Everything I have is either for entertainment or home automation. Most of it is running on a mini-PC running Proxmox.
And I’ve got a containerized Audiomuse-AI instance for music analysis and instant playlist generation.
This is pretty cool, and I’m guessing the hardware doesn’t even break a sweat.
My entire setup runs on two AMD mini-PCs, one running a Ryzen 5700u with Proxmox for VM hosting, the other is a 5500u running bare metal Ubuntu.
Proxmox server hosts:
Probably a few other things I forgot about…
The bare metal Ubuntu server currently just runs Audiomuse-AI for music analysis, but when not scanning it’s generally idle. Only set this up because early versions of Audiomuse-AI didn’t play nice for me in a VM even when r running with CPU in host mode.
When the hardware gets cheaper I wouldn’t mind a full size server again with a dedicated GPU (I decommissioned my old one due to defective RAM), but for now the mini-PCs have been great. They’re quiet and absolutely sip power, so efficient and quiet.
The NDS is still a solid choice. I just finished playing Puyo Puyo 7 this week.
Yo, that’s awesome!
Pro tip for you, ASR (whisper - lyric detection/transcription) can be kind of bad, but if you have some spare resources, it takes very little to host a local LRCLIB database and clone lrclib.net (they have a GitHub page). This massively speed up lyric analysis for me using the API against a local site instead of getting 429s against lrclib.net or relying on ASR.
Lyrics are the biggest longest part of the scans. My whole collection was like 3+ weeks with lyrics stuff on, but only 2 days with just MusiCNN and CLAP.
The Xeon server would be a good bet. Your other machine would be potentially bottleneck for memory (though it meets min spec if the server isn’t doing anything else). There’s a NOAVX docker deployment available, would be slower but should work fine. Just be sure to disable anything associated with lyric detection, it’s an absolute performance nightmare.
I ran it on a Ryzen 5500u mini-PC with 32 GB RAM with the standard deployment with AVX2 support and scaled up to three worker threads. For a collection of 53k tracks it was processing about 100 per hour that way with lyrics/whisper translation enabled, but once I turned that off it was doing 1300-1400 tracks per hour.
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Edit - the 6600T would work too. I found with lyrics disabled, each worker only used between 500MB and 2 GB of RAM. Long as the server isn’t under load while scanning I think that would work, and would be faster for having AVX2 support.
Despite all of this, I haven’t completely abandoned Plex.
Plexamp remains one of the best self-hosted music applications I’ve ever used.
Lyrion, Music Assistant, and Navidrome are all solid options. And Jellyfin also supports music hosting, along with FinAmp, which has similar functionality to PlexAmp (maybe not as good, but download functionality works).
Personally, I abandoned PlexAmp. Wasn’t worth keeping with the rest and it has been downhill since the loss of Tidal integration. Navidrome clients work great, have solid radio and discovery features for large collections, and support local downloading for on the go.
And for local listening, I’d argue that Lyrion with Blissmix or LastFM “Don’t Stop the Music” plugins are as good and sometimes better than PlexAmp. And Navidrome and/or Music Assistant with AudioMuse-AI plugin utterly destroys PlexAmp’s radio/DJ functionality. Install AudioMuse, scan your library and go, it just works. Especially with recent builds having native Linux, Mac, and Windows now (I deployed with Docker compose before these options were available).
It’s pretty cool. I have it integrated with Lyrion via a plugin so I can generate a list of related tracks to a song, album, or artist in my play queue, and with lyrics and CLAP analysis it can also generate a music queue via text prompts via phrases like “classical music with cellos” or “relaxing ambient without bass” “aggressive melodic rock” “soothing female vocals” and so on.
As a bonus, we use Wiim Pros and Pro+ units at home to integrate with Lyrion and they can be linked and synced for whole house playback across multiple audio setups.