Navidrome or similar and Audiobookshelf

Hello,

I’m reading up on Freedom box and thinking of setting it up on a Pi4 to get the hang of it until the LibreCraft Freedom boxes are available in the UK.

I used to run a Yunohost server which was fun but demanding. The two things I miss from it, apart from Nextcloud, are Navidrome music server and Audiobookshelf, which is a library for audiobooks. So good!

I have seen a few topics mentioning that you can install applications that aren’t in the FBX catalogue. I am fairly comfortable with APT and simple command line stuff. Is that how apps are installed? Through APT? Or is it a containerised setup?

Sorry to answer my own question, but I’ve found this:

https://docs.freedombox.org/tutorial/index.html

It looks as though it’s at the outer edge of my abilities. If I took it on, would I be able to get some help?

Short Answer

If you can install these packages using apt on a Debian system you can just install and use these on FreedomBox.

Welcome @danceswithcats!

would I be able to get some help?

There’s a lot of collaboration on this board, you’d get some help with that.

It looks as though it’s at the outer edge of my abilities.

It’s easier than you think…

  1. If navidrome and audiobookshelf exist as Debian compatible packages you can just install them using apt on a FreedomBox. You’d have to set up a non-Debian repository. There are some examples of this being done on this board.
  2. If you also want to make a nice launcher icon and link to use the application from the FreedomBox web interface, you can do that by customization. There’s documentation for this and several threads on this board about this. Some users here have mastered this skill and are happy to share that knowledge. This is covered in the manual.
  3. If these packages get included in Debian one day (I don’t see them in the current release) they could then be candidates for complete inclusion in FreedomBox. This is a conditional and longer term statement, but they meet needs that would expand FreedomBox’s value to users.

It appears that both of these applications are packaged for Ubuntu and distributed through Ubuntu PPA. I have used a package on FreedomBox distributed through PPA. It worked perfectly. Everything you are asking about looks to me like you can do it.

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I installed the Navidrome binary following its own instructions. It works without any problems. You have to be careful with the security and backup settings.

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Thank you @joseph

I had found the manual, but hadn’t found that section yet. Very useful. I shall refer to it when I’ve got my pi set up.

I’ll also look forward to learning how to integrate apps into the Freedom box front end.

Thanks again for your informative and thorough answer.

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That’s fantastically useful, @problema Thank you. I’ll look more closely once I’ve got the box up and running.