Gonic

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 901 words

On a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 with 512 MB of RAM, Gonic serves a 15,000-track FLAC library to a phone over the Subsonic API and leaves 400 MB free. That is the pitch. It is a single Go binary with a SQLite database, no web player worth mentioning, a two-page admin panel, and a strict opinion about how your music folders must be laid out. It has 2,541 stars, is GPL-3.0, and is the tool I recommend to people who already own a good Subsonic client and want the smallest possible thing behind it.

Subsonic is the interface, so choose the client first

Gonic has no listening UI of its own. It implements the Subsonic API, the de facto standard for self-hosted music, and every listening feature you see comes from the app you connect. The good ones on Android are Symfonium and Tempo; on desktop, Feishin is a Spotify-like client that pairs well; on iOS, play:Sub and Amperfy. Pick the client by which platform you listen on, then install Gonic to feed it. Scrobbling to Last.fm and ListenBrainz is built into the server, so listens count regardless of client.

This is also where Gonic diverges from Navidrome, the far larger project in the same space. Navidrome ships a full web player and per-user libraries and is the safer default for most people; the Navidrome walkthrough covers that path. Gonic is for the subset who never open a browser to listen and want the lightest possible daemon.

Folder layout is the rule that trips everyone

Gonic browses by folder, not by tag, and it expects exactly artist/album/tracks. A library organised as one flat folder, or as genre/artist/album, will show up wrong or not at all. Compilations belong under an artist folder named for the compilation or under "Various Artists"; multi-disc albums go in one album folder with disc numbers in the tags. This is a deliberate design that makes scans fast and predictable, and it is the number one reason people conclude Gonic is broken. Spend an hour with a tagger and a rename script before the first scan and the rest of the setup is trivial.

Multiple music folders are supported, so a "lossless" and a "lossy" tree can be served side by side, and podcasts get their own path with RSS subscriptions managed from a client.

The whole deployment is five environment variables

services:
  gonic:
    image: sentriz/gonic:latest
    ports:
      - "4747:80"
    environment:
      - TZ=Europe/London
      - GONIC_MUSIC_PATH=/music
      - GONIC_PODCAST_PATH=/podcasts
      - GONIC_PLAYLISTS_PATH=/playlists
      - GONIC_CACHE_PATH=/cache
    volumes:
      - ./gonic-data:/data
      - /srv/music:/music:ro
      - ./podcasts:/podcasts
      - ./playlists:/playlists
      - ./cache:/cache
    restart: unless-stopped

Browse to port 4747, log in as admin/admin, change the password, trigger a scan, and it is running. Scans are incremental after the first one, and a scan of 15,000 tracks finishes in a few minutes on a Pi 4. There is a scan-on-interval setting and a watch mode for libraries that change often. Everything Gonic knows lives in one SQLite file under /data; back that up and the music directory and you can rebuild the server in 1 minute.

Transcoding profiles are per user and per client

The feature that quietly makes Gonic excellent on a cellular connection is per-client transcoding. In the admin panel you create a profile: Opus at 128 kbps for the phone, no transcoding for the desktop, and Gonic serves the right stream depending on which client is asking. Encodes are cached at GONIC_CACHE_PATH, so a frequently played album is transcoded once. Give the cache 5 to 10 GB and it saves a lot of ffmpeg on a low-power box. Jukebox mode, playing through the server's own audio output via mpv, exists for people who want a headless player in a room; it is a bonus, not the main event.

Playlists are M3U files on disk, editable from clients or from a text editor, which suits the same crowd that likes folder-based browsing.

What it gives up

No web player to speak of, no user-facing library management, no artwork fetching beyond what is embedded or sitting in the folder, no smart playlists, and a bare admin UI. Multi-user exists, with per-user scrobbling and playlists, but there is no per-user library isolation. Navidrome does all of those, and Airsonic Advanced does most of them at a higher resource cost. If any of them are requirements, Gonic is not your server. The trade is deliberate: it is about 30 MB of RAM at idle, roughly a fifth of Navidrome's, and has almost nothing to go wrong.

What I'd do

Tidy the library to artist/album, run the compose file above, and set two transcoding profiles: Opus 128 for mobile, raw for everything else. Put Symfonium on the phone and Feishin on the desktop, and let scrobbling run to ListenBrainz. If after a month you catch yourself wanting a web player or a partner wants their own library view, move to Navidrome; the clients and playlists carry over because both speak Subsonic. For a solo listener on a small box, Gonic is the one I would leave running, and the one that will still be running when you have forgotten it is there.