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.
50GB of flac = maybe 20GB of Vorbis amirite? Is that 450GB of flac in your screen shot? It would fit on a 256gb phone even without an SD card. A 512GB card is quite affordable these days. Just make sure to buy a phone with a slot, and think of it as next level degoogling ;).
Yeah I know there’s lots of music in the world but who wants to listen to all of it on a moment’s notice anyway?
I enjoy it when people go to absurd lengths to not spend money. There’s so much room for creativity within what we tools we already have available to us.
I also think that it’s important to try new things and see what we can learn from it. Trying and failing is all a part of learning. And we need more ideas and knowledge out there if the idea of open source is to spread and gain popularity.
If a project is not interesting or important to me, that doesn’t mean that someone else can’t benefit from it. I think if one person finds a project useful or interesting then that’s worth sharing alone. And if only one other person wants to contribute their time to that project, then that’s still pretty awesome.