LMS Lightweight Music Server on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

LMS Lightweight Music Server on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

LMS (Lightweight Music Server) is an open source, self-hosted music streaming server. It streams your personal music collection from anywhere through a fast in-browser web player or any Subsonic-compatible mobile and desktop app. It scans the audio files you copy into its library and presents your albums, artists, genres and playlists with cover art, on-the-fly transcoding through ffmpeg, and a Subsonic-compatible API that a wide ecosystem of player apps already speak. It is a privacy-respecting alternative to hosted streaming services for anyone who would rather keep their music, and control over who can reach it, on their own infrastructure.

LMS is written in C++ on the Wt web toolkit and keeps its catalogue in an embedded database, which makes it unusually light on memory and CPU for a full-featured streaming server, so a modest instance comfortably serves a large library.

This cloudimg image is a ready-to-run streaming appliance, not just the software:

• LMS 3.79.0 built from source and served behind an nginx reverse proxy, managed by systemd
• Secure by default: a unique administrator password and a separate Subsonic API key are generated on every VM's first boot, before the server accepts its first connection, so no shared or default login ever ships in the image
• The server bound to 127.0.0.1:5082 only and never exposed directly to the network
• ffmpeg for on-the-fly transcoding to any bitrate or format
• A dedicated Azure data disk at /var/lms for the music library, the catalogue database and the transcode cache, separate from the OS disk and independently resizable
• A preconfigured music library and a nightly scan, so audio you copy in is picked up on its own

Licensing is GPL-3.0-or-later and free - the cloudimg charge covers packaging, security patching, image maintenance and 24/7 expert support.

Recommended size: Standard_B2s. Target users: anyone self-hosting a personal or family music library who wants a private, ad-free streaming server they fully control. Prerequisites: an Azure subscription, a VNet and an SSH key; the NSG should permit port 22 from your admin networks and port 80 for the web player.

Deployment guide: https://www.cloudimg.co.uk/guides/lms-music-server-on-ubuntu-24-04-azure/

24/7 support: support@cloudimg.co.uk