🎶 Zero Knowledge Music Player — Storage

In the last article I have covered why I don’t like online music streaming services. If you didn’t read it, my main points are that:

• It is risky to keep your playlists there
• You can’t control your music experience
• You can’t move to other service provider easily
• The experience is the bare minimum
• One day you can enjoy a feature, and the other not
• You can’t improve your experience

As you can see, there are things that I don’t like about online music streaming services. But I like one thing! I like that you can listen to your music from everywhere.

I did research to see if it is possible to set up your own music streaming server. My initial aim was to look for a Raspberry Pi or Arduino solution. It seemed like being able to play music from these devices would be something already covered by dozens of ready-to-use solutions. To my surprise it occurred it is not the case.

There seem to be some solutions, and some are paid. But I feel that there is no ready-to-use solution. Everywhere I was looking to, it involved heavy console operations. The documentation is sparse, with a little chance for support and a success. And even if you did it, you still have to figure out a bunch of other things like, how to expose the device to the world, how to maintain the whole stack. So instead of listening to the music, you’d just become a Linux administrator :) Tempting, but no :)

Then I figured out there is another way to achieve the same result. It all boils down to being able to store music files somewhere on the Internet. And this is quite easy these days. You can buy a hosting service that offers cheap hosting and transfer. You can use free tier of cloud solution, or even IFPS.

Since all of these services offer Internet access to the files, you just could upload your files there.

But the real problem is how to limit the access to the files. You can’t just share music files with everyone, because it may break the license. Only you should be able to access the music.

Unfortunately, in the most basic scenario it is not the case. If you upload a MP3 file to your shared…