What is a Music Server?
A music server is a software application or device that stores, organizes, and manages a music collection. It acts as a central hub where music files are stored and can be accessed by various devices or clients.
What is a Music Streaming Server?
A music streaming server is a type of music server that allows users to stream their music collection over a network. It enables users to access their music from different devices and locations without physically transferring the music files. The server streams the audio data to the client devices, allowing users to listen to their music in real-time without the need for downloading or storing the files locally.
In this post, we will explore a variety of music streaming servers that are not only free but also open-source. These servers allow you to stream your music collection to any device, regardless of your location.
Whether you're looking for a personal music streaming server or a platform for a small community, we've got you covered.
1. mStream
mStream is an exceptional personal music streaming server. With mStream, you have the power to effortlessly stream your music collection from your home computer to any device, regardless of your location.
Server Features
- Cross Platform. Works on Windows, OSX, Linux, & FreeBSD
- Light on memory and CPU
- Tested on multi-terabyte libraries
- Runs on ARM boards like the Raspberry Pi
WebApp Features
- Gapless Playback
- Milkdrop Visualizer
- Playlist Sharing
- Upload Files through the file explorer
Other Features
- iOS Client
- Android Client
IrosTheBeggar
2. Gonic
Gonic is a music streaming server that is a free-software implementation of the Subsonic server API, supporting multiple clients.
Features
- browsing by folder (keeping your full tree intact) see here
- browsing by tags (using taglib - supports mp3, opus, flac, ape, m4a, wav, etc.)
- on-the-fly audio transcoding and caching (requires ffmpeg) (thank you spijet)
- subsonic jukebox mode, for gapless server-side audio playback instead of streaming (thank you lxea)
- support for podcasts (thank you lxea)
- pretty fast scanning (with my library of ~50k tracks, initial scan takes about 10m, and about 6s after incrementally)
- multiple users, each with their own transcoding preferences, playlists, top tracks, top artists, etc.
- last.fm scrobbling
- listenbrainz scrobbling (thank you spezifisch, lxea)
- artist similarities and biographies from the last.fm api
- support for multi valued tags like albumartists and genres (see more)
- a web interface for configuration (set up last.fm, manage users, start scans, etc.)
- support for the album-artist tag, to not clutter your artist list with compilation album appearances
- written in go, so lightweight and suitable for a raspberry pi, etc. (see ARM images below)
- newer salt and token auth
- tested on airsonic-refix, symfonium, dsub, jamstash, subsonic.el, sublime music, soundwaves, stmp, strawberry, and ultrasonic
sentriz3. Black Candy
Black Candy is a self hosted music streaming server built with Rails and Hotwire. The goal of the project is to create a real personal music center.
blackcandy-org4. Muffon
Muffon is a cross-platform music streaming client that allows users to listen to, discover, and organize music from various Internet sources, including Last.FM, VK, Odnoklassniki, Yandex Music, Spotify, Bandcamp, Deezer, SoundCloud, YouTube Music, YouTube, Discogs, Genius, MusixMatch, and MusicBrainz.
Features
- absolutely free
- no ads
- no login (but required for certain features)
- listening (artists / albums / tracks) (+ offline) (+ equalizer)
- artists (tracks / albums / similar / shows)
- albums
- tracks (similar / albums)
- tags (artists / albums / tracks)
- queue (+ shuffle / loop) (+ albums adding)
- music library (+ import from account) (+ compatibility)
- music services integration (Last.FM, Spotify - Coming soon)
staniel3595. Navidrome
Navidrome is an open source web-based music collection server and streamer. It gives you freedom to listen to your music collection from any browser or mobile device. It's like your personal Spotify!
Features
- Handles very large music collections
- Streams virtually any audio format available
- Reads and uses all your beautifully curated metadata
- Great support for compilations (Various Artists albums) and box sets (multi-disc albums)
- Multi-user, each user has their own play counts, playlists, favourites, etc...
- Very low resource usage
- Multi-platform, runs on macOS, Linux and Windows. Docker images are also provided
- Ready to use binaries for all major platforms, including Raspberry Pi
- Automatically monitors your library for changes, importing new files and reloading new metadata
- Themeable, modern and responsive Web interface based on Material UI
- Compatible with all Subsonic/Madsonic/Airsonic clients
- Transcoding on the fly. Can be set per user/player. Opus encoding is supported
- Translated to various languages
navidrome
Hazem
6. LMS
LMS is a self-hosted music streaming software: access your music collection from anywhere using a web interface!
Features
- Recommendation engine
- Audio transcoding for maximum interoperability and reduced bandwith requirements
- Multi-value tags:
genre,albumgenre,mood,albummood,albumgrouping, ... - Artist relationships:
composer,conductor,lyricist,mixer,performer,producer,remixer - Release types:
album,single,EP,compilation,live, ... - MusicBrainz Identifier support to handle duplicated artist and release names
- ListenBrainz support for:
- Scrobbling and synchronizing listens
- Synchronizing 'love' feedbacks
- ReplayGain support
- User management, with several authentication backends
- Subsonic/OpenSubsonic API support
Music Discovery
LMS provides several ways to help you find the music you like:
- Tag-based filters (ex: "Rock", "Metal and Aggressive", "Electronic and Relaxed", ...)
- Recommendations for similar artists and albums
- Radio mode, with endless filling of the play queue with tracks similar to what is there
- Searches in album, artist and track names (including sort names)
- Starred Albums/Artists/Tracks
- Random/Starred/Most played/Recently played/Recently added for Artist/Albums/Tracks, allowing you to search for things like:
- Recently added Electronic artists
- Random Metal and Aggressive albums
- Most played Relaxed tracks
- Starred Jazz albums
epoupon7. Swing Music
Swing Music is a beautiful, self-hosted music player for your local audio files. Like a cooler Spotify ... but bring your own music. Just run the app and enjoy your music library in a web browser.
swing-opensource8. Soundscape
Soundscape is a free and open-source personal music streaming server.
Features
- Import from YouTube
- Save any YouTube video as a song in your library
- Keep your entire music collection in the cloud
- Store thousands of songs on your private server
- Listen to your music anywhere
- Stream from any desktop or mobile device
- Create custom playlists
- Add your music to multiple playlists
- Share your playlists
- Let your friends listen to any playlist using the private URL
soundscapecloud9. Deaftone
Deaftone is a lightweight, cross-platform, open-source music server and streamer designed to make it easy to manage and listen to your music collection. Built using Rust, Axum, and SeaORM, Deaftone offers a modern and fast alternative to older, more bloated music servers like Subsonic.
With its streamlined design and user-friendly API, Deaftone makes it easy to access your music library from anywhere, on any device.
Deaftone is currently in active development, with a focus on building out its core functionality and adding new features based on user feedback.
Stay tuned for updates and new releases as we continue to improve and refine the platform.
Features
- Ability to handle the largest of music collections
- Cross-platform compatibility, with support for Windows, macOS, and Linux
- Simple, user-friendly API for easy integration with third-party applications
- Efficient, low-overhead architecture designed for fast performance and low resource usage
- Support for a wide range of audio formats, including FLAC, MP3, Ogg, and more
- Advanced features like playlists, automatic metadata scrapping, and more
Deaftone10. Koozic
KooZic is a music streaming server based on the Odoo ERP application. It gives you the possibility to access your music collection anywhere, from any device.
DocMarty8411. JPsonic
Jpsonic is a free, web-based media streamer, an Airsonic Clone. Most media servers have difficulty managing Japanese songs. To solve this, Development of Jpsonic has started.
Features
- Evolved meta processing
- Advanced sort tag support
- Reimplemented DLNA features
- HighRes FLAC and DSD support
- Cooperation with various mobile apps
- FLAC playback
- Transcode (to MP3)
- Transcode (to CD qual)
- Sort
- Server-side search
- Voice input
- Lazy loading
- Downloader
jpsonic12. Unsonic Music Server
Unsonic is a free drop in replacement for the Subsonic music server. It follows the Subsonic API and is usable with existing Subsonic clients without requiring any adjustment to them.
Unsonic strives to be better at handling music files tags, playing of those songs and use less system resources.
redshodan13. Tuna Server
Tuna is an open-source, self-hosted music streaming platform that allows you to stream music to any modern browser. It supports popular web-based storage platforms like Dropbox and NextCloud, and focuses on the player and music library.
Tuna does not have social media or sharing capabilities, but allows you to post play stats to Last.fm. It currently works only in browsers, with plans for a standalone Electron desktop player in the future.
shukriadams14. Hypersonic
Hypersonic is a free and open-source music streaming server that provides a subset of the Subsonic API.
Features
- Tag-based browsing
- Transcoding to Opus, Ogg Vorbis, or MP3
- Server-applied ReplayGain
- Playlists
- Jukebox
carlreinke15. Lanify
Lanify is a local music website that allows you to find and stream all your music without incurring any data charges.
sksin2816. Airsonic
Airsonic is a free, web-based media streamer that allows you to access and share your music collection. It supports streaming of various audio and video formats, including MP3, AAC, OGG, WMA, FLAC, and more.
It is designed to handle large music collections and can stream to multiple players simultaneously.
17. CherryMusic
CherryMusic is a music streaming server based on CherryPy and jPlayer. It plays the music inside your PC, smartphone, tablet, toaster or whatever device has a HTML5 compliant browser installed.
Features
- stream your music inside the browser (locally or remote)
- browse and search your music
- completely AJAX based (no page reloads on click, therefore fast)
- create and share playlists
- multiple user authentication
- HTTPS support
- automatic album cover art fetching
- see CHANGES for all the features
devsnd18. Diosic
Diosic is an open source web-based music collection server and streamer. Mainly suitable for users who need to deploy on servers with low hardware specifications.
Reknij19. Koel
Koel (also stylized as koel, with a lowercase k) is a simple web-based personal audio streaming service written in Vue on the client side and Laravel on the server side. Targeting web developers, Koel embraces some of the more modern web technologies to do its job.
koel20. forte
forte is a free self-hosted, music streaming platform.
kaangiray2621. Supersonic Server
Supersonic Server is a simple music server written in Python that can also manage videos, pictures, 3D models, and more. It has been tested with thousands of songs and works well on Linux, Windows, and MacOS.
Key Features
- Hosts a minimal Web UI for admin purposes and for checking the music index is correct.
- Easily hackable. You can change almost anything about this program.
- Reports listening statistics / habits.
- Works on the Raspberry Pi
Supersonic-Music22. Funkwhale
Funkwhale is a music server and player designed for small to medium communities. It also serves as a social platform for music and podcast enthusiasts to discover new content.
JeffCarpenter23. Mopidy
Mopidy is a Python-based music server that can play music from various sources such as local disk, Spotify, SoundCloud, TuneIn, and more. It allows playlist editing from any device using MPD and web clients.
24. NodeJS Music Server
Music Server is a free stateless NodeJS app that leverages AWS S3 & serves music through a REST API
25. hayasaka
This is a free music streaming web application built with Next.js and powered by the savan API. The app allows users to search and stream music from a vast collection of songs available on the Saavn platform.
Features
- Search and stream music from vast collection.
- Play, pause, skip, and control the playback of songs.
- Create your own playlists.
- Add songs to your favorite.
- Auto add similar songs to queue.
- Display song details such as title, artist, album, and album artwork.
- Responsive and mobile-friendly design for a great user experience.
- Minimalistic and intuitive user interface.
himanshu844326. Music Streamer
This project is a digital music platform, It's made for listening to music and making your favorite music collection. Spotify API is used to get tracks and albums, artists. Spotify API provides millions of music data. This project is made in the MERN stack.
Features
- Full-Screen Mode
- Password login & Verification Based Sign Up
- Forgot password
- Google Login & Sign up
- Collections Clone & Custom Playlist Create and Edit & With Search Feature in Library
- History
- Search With Filter ( all, artists, albums, tracks)
- Search box allows Spotify Search Query (Example = artist:alan walker )
- Account Edit Option
- On the home page user's recent activity-based recommendation
- Link Copy Feature (Track, Album, Artist)
- Audio (track) Controls
- Light & Dark mode
- Responsive Design
- Only Users Can Play Audio (Tracks)
ansonbenny27. Atraci
Atraci is a streaming application for Windows, Mac and Linux that lets you listen instantly to more than 60 million songs (way more than iTunes's 26 million). It requires no sign up, displays no ads and is 100% safe.
Atraci28. Polaris
Polaris is a music streaming application, designed to let you enjoy your music collection from any computer or mobile device. Polaris works by streaming music directly from your computer (or cloud server), without uploading it to a third-party. It is free and open-source software, without any kind of premium version.
Features
- Optimized for large music collections
- Can run on Windows, Linux, BSD, or through Docker
- Support for
flac,mp3,mp4,mpc,ogg,opus,ape,wavandaifffiles - Easy to setup and administer, no configuration files needed
- Dark mode and customizable color themes
- Listen to your music on the go:
- Polaris Android (Google Play Store · F-Droid · Repository)
- Polarios (App Store · Repository)
- Last.fm scrobbling
agersant29. Nuclear
Nuclear is a free desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources.
Features
- Searching for and playing music from YouTube (including integration with playlists and SponsorBlock), Jamendo, Audius and SoundCloud
- Searching for albums (powered by Last.fm and Discogs), album view, automatic song lookup based on artist and track name (in progress, can be dodgy sometimes)
- Song queue, which can be exported as a playlist
- Loading saved playlists (stored in json files)
- Scrobbling to last.fm (along with updating the 'now playing' status)
- Newest releases with reviews - tracks and albums
- Browsing by genre
- Radio mode (automatically queue similar tracks)
- Unlimited downloads (powered by youtube)
- Realtime lyrics
- Browsing by popularity
- List of favorite tracks
- Listening from local library
- Audio normalization
- No accounts
- No ads
- No CoC
- No CLA
nukeop30. MusicDB
This is a self-hosted open-source music manager with focus on remote access to your music by having a WebUI and providing an audio stream.
rstemmer31 Subplayer
Subplayer is an exceptional frontend application meticulously crafted to deliver a seamless, functional, and aesthetically pleasing web player experience when paired with a Subsonic backend.
Features
- Play and seek audio
- View/create/edit playlists
- Add/remove songs from Starred
- Search artists/albums/songs
- Browse your music by Artist, Albums and Genres (only compatible with v1.13.0)
- Star/unstar albums
- Scrobble
- Add/Remove from queue
- Theming
peguerosdc32. Zoff
Zoff (pronounced søff) is a shared (free) YouTube and SoundCloud based radio service, built upon the YouTube API, and SoundCloud API, with integrated casting with Chromecast.
Zoff supports importing YouTube, SoundCloud and Spotify playlists, and has functionality that (tries to) export to YouTube, SoundCloud and Spotify.
zoff-music33. Astro Player
This is an open-source web application built using React, Redux & Deezer API.
opeoyeleke34. Musify
Musify is a music streaming app that offers features such as online song search with suggestions, streaming and offline listening support, data import and export, custom playlists with links, optimized sound experience, lyrics support, and an ad-free experience.
gokadzev35. Amplyfm
Amplyfm is a open-source web app where you can enjoy unlimited free music, search for your favorite artists and genres or discover new ones, get song lyrics, watch your favorite music videos and share them with your friends.
For the data, such as artist biography, top tracks, similar artists, etc. it uses Last.fm API. For the lyrics, it uses lyrics.ovh API. And for streaming actual songs it uses YouTube data and iframe API
aciddjus