A practical guide to self-hosting music

The stack

Self-hosting music works best when each tool has a narrow job. Lidarr manages the long-term library. Navidrome streams it. Amperfy makes it feel native on iOS. Tailscale keeps it reachable away from home. Aurral sits in the middle as the discovery layer.

Lidarr nightly

Artists, albums, metadata, imports, and plugin downloads.

Aurral

Discovery, flows, imported playlists, and Lidarr adds.

Navidrome

Main library and Aurral-generated playback over Subsonic.

Tubifarry and slskd

Lidarr nightly search and downloads through Soulseek/slskd.

Aurral Soulseek client

Built-in flow and imported-playlist downloads.

Tailscale

Private access without putting admin tools on the internet.

The guiding idea

The biggest mistake in self-hosted music is treating discovery as collection. Every saved album becomes storage, metadata, scans, backups, and maintenance. Let discovery stay temporary until the music proves it deserves to be permanent.

Aurral gives that temporary layer a real home. It can surface new artists, build rotating flows, import outside playlists, and write generated tracklists into its own folder instead of dumping every find into the main music library.

Recommended Lidarr defaults

For a discovery-heavy setup, keep Lidarr and Aurral defaults conservative. The important choice is monitoring.

In Aurral, this maps well to setting default album monitoring to none while still adding the artist. The artist library becomes a set of taste anchors. Albums become deliberate commitments.

Lidarr nightly, Tubifarry, and slskd

Use Lidarr nightly if you want plugin support. Tubifarry and slskd live in the plugin-oriented Lidarr ecosystem, which makes Lidarr much more useful for music sourcing than a plain stable install.

1. Run Lidarr nightly.
2. Install Tubifarry from its GitHub plugin URL.
3. Run slskd as the Soulseek client.
4. Add slskd in Lidarr as both an indexer and download client.
5. Align download paths or configure remote path mapping.
6. Keep Aurral flow downloads separate from Lidarr album downloads.

Use Aurral as the glue

Aurral works best when it connects the stack without trying to own every part of it.

A low-storage workflow

1. Add only meaningful artists to Lidarr through Aurral.
2. Keep default album monitoring set to none.
3. Let Aurral discovery use those artists as taste anchors.
4. Build one or more flows for regular listening.
5. Listen to flows in Navidrome or Amperfy.
6. Move standout tracks into a static Aurral playlist.
7. Add full albums to Lidarr only when they clearly earn it.

Flow strategy

Treat flows like radio stations you control. Start with a small number of useful flows instead of creating one for every genre.

Keep flow sizes moderate, such as 25 to 75 tracks. Schedule them weekly unless you listen through them faster. Use Focus when you know the mood, tag, or related artist lane you want.

Static Aurral playlists are the memory layer. They preserve individual finds without pretending every find should become part of the core library.

Navidrome layout and file reuse

Keep the main Lidarr library and Aurral-generated folders separate on disk. That makes scans, cleanup, backups, and permissions much easier to reason about.

services:
  aurral:
    image: ghcr.io/lklynet/aurral:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3001:3001"
    environment:
      - DOWNLOAD_FOLDER=/srv/music/aurral
    volumes:
      - /srv/aurral/data:/app/backend/data
      - /srv/music/aurral:/app/downloads
      - /srv/music/library:/data:ro

  navidrome:
    image: deluan/navidrome:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "4533:4533"
    environment:
      - ND_SCANNER_PURGEMISSING=always
    volumes:
      - /srv/navidrome/data:/data
      - /srv/music:/music:ro

If you run slskd, add /srv/music/aurral or the equivalent host path to your slskd shared folders.

iOS and remote access

For daily iOS playback, use Amperfy with Navidrome. Run Navidrome at home, connect Amperfy through Subsonic, install Tailscale on the server and phone, and use the server's Tailscale address or MagicDNS name.

For Aurral discovery on iOS, use the beta Aurral iOS app. Users can get into testing through the Aurral Discord.

Maintenance rhythm

A self-hosted music setup stays healthy when the routine is light. The goal is a smaller, better library with a discovery system around it.

Aurral keeps fresh music moving. Lidarr keeps the permanent collection orderly. Navidrome and Amperfy make listening easy. Tailscale keeps it reachable without turning the whole stack into a public service.