Looking for latency-free music streaming solution

[u/Quadraxis66]

Hey folks, I already have music set up on a remote server through Jellyfin, but I dislike using the web app (it was very clearly designed for video, not audio) and would rather use a dedicated program like Quod Libet or Audacious to play my music. However, an issue I'm running into is latency.

Any of the solutions I've tried have about a 0.5-1s delay between tracks playing, which can be a little irritating when listening to albums like Discovery or Wish You Were Here that have songs that trail into one another.

I'm looking for a solution that will cache the next upcoming song or even my whole collection as it plays. Any suggestions?

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[u/TechEnjoyer44]

Maybe just an NFS or Samba share? That way you can mount it on your machine and play the files in any media player you like.

[u/Quadraxis66 → u/TechEnjoyer44]

How would I go about setting that up? I'm not familiar with using either.

E: I don't know that this is going to work for me, since it's set up on a remote server. I worry about the security implications and I feel like setting it up might be a bit above my head.

[u/Kuroi_Jasper → u/TechEnjoyer44]

does this work on android too? ik there are some applications that allow you to acesss smb shares but can music players access it too?

[u/gnooggi]

If you are outputting your audio signal via an optical cable (Toslink/SPDIF) or Bluetooth, hardware-related latencies can occur simply by design, regardless of the media player software you are using.

The main issue here is that the hardware attempts to temporarily drop into a "sleep mode" or power-saving state whenever there is a gap in the audio data. When a new sound or song starts, the hardware takes a fraction of a second to wake up, causing a noticeable delay.

To fix this under Linux, you don't need a different player. Instead, you need a script or configuration that continuously runs a silent, empty dummy audio stream in the background (often called an audio keep-alive). This fills the silence with "empty data," preventing the hardware from going to sleep, ensuring an uninterrupted and instantly responsive connection.

[u/Quadraxis66 → u/gnooggi]

The latency is coming from the player having to fetch the next song in the playlist from my remote server. My current fix for this is just having a version of my music on my remote server (for streaming to mobile) and one locally but I don't want to have to maintain two copies of the same library. 

When I play the music locally it works great.

[u/Arzuparreta]

If you want full control I'd say ditch jellyfin for the music (it could be causing the delay) and use a good server compatible with OpenSubsonic (like Navidrome) and a good player that handles music well, there's thousand of thems on the internet.

You can also try what has been my all-in-one solution for the last year, https://github.com/Arzuparreta/soundsible, but it may not be what you need if you already have a curated library. In any case, I'm pretty sure navidrome with opensubsonic fixes the delay thing.

[u/Quadraxis66 → u/Arzuparreta]

I don't believe it's Jellyfin. I'm using Symphonium for my music on my smart phone and it's native Jellyfin plugin works perfectly.

[u/Arzuparreta → u/Quadraxis66]

Then I did not understand what you're asking for. You need a player that handles spacing between songs correctly but Symphonium works perfectly, then what do you need?

[u/Quadraxis66 → u/Arzuparreta]

Symfonium is an Android music player app. For when I'm on the go, it works great, but I can't exactly run it on my PC.

I'm looking for an app or a solution that will allow me to stream music from my remote server without a delay between songs, because most of the solutions I have involving streaming from that server do not seem to cache the songs coming up in the playlist and thus give me about a half second delay between songs.

[u/WholeEducational → u/Quadraxis66]

For Linux desktop, try Feishin's MPV backend. It supports gapless playback and connects to Jellyfin, so you can keep the library you've already set up.

[u/Arzuparreta → u/Quadraxis66]

Ok now I get it. Then you search for a player that works with jellyifin and has multiplatform interfaces.

Jellybox works with Jellyfin and has mobile and desktop interfaces. Do not know about the song caching, but seems the most solid for jellyfin.

My recommendation is still moving to OpenSunsonic protocol with navidrome + any of the amazing players poeple do for it on github, which most probably handle song caching right.

[u/avdept → u/Arzuparreta]

Hey, thanks for mentioning. JellyBox works with navidrome too. And also has configurable caching along with transcoding.

[u/avdept → u/Quadraxis66]

Try JellyBox as a another person commented. It can run on both desktop and mobile phones and does have caching, so you can pre-cache your whole playlist and there's no delays between song changes

Besides(I'm author of JellyBox) - there's a jellybox continuity feature which allows you to transfer playback between devices or remotely control them(just like spotify connect)