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Oh hey hi

A while ago i heard about this thing some people do where they create their own personal server, either because they can find a use for something like that or just because they want to have fun experimenting with stuff, and i found myself in a position in between; while i had in mind just doing it to do some silly stuff like hosting servers for games and such, i then realized i could use it for something a bit more useful

If the fact that i'm talking about home servers wasn't enough of a clue, i am a nerd that, when possible, tries to avoid the more convenient solution and instead go for the one that grants me either more control for me, or less control for the service i'm using, and one of the ways that shines the most is through how i listen to music

For the longest time the way i listened to music consisted on me sailing the seven seas looking for flacs of albums i liked, getting them into my preferred player (Foobar 2000), and if i really liked it, i'd use Local Send to copy it to my phone, which was kind of a pain; so the idea of having a central place that both my computer and my phone can access with the exact same music seemed interesting

So, i got a cheapo mini pc, installed ubuntu server, and went straight into CasaOS, a web UI that allows you to manage your server in a more friendly manner than the cold, cold terminal

The first day with it was an absolute mess, nothing was working, everything was restarting out of nowhere, and i accidentally left my whole house without internet trying to set up a static IP address, whoops  

The thing that bugged me the most however was the most was Navidrome, the service for synchronizing music between devices and what got me interested with this project, i couldn't see a way to implement Last.fm scrobbling, something that i feel is kinda essential, since i like to keep track on the songs i listen to

However, after sleeping and deciding to tinker with it a bit more, i discovered that the reason for that was because it was a docker container, i was trying to do it the manual way (creating a config file with the API keys), but i just needed to enter the setting page CasaOS offers and i was able to put everything i needed in there

How something as simple as this took me an entire day to figure out i think is proof that i should stay away from important computers

But yeah!, i've been hacking away at it, got compatible players on both my phone and pc (For anyone interested, my recommendations are Aonsoku for windows and Substreamer for android), and i'm thinking of seeing if i could get a static IP address to host servers for my friend group, like a mumble server or something like that

If you decide to venture into this, do know that it will take time, effort, a lot of patience, and plunging yourself into something completely unknown, where stuff might happen to you that didn't ever happen to anyone else; but, if you persist and come to terms that on your first attempt you might need to start from 0 a few times, i highly recommend this, it's been wonderful working this thing out