Hello everyone,
Over the past few years, I’ve tried various music player solutions, but none of them met my specific needs. So, I decided to create my own music player with the following key features:
- Access to my entire music library remotely
- A directory structure view, rather than just Album/Artist/Genre views
- Transcoding while streaming to minimize mobile data usage
- Syncing parts of my library for offline usage
My previous attempts at finding a solution involved manually copying files from my server to my phone and playing them with a local player, or using Polaris with a manually transcoded version of my library. However, these methods were cumbersome, especially when I wanted to add new music.
I require a directory listing for several reasons:
- My library is too large to be manageable with a flat Artist/Album listing
- Some of my music is too niche to be properly indexed by current databases
- Many of my albums and songs have inconsistent metadata, with artist names spelled differently each time
- I’ve grown accustomed to my specific folder structure, which makes it easier for me to find specific songs
My friend and I have been using the app for the past two weeks, and I’ve addressed the most obvious UI issues and performance problems. The app seems to work well on both desktop and mobile devices.
There are still some features in the pipeline, such as displaying song metadata (e.g., embedded covers, ID3v2 title tags), filtering files by name, and possibly even video support. However, getting transcoding to work smoothly for video will be a significant challenge.
I’d appreciate any feedback on bugs you encounter, simple missing features (keeping in mind that I aim to maintain a low complexity for ease of maintenance), and code improvement suggestions, especially if you’re familiar with SolidJS, as this is my first major project using the framework.
P.S: This was also my first project actively using LLMs for coding, big shoutout to DeepSeek-V3-0324 for generally understanding what I want and giving concise solutions, even when it doesn’t always work, and big anti-shoutout to Gemini-2.5-pro, who insists on copy pasting my whole files in the output for even single line changes and always tries to rewrite every line of code in my repo even after explicitly instructing it not to.
Have you tried Plexamp? It supports all the features in your list. You need a Plex Pass for most of its features though.
I’m not mentioning it to suggest your project is bad or to discourage you; I’m mentioning it since it might give you some inspiration for features to implement in your one :)
https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp
Jellyfin equivalent which doesn’t require a subscription for your own media library.
It was missing a bunch of features last time I tried it - no crossfades, no automatic playlists (for things like liked songs, decades, etc), no artist radio (play an artist plus similar artists), no way to play sonically similar songs (based on server-side analysis), no loudness leveling, no Android Auto. Maybe it’s improved now - I’ll have to give it another shot.
Unfortunately I’m not sure I know enough about audio processing and similarity analysis to be able to implement those features myself.
Plexamp seems to be closed source and also paid? In that case that’s definitely not an option for me, but at least nice to know that something like this actually exists.
I’ll try to look at the screenshots to glean something useful to copy, but I’m already doing that with other projects anyway.
Thanks for the mention though! I did hear about Plex but not Plexamp yet
Yeah, unfortunately it’s closed-source. It’s a good app though! If you build something similar that’s fully open source, with an Android app and Android Auto support, then I’d definitely be interested in trying it.