If, like me, you wish your Jellyfin music server could do things that Spotify or Apple Music can, you’re in luck. There are some awesome plugins developed by the Jellyfin community, which add lots of cool features to your Jellyfin server.

Get automatically updated and synced lyrics

Takes about two minutes to set up

First up, we have Lyrics. It’s a third-party plugin for Jellyfin, designed to automatically pull missing lyrics for all tracks on your Jellyfin server. You can set it to automatically fetch those lyrics whenever the Jellyfin server launches, or have it scan the library and fetch missing lyrics at regular intervals.

You can also manually update lyrics for a song by clicking one button. It has a smart scanning system which ignores songs without lyrics. Lyrics is pretty seamless in my experience, and it just works once you set it up.

Start by logging into your Jellyfin server via the web portal. Click the hamburger menu and open the Dashboard. Scroll down to Plugins and click Manager Repositories > New Repository. Paste in this link to add the third-party repository for the plugin we need.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Felitendo/jellyfin-plugin-lyrics/master/manifest.json

It should appear in the list of Jellyfin repos.

You’ll need to restart the Jellyfin server at this point. Since I’m running Jellyfin as a Docker container, I can run the command docker restart jellyfin to restart the server.

Before installing Lyrics, we’ll need to remove the default lyrics plugin called “LrcLib Lyrics.” Look for it under installed plugins, click it, expand it, and then hit “Uninstall” to remove it. If it’s not showing up in the list of plugins in the first place, you can proceed to the next step.

Search for “lyrics’ in the plugins tab and install the plugin named “Lyrics.” Click the blue Install button, and accept any warnings that may pop up.

Now back on the dashboard, scroll down to Scheduled Tasks and click on it. Look for the “Download and upgrade lyrics (new)” menu and expand it. You’ll see that it’s set to download and auto refresh lyrics every 24 hours. You can add more triggers to change how it refreshes the lyrics. For example, you can set it to run on “On application startup,” so it automatically checks and updates lyrics accordingly.

If it misses a file, you can open it in the Jellyfin media player, Click the three dots on the player and select Edit Lyrics. Then click the little search icon, and it’ll show you a list of lyrics for the track, which you can update with one click.

Set up your own version of Spotify Wrapped

Made possible with Last.fm scrobbling

Next we’re looking at the Last.fm scrobbler plugin. Scrobbling is the activity of logging and tracking your listening history in one place. If you’ve heard of Trakt (which tracks your TV watch history across platforms), the Last.fm scrobbler does the same thing but for your music.

With a Scrobbler logging your music history over months or years, you get your own private version of Spotify Wrapped. It’s a good way to put together playlists of forgotten favorites. You can even get better recommendations based on this listening history and the recommendations will get more spot on the longer you scrobble. Using this personal listening data, there are tools that can generate automatic playlists (just like popular music streaming apps.)

Once again, jump to the Jellyfin server dashboard and scroll down to Plugins. Click Manage Repositories > New Repository. Paste in this link to bring in the Last.fm plugin repo.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danielfariati/jellyfin-plugin-lastfm/refs/heads/master/manifest.json

Name it “Last.fm” and click Add.

Restart the Jellyfin server. If you’re running a Docker container, you can simply run the docker restart Jellyfin command in the terminal to restart it.

Search for the “last.fm” plugin and install it.

Restart the Jellyfin server one last time after installing the plugin. When you come back, there should be a new Settings button on the Last.fm plugin page.

On the Last.fm plugin page, enter your Last.fm username and password (you can sign up for it, if you don’t have a Last.fm account). Check Enable Scrobbling for the user? and then click Save.

The plug-in will immediately start scrobbling your music, which you can check on the Last.fm page.

Build dynamic playlists

Make auto-generated playlists you’ll want to listen to

SmartLists is a third-party Jellyfin plugin for creating rule-based dynamic playlists. Instead of creating playlists by hand, you can use this plugin to spawn auto-generated playlists based on “rules” you set. For example, you could have it generate an “on repeat” playlist, which automatically populates with your most listened tracks (obeying the play count rules you set.) More importantly, it automatically syncs with your library and updates the playlists as you add more music.

Start by creating a new repository. Go to Dasboard > Manage Repositories > New Repository. Paste in this repo.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jyourstone/jellyfin-plugin-manifest/main/manifest.json

Click Save and restart the Jellyfin server.

Then look up “smartlists” under the Plugins tab. Install it. Then restart your Jellyfin server one last time.

After restarting, you’ll see a Settings button under the SmartLists plugin page. This is where you can construct rules for generating new playlists. You can give your playlist a name, add rules for how it should be populated and updated, and hit Create Playlist. It should show up on the Jellyfin homepage under the Playlists tab.

You’ll also want to set rules for how often the playlist refreshes. By default, it’ll do so whenever Jellyfin starts. You can manually refresh it by pressing the Refresh button under Manage lists in the plugin settings.

OS

Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS, Fire TV, Roku OS, WebOS, Xbox,

Price

Free

There are even more plugins to discover

With that, your Jellyfin now has three features that you normally see on Spotify or Apple Music. There are dozens of more plugins actively maintained by the community that add even more awesome functionality to Jellyfin.