Self-hosted music and audiobooks: Navidrome and Audiobookshelf
What Navidrome and Audiobookshelf are, what they are known for, and how to stream your own music and audiobook libraries to any device.
Two of the most-loved self-hosted media apps are not for films — they are for music and audiobooks. Both turn a folder of files into a streamable library with a proper app, and both are small enough to run anywhere.
Navidrome — your own music streaming
What it is: a lightweight music server that indexes your audio files and streams them to any Subsonic-compatible client (there are many, on every platform).
What it does: reads your folder of music, uses tags to organise by artist/album/track, builds playlists, scrobbles to Last.fm/ListenBrainz, transcodes on the fly when a client needs a lower bitrate, and serves it all over the web or an app.
What it is known for: being fast and featherweight — it runs in a tiny amount of RAM — and for speaking the Subsonic API, which means dozens of mature mobile clients work out of the box.
Why use it: stream your own music collection from anywhere, with no subscription, no region locks, and no "this album is no longer available" — because it is your library.
Audiobookshelf — your own audiobook & podcast server
What it is: a self-hosted server for audiobooks and podcasts, with its own polished apps.
What it does: organises audiobooks and podcasts, remembers your playback position across devices, supports chapters, bookmarks, collections, and a built-in podcast downloader/subscriber. Progress syncs between the mobile app and web.
What it is known for: being the app that finally made self-hosted audiobooks pleasant — position sync and mobile apps are exactly what a self-hosted audiobook listener needs.
Why use it: your audiobooks and podcast subscriptions in one place, synced, with no cloud service deciding what you may listen to.
Where and how
Both are light: a 1–2 vCPU, 1–2 GB VPS is plenty for a personal library, with storage sized to your media. Both ship as Docker images with a small database. Point the app at your library folder, let it scan, then connect the clients (any Subsonic client for Navidrome; the official apps for Audiobookshelf). Keep a backup of any playback-progress database if you care about sync history.