How to Install Navidrome?

Useful links
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Official Guide: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/installation/docker/
Subsonic player recommendations: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/overview/#apps
Tag editor: https://kid3.kde.org/
To make Albums: https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
Android Subsonic Player: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.moire.ultrasonic
Desktop Subsonic Player: https://github.com/dweymouth/supersonic/releases

What is Navidrome?
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Navidrome is a Subsonic based server music player. Which can be used via a browser web interface. It can also be used over the network by other Subsonic players running on your device. This is not irrelevant as Navidrome has limitations which I will cover to later.

How to install Navidrome?
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The best way to install Navidrome is via Docker. I have a yaml file for this on Github which you can use in Portainer. There I also explain a few other things you have to consider but these will also be addressed in this article.

https://github.com/XenoElectronics/Docker-Compose-Files/tree/main/Portainer-Stack-Files/Navidrome

Hear is also the Yaml file if you want it on this site.

services:
  navidrome:
    image: deluan/navidrome:latest
    container_name: Navidrome
    ports:
      - 21480:4533
    restart: always
    environment:
      ND_DEVACTIVITYPANEL: false
      ND_DEVFASTACCESSCOVERART: true
    volumes:
      - data:/data
      - music:/music
      
volumes:
  data:
  music:

How does Navidrome find and categorize music?
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Like many programs, Navidrome finds and categorizes music based on its metadata. So it doesn’t matter what kind of folder you have where your albums, playlists or anything else is stored. Navidrome is only interested in the metadata of the files in the folder you want it to look in.

Unfortunately this means that for all songs you want to have in Navidrome you have to adjust the metadata so that Navidrome categorizes them correctly. The important metadata are:

Album:
Artist:

These must be identical so that Navidrome can categorize them into an album. For example, for music from a video game it must look like this:

Album: Super Mario 64
Artist: Super Mario 64

It doesn’t make sense that the artist is called like the album, but it makes it easier for Navidrome to put it in one album.

How do I edit the metadata?
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A software I recommend to edit the metadata is kid3-qt.

https://kid3.kde.org/

It is a tag editor but that is correct. The tags in a music file are basically the metadata of the file.

How to make an album?
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Unfortunately, editing the metadata is not enough. At least in my experience.

We still have to tell the files that they are an album, we can do this by using the software Musicbrainz Picard.

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

There we can insert the songs, where we have customized the metadata and combine them into an album

Problems that Navidrome has
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In principle, we can now put the data in the music folder of Navidrome and it would also combine them into an album. That’s nice, but we still have two problems.

We need a Subsonic Player
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The first is that we always need the browser to use Navidrome, which is annoying and I’m sure many people don’t want to do it that way. I have two recommendations for Subsonic players that run on all desktops and on Android.

Android Subsonic Player: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.moire.ultrasonic
Desktop Subsonic Player: https://github.com/dweymouth/supersonic/releases

On Apple IOS most of them cost or are proprietary so I don’t care. sorry apple users.

A small problem with large playlists
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If you use a subsonic player as recommended above you will never notice this and you may not care but if you use Navidrome in your browser and have playlists of 100 songs or more, you will notice that Navidrome stops responding or takes hours to load a song.

This is currently a bug that they want to fix but have not yet managed to do so. With a Subsonic player this bug never occurs even with playlists that have 4000+ songs. I have such a playlist and it runs perfectly on the players I have recommended to you.

Why do you have a 4000+ song playlist you ask? Why not.