LMS

LMS — Lightweight Music Server — is an open-source self-hosted music streaming server written in C++ that exposes your personal audio library through a fast web UI and a Subsonic-compatible API. Instead of leaning on a SaaS streaming service that increasingly favors catalog-as-a-product over the music you actually own, LMS indexes a folder of audio files on disk and lets you stream them to any browser or to any of the dozens of mobile and desktop clients that already speak the Subsonic protocol. The result is a low-overhead, vendor-independent music backend that scales from a personal library on a small VPS to a household setup with several users and tens of thousands of tracks.

Common Use Cases

Music collectors with deep personal libraries — FLAC rips, lossless backups of physical media, hard-to-find live recordings — use LMS to keep that catalog streamable from anywhere without re-uploading it to a commercial service that may not even allow the formats they care about. Households with multiple listeners self-host LMS so each family member has their own playlists, ratings, and listening history while sharing one underlying library and one backup pipeline. Mobile-first listeners pick a Subsonic client they prefer (substreamer, DSub, Symfonium, play:Sub, Sublime Music, and more) and point it at their LMS instance, getting a polished native experience without LMS having to ship its own apps. Audiophiles use LMS as a private alternative to Spotify or Apple Music for high-bitrate playback over private networks, taking advantage of read-only library mounts and well-defined transcoding rules. Privacy-conscious listeners self-host both LMS and a scrobble target like Maloja on the same VPS, keeping listening data fully off third-party services while still getting per-track and per-artist statistics. Power users with already-organized libraries on NAS hardware bind-mount the existing share into the LMS container as `/music:ro`, letting LMS index it without touching the source files.

Key Features

• Subsonic-compatible API that works with the wide ecosystem of Subsonic clients across every major platform
• Lightweight C++ daemon with SQLite-backed metadata storage for predictable resource usage on small VPS plans
• Multiple user accounts with separate playlists, ratings, listening history, starred items, and per-user settings
• Smart recommendation engine that builds clusters of similar artists and tracks from tags and listening history
• Radio and autoplay modes that extend a starting selection with similar material from the local library
• Last.fm and Maloja-compatible scrobbling for unified listening history across devices and apps
• Read-only mount of the music directory so the server can never accidentally modify or delete source audio
• Multiple authentication backends — internal, PAM, and HTTP-header SSO — for integrating with existing identity systems
• Cover-art extraction, transcoding for clients that need different formats, and metadata-driven library views
• Configurable trusted-proxy support for clean integration behind reverse proxies like Traefik
• Open-source GPL licensing with active upstream development and frequent tagged releases
• Web UI with playlist management, queue control, and library browsing built directly into the server image

Why deploy LMS on Hostinger VPS

Running LMS on a Hostinger VPS gives you a private, vendor-independent home for a personal music library that survives any one streaming platform's catalogue, pricing, or policy changes. Dedicated CPU on a VPS handles transcoding, library scans, and concurrent listeners predictably; persistent volume storage keeps the SQLite metadata database, listener history, and playlists durable across container restarts and host upgrades. Because LMS scans the music directory but does not mutate it, mounting the source as read-only keeps your audio files completely safe even if the indexer encounters a bug. Combined with Traefik-based HTTPS routing, the public URL you point your Subsonic clients at is TLS-encrypted on every device. The C++ runtime keeps the deployment small enough to coexist with other self-hosted services — a scrobble target like Maloja, a sync server like Syncthing, a backup service — on the same VPS without crowding it. For listeners who prefer the catalogue they have curated over the catalogue a SaaS provider has decided to stock, self-hosting LMS on Hostinger is a clean path back to the music they actually own.