just to let you know: Navidrome has released its v0.55.0 - Big Refactor (BFR).
You can test a demo online here (without installing anything locally):
User: demo
Password: demo
If you are interested in "Your Personal Streaming Service" (self-hosted locally and with your own tracks) you should have a look at this newest version.
They call it
Navidrome is an open source web-based music collection server and streamer. It gives you freedom to listen to your music collection from any browser or mobile device. It's like your personal Spotify!
I'm quite curious to see what other users (like @Casual_Tea) have to say about this latest version, especially about the "handles large libraries" claim:
Thanks for letting me know.
I've tested Navidrome in the past (I think 1,5ish years ago) and while the performance was decent with a "gigantic" collection, I found its multi-value support lacking (I use these for multiple fields).
That's why I settled on lms in combination with Symfonium. It takes lms 10-15min to scan my library for changes and then another 15-20min for Symfonium to sync the updated db to my phone. In comparison, jellyfin took 20+ mins for a scan and ~1 hours to sync to Symfonium.
While I'm quite happy with the performance of lms, I guess I could spin up a Navidrome instance and see how the new version fares in comparison.
Multi-valued Tags: Support for multi-valued tags has been improved, allowing users to store multiple values for any single tag. This feature enhances metadata flexibility and enables more detailed categorization.
If you find some time a short comparison would be really interesting.
Turns out I can't test it at this time. I still had the docker compose, so updating that and redeploying the container was trivial. However it seems that to fully rescan my library, Navidrome requires more than the 7GB of disk space I currently have free in that VM.
time="2025-03-12T02:54:29Z" level=error msg="Scanner: Error persisting changes to DB" error="database or disk is full"
time="2025-03-12T12:55:39Z" level=info msg="Stopping HTTP server"
time="2025-03-12T12:55:39Z" level=error msg="Scan failed" error="media file count: context canceled"
time="2025-03-12T12:55:42Z" level=info msg="Closing Database"
time="2025-03-12T12:55:43Z" level=info msg="Navidrome stopped, bye."