I have a weird relationship with Spotify. I appreciate the convenience the music streaming platform offers, alongside its surprisingly competent AI DJ, but I've never been fond of the app's ad-filled UI, or the fact that it's progressively getting more expensive every year.

With that in mind, I've been looking at various self-hosted alternatives to the streaming giant. While I'm not ready to completely get rid of the streaming service yet, I think I'm finally on the right path — and with a little bit of extra work and fine-tuning, I can see myself canceling my Spotify subscription entirely for Feishin.

Feishin works with Jellyfin to stream your music on desktop

The open source app is surprisingly straightforward and intuitive

First off, it's worth noting that I don't have a massive library of recent music on my PC given I've been using Spotify for well over a decade. That said, I have a treasure trove of mid-2000s and early 2010s music on an old WD Cloud drive I've been hanging on to for some reason. I collected the MP3 files back in the day to burn to CDs (remember that smell?) and to throw onto various MP3 players and eventually an iPod Classic (I still miss that thing — it plummeted to its death on a tile floor in 2014).

With that in mind, in order to test the self-hosting music waters, I uploaded roughly 20GB of music to my Jellyfin server and connected it to Feishin, an open source music client that acts as a slick frontend for your tunes. I'll get into the Feishin setup process in detail later, but it's overall surprisingly straightforward and it only took a few minutes to get up and running. Let's outline some of the app's key features.

The open source music streaming app offers a very Spotify-like experience

There's even an Auto DJ feature that plays related tracks

Feishin's layout looks so much like Spotify that it's a little off-putting at first, though thankfully, it's far less busy and it doesn't feature annoying ads on every page. On the left side, you'll see the My Library section with organization that includes Favorites, Tracks, Artists, Genres, and more, and underneath is an option for custom playlists. The right side shows album art and a list of your most played songs. At the bottom is a very familiar-looking mini-player.

There's even an Auto DJ option that automatically continues playback of similar tracks after your current song, album, or playlist is done. It's not quite as good as how Spotify plays related tracks or the streaming platform's AI-powered DJ, but it gets the job done and is better at recommending songs than I expected. When you search for an artist, you'll also see your top five most listened to songs by that band, alongside their bio, genre information, and more. Features like this aren't essential, but they're a welcome touch that make Feishin feel more Spotify-like.

On a basic level, Feishin offers a stripped-back Spotify-like experience that only features tracks you've added to it, which is exactly what I'm looking for from a self-hosting music platform.

How to setup your own version of Spotify

If you already have a Jellyfin server running, it's a breeze

Thankfully, I already host a Jellyfin server on my M4 Mac mini, but if you don't, you'll need to get one running first. After that, download Feishin from GitHub for whatever platform you plan to use it on (you can install the app on multiple desktop devices). In my case, on macOS, I needed to run a Terminal command to bypass a macOS quarantine error (this only took a few seconds). There are also Windows 11 and Linux versions of Feishin available on GitHub.

Next, I entered my Jellyfin username, password, and server IP address on Feishin's login screen. After that, I was in—my entire high school and university music library appeared on my MacBook Pro's screen within the app.

It's worth noting that, like many open-source apps, Feishin and Jellyfin are not a perfect fit. One of the key problems I've encountered is that, due to the iPod-era metadata naming scheme of my music library, Jellyfin hasn't been able to pull art for every artist, which is undeniably a bit of a bummer (I'm still looking for a solution). Sometimes, artist and album art can be very wrong, too. For example, instead of obscure Canadian pop-punk band Cauterize, Jellyfin pulled in what seems to be a random Swedish metal band that shares the same name.

It also sucks that I can't cast music to my Sonos One speakers with the app, and that on-earbud controls like stopping, starting, and skipping tracks don't work. There's no mobile version of Feishin either, unfortunately. There might be solutions to these issues that I just haven't uncovered yet. Overall, though, I'm impressed with Feishin, particularly with how easy it is to set up.

Am I ready to ditch Spotify entirely yet? Not quite. I still need to acquire a lot more recent music and solve at least a few of the key issues I mentioned above. However, now that I've used Feishin for a few days and am getting familiar with the app, I'm confident I'm one step closer to canceling my Spotify subscription.