Open-source alternatives to Owntone Server

Snapcast is a multiroom audio streaming system designed to broadcast synchronized high-fidelity audio from a central server to multiple network clients. It functions as a TCP audio distribution server that captures raw audio sources and distributes them to synchronous network audio players. The system utilizes networked clock synchronization to coordinate timing between devices, ensuring simultaneous playback across different physical locations without echo or delay. It includes a remote audio playback controller to manage volume, mute status, and stream assignments via HTTP or WebSockets. T

Music-tag-web is a self-hosted music platform that combines a music tag editor, metadata scraper, batch file processor, music library manager, and Subsonic API server into a single web application. It provides a complete solution for organizing, tagging, and playing a personal music collection, with the ability to edit embedded metadata such as title, artist, album, lyrics, and cover art for local audio files. The platform distinguishes itself through its comprehensive automation and integration capabilities. It supports batch online auto-tagging from multiple music services, background task

Koel is a self-hosted music streaming server that allows users to stream personal audio collections from a private server to any web browser. It functions as a multi-user audio library, supporting independent user libraries and single sign-on authentication. The platform integrates cloud storage drivers to host and serve music files from third-party providers and utilizes a metadata aggregator to enhance local library data and track listening history via external services. It also includes a natural language interface for executing playback commands and navigating the music library. The syst

Blackcandy is a self-hosted music streaming server and digital music library manager. It allows users to host personal collections of audio files on a private server for streaming to web browsers and dedicated mobile applications. The system includes a media library sync engine that monitors file system changes in the background and uses parallel processing to keep the music database synchronized. It manages library organization by extracting audio metadata and fetching artist and album imagery from external databases. The platform provides capabilities for remote audio playback, music libra

Shairport-sync is an AirPlay audio streaming receiver that enables the reception of wireless audio streams from Apple devices and routes them to system sound servers or hardware devices. Its primary purpose is to facilitate multi-room audio synchronization, aligning output across multiple playback devices to ensure content plays in unison. The project distinguishes itself through advanced digital signal processing, including impulse-response convolution filtering to correct frequency response. It provides precise audio timing adjustments to compensate for amplifier latency and offers extended

Koel is a self-hosted music streaming server designed for hosting, managing, and streaming personal digital music collections via web and mobile applications. It functions as a personal audio streaming platform that allows users to organize local and cloud-based audio libraries with integrated user accounts and playlist management. The system distinguishes itself by acting as a cloud-integrated media server, enabling the connection of remote storage providers to serve music files without requiring local disk space. It provides a cross-platform playback experience, ensuring consistent access t

Strawberry is a desktop music player and SQL music library manager designed for managing large collections of digital audio files. It functions as a high-fidelity audio client that provides bit-perfect playback by bypassing system resampling to deliver raw audio data directly to hardware output devices. The software distinguishes itself through advanced library organization and external integration. It utilizes relational database indexing for fast searching and employs acoustic fingerprinting to retrieve missing metadata and correct album information. Additionally, it synchronizes listening

FeelUOwn is a modular music player that integrates local audio files and external streaming services into a unified playback engine. It functions as both a standard media player and a headless audio server, allowing for background operation in terminal environments or on remote systems. The application distinguishes itself through an integrated natural language processing pipeline that converts text descriptions into curated playlists and radio stations. Users can extend the player's core functionality and define custom operational workflows through external script files, while a network inte

AirConnect is a cross-protocol audio gateway and network proxy that relays AirPlay audio streams to non-Apple hardware, such as Chromecast, Sonos, and other UPnP compatible media players. It functions as a multi-platform audio streamer that enables the casting of audio from Apple devices to a variety of smart speakers and network audio devices over a local network. The project utilizes virtual AirPlay device emulation to mimic a receiver's network identity, allowing Apple devices to recognize the proxy as a valid streaming target. It translates AirPlay signals and performs on-the-fly audio tr

Feishin is a cross-platform desktop audio player designed for streaming and managing music libraries hosted on Navidrome or Subsonic compatible servers. It functions as a remote music library manager that utilizes the Subsonic API to browse collections and synchronize playback. The application provides specialized capabilities for music organization, including the creation and management of smart playlists based on specific filtering criteria. It also features synchronized lyrics display that matches on-screen text to the timing of the audio track. The software covers broad functional areas

Navidrome is a self-hosted music streaming server designed to organize, index, and stream personal digital music collections. It functions as a centralized audio streaming platform that manages local audio files, automatically enriching them with metadata and artwork while providing a web interface for playback. The system supports multi-user access, allowing administrators to manage separate collections and listening histories with granular permissions. The platform distinguishes itself through its compatibility with the Subsonic API, enabling users to connect a wide range of third-party mus

Musikcube is a cross-platform audio player and high-performance C++ audio engine designed for managing local music libraries. It functions as both a terminal-based music player and a headless audio server capable of indexing metadata and playing audio across different operating systems. The project utilizes a client-server architecture that separates the core audio engine and metadata indexer from the user interface. This design allows it to act as a self-hosted audio streaming server, delivering music and metadata to remote clients via WebSocket and HTTP with support for real-time transcodin

cmus is a terminal-based audio player that runs entirely within a terminal window, using the ncurses library to render its interface without any graphical toolkit. It is designed to play local music files and internet radio streams, with support for CUE sheet metadata that splits single audio files into logical tracks with correct timing, and gapless playback that eliminates audible pauses between consecutive tracks. The player distinguishes itself through a Vi-inspired incremental search interface that locates tracks and commands in real time as you type, and a tab-based workspace model that

Twisted is an event-driven networking engine for Python that provides a framework for building asynchronous network applications. At its core, it uses a reactor-based event loop to drive all input and output, dispatching callbacks in a single thread without blocking. The library implements a deferred promise chain for composing asynchronous logic, along with a protocol and factory pattern that separates connection state management from protocol handling, enabling reusable handlers for different network protocols. The framework supports multiple event loops across platforms, including select,

OpenMediaVault is a Debian-based network attached storage (NAS) operating system that turns a computer into a dedicated storage appliance, managed entirely through a browser-based control panel. It provides a unified configuration interface for managing file sharing protocols, RAID arrays, user permissions, and network services, with extensibility through a modular plugin system that adds new capabilities without modifying the core installation. The platform supports setup and management of multiple RAID levels for data redundancy or performance, and exposes file storage over protocols includ

Cowrie is an SSH and Telnet honeypot that simulates vulnerable services to capture attacker commands, file transfers, and brute force attempts for deception and monitoring. It uses Python-based protocol emulation within a Twisted event-driven network framework to handle concurrent connections, while maintaining an in-memory virtual filesystem that logs every read, write, and traversal operation. The honeypot distinguishes itself through LLM-driven dynamic response generation, producing context-aware shell replies that adapt to attacker commands rather than relying on static templates. A plugi

Beets is a command-line music library manager that automates the organization, standardization, and maintenance of digital audio collections. It functions as a relational database-backed system that identifies audio content through acoustic fingerprinting and retrieves accurate metadata from online databases to ensure consistent tagging and directory structures. The project distinguishes itself through an event-driven pipeline architecture and a modular plugin system, which allow users to intercept and customize library processing workflows. This extensibility enables the integration of exter

PixelPlayer is a local music library manager and media player that supports offline audio and video playback. It provides tools for organizing personal collections by artist, album, or genre and includes a built-in editor for modifying audio file metadata tags. The application features wireless media casting to stream content to compatible external smart speakers or televisions. It also includes a dynamic user interface that adapts its color palette and layout based on the artwork of the current track. Playback capabilities include gapless transitions with custom crossfade, queue management

Snapcast is a multi-room audio streaming server and network audio synchronizer. It coordinates audio playback across multiple networked clients from a single central server to ensure synchronized sound across different locations. The system utilizes a network audio synchronizer to prevent echo and lag, aligning audio streams through precise time synchronization. It also includes an audio stream resampler that adjusts the sample rate of incoming audio to match the specific hardware requirements of each playback client. The project provides a remote audio controller for centralized management

Librosa is a Python audio analysis library and digital signal processing framework. It functions as a feature extraction suite and music information retrieval tool designed to analyze the structural and sonic characteristics of audio signals. The library provides specialized capabilities for music analysis, including dynamic tempo tracking to identify rhythmic pulses and spectral feature extraction to compute harmonic spectra, chroma variants, and onset points. It also serves as a time-series audio processor for synchronizing audio streams. The system covers a broad range of audio processing

Mopidy is a modular, headless audio streaming server and Python-based music server. It functions as a remote controlled music player that streams audio from local files and online services through a unified architecture. The system is built as an extensible platform that supports custom plugins for music backends, audio sinks, and remote control interfaces. This framework allows for the integration of new audio sources and output devices via custom extensions. The server provides capabilities for multi-source audio streaming and remote playback management. Users can manage music playback and

SimpMusic is an ad-free music streaming application that provides background audio and video playback from external web sources. It enables personal music library management through the organization of custom playlists and the synchronization of user accounts across multiple devices. The application features AI-powered real-time translation of time-synced lyrics and integrates with vehicle head units to map playback controls and browsing for in-car use. It utilizes cookie-based session synchronization to access personal libraries and recommendations from external services. The platform inclu

Harmonoid is a local music player focused on high fidelity audio playback and comprehensive music library management. It indexes local audio files into a structured database to facilitate the organization and retrieval of large collections based on artist, album, and genre. The project features advanced playback controls, including gapless transitions, crossfading, and manual adjustments for pitch, speed, and volume boosting. It also supports synchronized lyric displays sourced from embedded tags, local files, or online providers. Additional capabilities include direct editing of internal au

Psst is a cross-platform Spotify music client and library manager. It functions as a desktop application for streaming music and podcasts, providing a native playback interface and tools for organizing saved albums and playlists. The project is distinguished by a client-server architecture that separates the core audio playback engine from the user interface. This allows for dual-interface state sharing, where a graphical user interface and a dedicated command-line interface can simultaneously control the same playback session. The application covers audio streaming with loudness normalizati

Cider is a cross-platform music streaming application and desktop client designed for the Apple Music service. It serves as a dedicated media player for streaming high-quality audio and managing music libraries within a unified desktop interface. The application provides specialized controls for desktop music playback, enabling users to organize and access personal music collections across different operating systems.

AfuseKt-release is an Android media player application designed for playing and organizing video content across various network protocols and cloud storage services. It functions as a network video streamer and a cloud storage video client. The application enables the streaming of movies and shows directly from cloud storage services such as Aliyun Drive, 115, and Alist. It also provides access to self-hosted media servers, including Emby, Plex, and Jellyfin. The system includes a metadata scraping engine that retrieves information from external databases to organize raw media files into a s

musicdl is a command line music downloader and library manager designed for searching and downloading audio tracks and playlists from streaming platforms to local storage. It functions as a tool for music library archiving, allowing for the bulk acquisition of media and the organization of local audio collections. The project includes an AI lyric transcriber that uses machine learning models to generate text lyrics from audio files, supporting synchronized playback where lyrics are highlighted based on playback timestamps. To maintain access to streaming platforms, it employs a network proxy