• 1 Post
  • 87 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: November 3rd, 2023

help-circle
  • To anyone reading this, unless you absolutely must have the federation abilities of Funkwhale above your own sanity, it’s not worth it. Funkwhale is an absolute bear to setup by comparison to every other music server. I have been bouncing through them all spinning up containers for the same library and putting them through their paces.

    Spinning up 4 Navidrome containers with 4 different domains for my user’s library preferences was quicker and easier than setting up one Funkwhale server for 4 users. It’s beyond absurd how clunky it is. And worst of all, 4 Navidrome containers are extremely faster, less resource hungry, and easier to maintain.

    None of the local library importing works in the UI unless you’re the admin account. That means going into users to create libraries then spinning up an API container with a command to import the local files. But then it doesn’t watch them unless you include that flag and leave the detached container running.

    On top of that, so few people are running it that you cannot just search the web for issues. It’s their lacking documentation only. You know something is obscure when you cant even find their own website by searching Funkwhale without going through the top result that links to it.

    Funkwhale is just not ready for prime time compared to the other servers.

    I have used Airsonic and then Airsonic-advanced for years after briefly using Subsonic. But recently as my more and more of my library migrated to FLAC I had issues with transcoding. Sometimes all transcoding would just start failing and when it did Airsonic would peg every thread it had available. (Heresy I know but when I or my users are on a mobile network I don’t want to chew through data in a few day long outings.) So that’s what led me down this path. I tried Navidrome and loved it except for the lack of library separation. I tried Funkwhale, and I tried Gonic. Gonic is wonderful in its simplicity but it’s almost too basic. It supposedly had library separation and has transcoding but neither was working out of the box so I just said fuck it and went with 4 Navidrome containers because copy and pasting is easy and everything about Navidrome just works. Most importantly, Navidrome is lightning fast loading in an app which is the only way my users interact with the server. It fires up transcoding so fast you almost cannot tell the difference between loading the native file and transcoding in terms of response. I swear there was at least one more server I looked at but passed over and I cannot recall the name.

    Edit: FYI Navidrome said that they are currently reworking the entire server backend, but after that it will be easier to implement multiple libraries.













  • We’ll see if they even make them. I can’t imagine there’s a huge customer base who really needs to cram all that I/o through only two or 4 lanes. Why make these ubiquitous cards more expensive if most of the customers buying them are not short PCI-E lanes? So far most making use of 5.0 are graphics and storage devices. I’ve not seen any hint of someone making a sas or 10 gbe card that uses 5.0 and fewer lanes. Most cards for sale today still use 3.0 let alone 4.0.

    I might as well just drop the cash on a real EPYC CPU with 128 lanes if I’m only going to be able to buy cutting edge expansion cards that companies may or may not be motivated to make.



  • Not really. It’s just a normal Zen 4 CPU with some server features like ECC memory support.

    The biggest downfall of these chips is they have the same 28 PCI-E lanes as any consumer grade Zen 4 CPU. Quite the difference between that and the cheapest EPYC CPUs outside the 4000 series.

    You’re going to run in to some serious I/O shortages if trying to fit a 10gbe card, an HBA card for storage, and a graphics card or two and some NVME drives.


  • Is the x4 slot full length? Because the graphics card will likely work fine in an x4 slot. Especially if you are just using it for transcoding. PCI Express is backwards compatible, is just going to limit performance.

    PCIe 2.0 with 4 lanes gets you 2GB/s. Which should be more than enough for video transcoding.

    If it’s not a full length slot you can buy a riser that converts it. Some x4 slots have a cutout at the end though to allow them to accept full length cards.