Software Alternatives & Reviews

LibreTime VS Polaris

Compare LibreTime VS Polaris and see what are their differences

LibreTime logo LibreTime

LibreTime is a community driven fork of SourceFabric's Airtime.

Polaris logo Polaris

Polaris is a music streaming application, designed to let you enjoy your music collection from any computer or mobile device.
  • LibreTime Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-27
  • Polaris Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-27

LibreTime videos

LibreTime Tutorial: How to install LibreTime

More videos:

  • Tutorial - LibreTime 101: How to schedule a podcast to play the newest episode on an automatic basis
  • Tutorial - Libretime Tutorial: How to upload and schedule tracks

Polaris videos

Impressive Flight in UNITED POLARIS Business Class: 777-300ER Review San Francisco to Frankfurt!

More videos:

  • Review - 2021 Polaris GENERAL XP 1000 Deluxe Full UTV Review
  • Review - The Polaris Slingshot Is One of the Craziest Vehicles On Sale

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to LibreTime and Polaris)
SHOUTcast
100 100%
0% 0
Media Players And Streaming Platforms
Broadcast
100 100%
0% 0
Music Streaming
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare LibreTime and Polaris

LibreTime Reviews

  1. Be prepared to face the terminal

    Running for some (4) years Airtime 2.5.2 (latest free version), now moving to LibreTime because of various runtime (unsupported PHP too old etc.). My description also includes the (painfully) migration of the existing database, so new users might read that part as a story.

    Installation

    Nothing fancy, install OS (Ubuntu 18.04), git and curl are probably already there or at the distance of an sudo apt -y git curl, install icecast and apache2 (or whatever the web server you might need if you plan to pump the stream in a web page), then read the Libre docs, clone the repo and install -fiap.

    Do NOT use Ubuntu later than 18.04 (so no 20) because it will not work.

    Back to installer: did not work 100% mainly because of the post install setup (the web part), which have the habit of not saving the changed password for admin and others, so a nano visit to /etc/airtime/airtime.conf and on liquidsoap might be needed. Also /etc/airtime/icecast_pass might need tweaking as well.

    So I had to stop everything (service apache2 stop, libretime runtime as well), change the passwords to match icecast, move airtime.conf to a backup location and rerun the web part, which worked perfectly.

    [optional] Move of existing airtime database

    Files moved from another server to this new one, 70 GB, rsync, grab a coffee (ok, more than one) and copy everything in the exact same default location (/srv/airtime/stor/). All good. Database move: complete pain. My setup is postgres, which does not support select from one database and insert in another, and the dblink postgres specific thing sucks ass. Also, postgres is quite slow, database fields slightly differs, so I had to export in a CSV the airtime tables (ccfiles, cchistory, ccshow etc.) Some of the tables had around 700.000 rows and I had to do manual SQL in order to map the old existing foreign keys over the new ones - took one day but all good.

    The run

    My setup is one main (webserver + icecast) machine - which acts also as a relay for the second machine - and libretime sits on a second machine. Although the interface is relatively different than what airtime 2.5.2 has, I was able to setup the params, stream, schedule shows etc. in no time. The dragging of tracks into the right panel does not respect the UI (meaning I am dragging between songs 100 and 101 but I end up with the new track somewhere below some rows) but I can live with that. The same limitation of a show that cannot have more than 24 hours is present, but other than that, everything it is running for a week now on a 4 GB RAM machine with CPU sitting most of the time in one digit. Import is very quick, smart blocks is a killer, and it works.

    Conclusion

    Although is not a stable release and is probably driven by a handful of guys having another jobs and doing changes in the spare time, it is a good fork which runs. Be comfortable with ssh and terminal because you might need to do this, especially when integrating with web servers, certbot, redirecting streams to HTTPS, making Icecast SSL-aware etc. But that's how Linux infrastructure is running, so no complains here.

    ๐Ÿ‘ Pros:    Free|Quick|Community|Minimal documentation|Source-code
    ๐Ÿ‘Ž Cons:    Alpha|Setup|Migration

List of Top Free Open Source & Self Hosted Application for Media Streaming
LibreTime โ€“ Simple, open source platform that lets you broadcast streaming radio on the web (fork of Airtime). AGPL-3.0 PHP

Polaris Reviews

35 Open-source Free Music and Audio Streaming Servers (Self-hosted)
Polaris is a music streaming application, designed to let you enjoy your music collection from any computer or mobile device. Polaris works by streaming music directly from your computer (or cloud server), without uploading it to a third-party. It is free and open-source software, without any kind of premium version.
Source: medevel.com
List of Top Free Open Source & Self Hosted Application for Media Streaming
Polaris โ€“ Music browsing and streaming application optimized for large music collections, ease of use and high performance. MIT Rust

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Polaris should be more popular than LibreTime. It has been mentiond 8 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

LibreTime mentions (1)

  • Open source music streaming?
    Https://libretime.org/ seems like a helper tool for setting up icecast and other radio type services? I've only just learned about it just now so you'll want to evaluate it for yourself. Source: about 2 years ago

Polaris mentions (8)

  • Does anyone use Jellyfin for music?
    If you have a big library I would highly recommend Polaris Https://github.com/agersant/polaris. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Best way to stream music from server to remote clients
    If you have a big library https://github.com/agersant/polaris is the way to go with easy to create large playlists and you can easy make a cloudflare tunnel or reverse proxy for it using caddy. They also have iOS and Android App. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Is there a self-hosted software for hifi music streaming?
    It doesn't have a lot of features like complex searching and transcoding, but I like https://github.com/agersant/polaris. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Apple Music is the last library focused music service
    Why not just run your own streaming service? You're here on hn, so standing up a webserver (or even a Raspberry Pi) is hardly beyond your means presumably. Subsonic [0] appears to be well polished. I've used a FOSS fork called Airsonic [1] previously, though I've played with (and liked) Polaris [2] in the past. All three would meet your (possibly only) requirement of using your own music, and I wouldn't consider... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • Let's create an overview of selfhostable music servers!
    I can't send a PR right now, but https://github.com/agersant/polaris is worth adding. Source: over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing LibreTime and Polaris, you can also consider the following products

AzuraCast - AzuraCast is a free and open-source self-hosted "web radio station in a box".

LMS - Lightweight Music Server - Access your self-hosted music using a web interface.

Centova Cast - Centova Cast is the world's most advanced Internet radio stream hosting control panel.

MusicDB - MusicDB is a music manager, server and player that focus on music.

OpenBroadcaster - Broadcast Automation Software LPFM IPTV

Swing Music - Beautiful and fast music streaming server.