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for music
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I run my own Navidrome server. You can set one up with minimal effort using a managed hosting provider for about $3/month, or self-host using their official docker container or the packages/binaries available for various OSes. (I self-host mine and can't personally speak to the experience of using PikaPods managed hosting, but it's officially partnered with Navidrome and seems fairly straightforward.)
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I get DRM-free music files from various places – mostly:
- Bandcamp: for the more indie artists; we'll see how things shake out I guess
- Qobuz: for most artists who aren't on bandcamp. they've recently made the UX around downloading your purchases more annoying1, especially if you're on Linux; but I'm not aware of any other music store that has a large catalog of mainstream music and will sell it to you as DRM-free downloadable files.
- Ototoy: for Japanese artists in particular. there's definitely gaps in their catalog, and some of their albums aren't available to buyers outside Japan, but I've gotten the Kessoku Band album and a few other anime OSTs from them.
there's also a handful of albums that i've gotten from other places – the Hollow Knight OST from GOG, a couple AlicebanD songs from ReverbNation, some music packs from itch, etc etc. The nice thing about Navidrome is that it doesn't matter where you get your music from. Once you have the files, you just chuck them all in a folder (or in a neatly organized hierarchy of folders if you prefer), point Navidrome at it, and as long as your music is properly tagged (which Bandcamp, Qobuz, and Ototoy have all been good about doing), it handles the rest for you.
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I use Ultrasonic to listen to music on my Android phone. it connects to Navidrome and gives me a nice view of my music library where I can enqueue things, add favorites, and also generate shareable links if there's a particular track or album i want to show a friend. Navidrome implements the Subsonic API, so you can use any music player app that supports that API; there's a lot of options out there, the Navidrome devs have a list of apps they've tested across most desktop and mobile platforms.
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when I'm listening to music on my laptop, I'll often just use Navidrome's built-in web player, it's worked pretty well for me.
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I also occasionally give close friends their own accounts on my Navidrome server when someone's interested; every user can listen to all the music that's on the server. it's easy to get people set up, and also means i get to subject my friends to my music tastes, i know i got at least one friend to listen to Seeming
i've also asked friends for album recommendations they'd like to have on the server, so i now have a big list of music to acquire at some point, time and money permitting.
for podcasts
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I use AntennaPod to listen to podcasts on Android. I can add RSS feeds, set podcasts to auto-download new episodes or not, maintain a queue of podcast episodes to listen to, it works great.
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I also use gpodder on Linux, but mostly just to download podcasts for archival/backup/cohost bot purposes; I pretty much only actually listen to podcasts on my phone. I'm pretty sure there's some way to synchronize my queue/playback progress between AntennaPod and gpodder, but I haven't bothered to try and figure it out.
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you used to be able to download the albums you'd purchased as a TAR archive. now, your options are either download each individual track one at a time, or use the Qobuz Downloader app, available for Mac and Windows (Linux support coming soon™). obviously, i would never try to violate the Terms of Service by reverse-engineering their app to figure out what API they're using and write my own downloader utility. unrelatedly, if anyone knows anything about how to decompile Dart/Flutter apps, i'd love to chat about that
I VPN in to the house and just SMB mount my desktop home directory.
Probably these instructions above are more reasonable to follow though.
