All 100 ideasAudio and music
#86 of 100 · Audio and music
A player for music you own
A polished player for owned music files with folder and tag tree views and simple album syncing to the phone.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay12%
- Want it local or private88%
- Object to subscriptions25%
- Want it open source or self-hosted0%
- Want AI to do it0%
Share of the 8 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Built, still asked for5 Show HN launches do this job, and 10 more do part of it. People still ask, so the launches are missed, unknown, or not what they want. Ask what they’re missing before you build.
- An OS X music library I've been working on for the past year.2011 · 301 pts
- Sol, my macOS music player and jukebox app, is now free and open source2026 · 30 pts
- HiFidelity – A native macOS offline audiophile music player2025 · 4 pts
- Katalog – a fast local music library app for Mac (91k tracks in ~1s)2026 · 3 pts
- Tape Music Hub, local music library manager with a P2P phone companion2026 · 1 pts
Instead of: iTunes, Winamp, foobar2000, Spotify
The idea, as matched
A fast, native desktop or phone music player for a library of owned files (iTunes/Winamp/foobar2000 replacement) with folder and tag views, ratings and play-history import, and easy device sync.
Jev first matched 9 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 8 of 9.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. Several are plain recommendation asks.
- Jun 2026Wants an easy music player for downloaded Bandcamp files that needs little organizing. Read it: a comment in “Tidal AI Policy”
- May 2025Wishes someone would revive XMMS. Read it: a comment in “I Built My Own Audio Player”
- Jan 2024Wants a standalone music player that shows a folder tree of albums when opening a folder. Read it: a comment in “VLC does not have Open Folder menu item”
- Oct 2020Wants a good offline music player for Android after Google Play Music ended. Read it: a comment in “Google Play Music, Music Play Store and Music Manager are going away”
- Jul 2019Wants a replacement for syncing PC albums to a phone for offline car playback. Read it: a comment in “Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems”
- Mar 2017Wants a Linux music player with foobar's tag-sorted tree view. Read it: a comment in “iTunes built, and then broke, my meticulous music-listening system”
- Sep 2016Wants a music player with only Winamp's features but a polished interface. Read it: a comment in “iTunes will never work well”
- Feb 2016Asks for a music player other than iTunes. Read it: a comment in “Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.