For a long time, I overlooked Jellyfin’s music streaming capabilities. Occasionally, I used the first-party Jellyfin app to listen, but the experience just felt limited and clunky, especially compared to the convenience I was used on Spotify and other music streaming apps. It turns out, I just hadn’t been using the right app.
If you’re not following, Jellyfin is a media server that you can use to stream movies, TV shows, IPTV, and more. It’s self-hosted, meaning you build and manage the server yourself. To access any of the media, you need to use a client, be that a dedicated app or a web interface.
Jellyfin is completely open source, with an API that allows anyone to build custom apps for use with Jellyfin servers. Many exist, including those built by third parties rather the Jellyfin development teams itself. One of those third party apps just clicked with me.
Finamp is a powerful Jellyfin music client
Of all the third party apps for Jellyfin I’ve tried, none have impressed me and changed my media consumption habits like Finamp has. It’s a mobile app for both Android and iPhone dedicated exclusively to music streaming on Jellyfin.
If you’re familiar with Plexamp, you can guess by the name that Finamp is meant as a Jellyfin equivalent to Plexamp. However, I’ve been a die-hard Jellyfin fan since I got into self-hosting, so I can speak from experience how Plexamp and Finamp compare. Judging by the feature list for Plexamp versus Finamp, though, Plexamp is far more mature. So if you’re thinking of dropping Plex for Jellyfin and thus Plexamp for Finamp, be prepared to lose some features.
Still, the features Finamp does have made me feel a lot better about having quit Spotify. It supports easy downloads, including both original quality and transcoding for storage compression. There’s also audio normalization and gapless playback, Finamp offers support for the AudioMuse plugin too, one I’ve not yet explored with my Jellyfin server but I’m looking forward to trying.
The redesign is where it’s at, though
My opinion on Finamp comes with one big caveat: while the latest full release is OK, I’m using and showing you Finamp’s redesign, which is currently in beta. At the time of writing, if you download Finamp from the Play Store or App Store, you’ll get the last full release, version 0.6.7, which came out several months ago. The developers have since then been putting together a significant overhaul of the app that comes with a refreshed interface and new features.
While I can’t say for sure what the status will be when you read this, you can get the redesigned version (for either Android or desktop computers) by heading to the Finamp GitHub release page and downloading the latest release. You should definitely read the release notes before proceeding though. Notably, at the time of writing, Finamp doesn’t recommend use with Jellyfin server 10.11 and newer while some speed issues are ironed out.
Lyric support feels like Spotify’s
One of my favorite Finamp features its lyric functionality. The official Jellyfin app for Android supports lyrics view too, but I’ve found that iteration to be clunky and far from intuitive. Not so with Finamp. (Again, this is only available with the beta pre-release at the time of writing, but in my testing it works great.)
To get this feature to work, your Jellyfin server needs to have the LrcLib Jellyfin plugin installed. It automatically searches for and downloads lyrics for the music on your server. Often, the lyrics come with time-syncing metadata, so you can watch the lyrics scroll by as they’re sung in the music.
This brings me back to the days when I was reliant on Spotify for my music listening and could look at song lyrics in-app while I listened. Since those days, I’d gone back to doing web searches for lyrics. But with the LrcLib plugin and Finamp’s support for it, I can say goodbye to those tedious lyric lookups.
Music gets ranked by my listening
While you can “favorite” music you really like in Finamp and put it in playlists using the heart icon, another feature I really like is play count tracking. It’s very simple in that it just lets me know how many times I’ve listened to a given song. In the main track view, I can order all tracks by listen play count to see what I listen to the most. Artist hubs also automatically show the top five ranked songs based on listening.
That comes in handy when I’m looking through artists and wanting to find my favorite songs for playlist creation or just put on and listen to my top songs.
All of this I’ve enjoyed before even installing the Playback Reporting plugin for Jellyfin, which takes the playback statistics to another level. I’m excited to find out what other kinds of insights I can get on my listening history as I expand my Jellyfin server’s array of plugins.
Offline listening saves my data costs
When I go driving, I usually prefer listening to my music collection over tuning into radio or podcasts. The trouble is that chunks of my limited mobile data plan can easily get used up by streaming from my Jellyfin server, just like any other music streaming platform.
Luckily, Finamp makes it super simple to download my music to my phone. Before leaving home, I can switch to offline mode so my library automatically filters for just my downloads, which helps me avoid accidently blowing past my monthly data limit.
When you download files, it’ll typically ask if I want to transcode the audio, especially for my lossless music. Finamp can transcode down to a more compressed format that maintains reasonable audio quality while letting me save space on my phone’s storage. It’s totally optional though, so if I want the higher quality originals, Finamp can deliver that to me.
Music streaming is just one way I’m taking advantage of my self-hosted Jellyfin server. Watching my physical movie collection without the hassle of physical media is tough to beat. I’ve also learned you can customize the Jellyfin layout to fit your style.