Bring your own music

Your library, on every device you own

Your library, on every device you own

Chordia streams the music you already own. The albums you bought, the Bandcamp downloads, the folder you have dragged across three laptops. It goes from wherever you keep it straight to your devices, at full quality, and none of it passes through us.

  • Your audio never touches our servers
  • FLAC, ALAC, WAV, Atmos
  • Runs on a Pi, a NAS or a VPS
  • AGPL-3.0, source on GitHub

This is the app

The app as it is today.

The Chordia home screen showing recently played albums and the player bar
Home picks up where you left off, on every device you signed in on.
An album page in Chordia showing cover art, the tracklist and the source file quality
Albums keep their artwork, their running order and their play counts.
The listening insights page in Chordia showing charts of plays over time
Your listening, charted by week, month and year. It keeps going after December.
The friends page in Chordia showing a friend list and a pending request
Share a library with a friend and they can browse and play it straight from your server.

What you get

Four things that are hard to get anywhere else.

Your files stay your files

Chordia never uploads your library, never re-encodes it behind your back, and never holds it hostage. Your library server hands audio straight to your devices. We only ever handle the metadata needed to sign you in and keep your friends list straight.

  • Audio goes device to library, never through us.
  • Stop using Chordia and every file is where you left it.
  • AGPL-3.0. The code we run is the code you get.

Full quality, or nothing quietly changed

Original quality is a byte-for-byte stream with no transcode step and no silent downgrade. On a train with two bars Chordia steps down to protect your data, tells you it has, and steps back up when the signal returns.

  • FLAC, ALAC and WAV streamed exactly as they are on disk.
  • Atmos and other spatial mixes pass through untouched.
  • You decide whether it's ever allowed to drop quality.

Everywhere you sign in

Chordia runs in the browser on any machine you sign in on, and installs to your home screen on a phone. Gapless playback, crossfade and an equalizer that remembers what you did to it.

  • Pick up on your phone exactly where the desktop left off.
  • Download an album for the flight and play it with no signal.
  • Volume levelled across albums so nothing blows your ears off.

Share a shelf, not the whole collection

Split your collection into as many libraries as you like, then hand each one to exactly the friends you choose. They browse and stream it like it was always theirs. You can see what they played, and you can take it back in one click.

  • Per-library access, not all-or-nothing.
  • Friends stream from your server without an account on it.
  • Revoke any time. Access expires on its own too.

A listening history that outlives every service you quit

Every play is recorded against your account, not against a server. Move house, replace the NAS, rebuild from nothing, and 2019 is still there.

  • Your rotation by week or by month, not once in December.
  • First-listen dates, streaks, and the album you played 47 times in March.
  • Scrobbles to Last.fm as well, if that is where your history already lives.
Chordia on a phone showing the full-screen player with cover art and controls
On a phone it fills the screen: artwork, controls, lyrics and the queue.

For the people who read the source first

Or run the whole thing yourself

Chordia is two pieces. A Hub holds accounts, friends and history. A library server holds your music and streams it. Use our Hub and run your own library, or run both yourself and never talk to us at all.

  1. 1

    Install the library server

    One binary or one container. It's happy on a Raspberry Pi, an old NUC, a Synology box or the cheapest VPS you can find.

  2. 2

    Point it at your music

    Give it a folder. It reads tags, fetches artwork, and matches releases against MusicBrainz, including the files whose tags are a mess.

  3. 3

    Pair it to your account

    One step in the browser. Your library advertises its certificate fingerprint, your devices pin it, and self-signed certificates stop being a problem.

Read the source

Questions

Is this a Spotify replacement?

Not quite. Chordia plays the music you already have rather than a catalog you rent. Bring the albums you bought, your Bandcamp downloads, your Qobuz purchases. If a folder of files is your idea of a record collection, you are in the right place.

Do I need a server?

Your files need somewhere to live: an old laptop, a NAS, a Raspberry Pi, or a cheap VPS. The library server runs on all of them. Point it at a folder and it takes it from there.

What does this cost?

Playing your own music is free and always will be; charging you to listen to files you own would be absurd. The software is AGPL-3.0 and all of it is on GitHub. Two paid tiers, Sonic and Super-Sonic, add extras on top for people who want them, and nothing that is free today has moved behind them. Self-hosting stays complete rather than becoming a crippled community edition. See the pricing page for what they cost.

Which formats work?

FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, MP3, AAC, Ogg and Opus. Dolby Atmos and other spatial mixes pass through untouched, because re-encoding something we cannot improve helps nobody.

What can you see?

Your audio never reaches our servers, not even as a cache. Your phone talks straight to your library over an encrypted connection. We hold your account, your friends list and your play history, and you can export or delete all of it whenever you like.

Does it work on a plane?

Yes. Download an album and it plays with no signal and no server. The files live on the device, not in a stream you have to keep alive.

Bring your music with you

Make an account, point Chordia at your music, and have it on your phone before the kettle boils.