Open-source Napster alternatives

Spotube is an extensible, open-source music streaming app for desktop and mobile, written in Dart with Flutter. Rather than being tied to one service, it relies on plugins that supply music metadata, playlists and audio sources, so community-made or custom plugins can add support for different platforms. GitHub lists the license as 'Other'.

The README highlights freely downloadable tracks with tagged metadata, time-synced lyrics regardless of plugin support, a small installation size, low data usage and native performance. Playback control is done locally rather than on a server, and the project states it has no telemetry, diagnostics or user data collection.

Installers and packages cover Windows, macOS, Android, Linux through Flatpak, Debian, Arch, Fedora and openSUSE packages, and Homebrew, while iOS uses an IPA file that needs sideloading. New versions usually arrive every three to four months. It suits listeners who want a lightweight, privacy-minded music client they can extend with plugins.

Navidrome is an open-source music server written in Go. You point it at your own folder of audio files and it serves the collection through a web player and through mobile apps, much like a personal streaming service. It is compatible with the Subsonic API family, so many existing Subsonic and OpenSubsonic client apps can connect to it.

The project says it handles very large music collections and can stream almost any audio format. It is light enough to run on small hardware such as a Raspberry Pi, and its topics also mention Airsonic and Madsonic, older servers it can stand in for. A live demo is available so you can try the interface first, and the maintainers recommend using tagged releases rather than the unstable master branch.

Navidrome is GPL-3.0 licensed and installed following the instructions on its website. For people who prefer not to run a server, PikaPods has partnered with the project to offer an officially supported cloud-hosted option, with part of the revenue helping fund development. It appeals to music collectors who want to keep control of their libraries instead of relying on a commercial service.

Koel is a free, open-source music streaming server that turns a personal music collection into a web-based player. It is built on Laravel and Vue, scans a music library and serves it back through a modern interface that works in any browser.

Beyond playback, Koel supports playlists and smart playlists, scrobbling, podcasts and radio, integrations with Last.fm, Spotify and MusicBrainz, and an AI assistant that responds to natural-language commands. Koel Player is the official mobile app for iOS and Android, which avoids the limits of the mobile web version.

The core is MIT licensed and designed to be self-hosted, with install and upgrade guides in the official documentation. A premium edition, Koel Plus, adds multi-user libraries, collaboration, SSO, cloud storage drivers, custom themes and white-labeling for organizations that want to run their own streaming service. The author is supported through sponsors on OpenCollective and GitHub.

Feishin is a modern music player built for self-hosted music servers. It acts as a client for Navidrome, Jellyfin and other Subsonic-compatible servers, and is a rewrite of the earlier Sonixd player. You keep your library on your own server and use Feishin to browse and play it.

Features include an MPV player backend for the desktop app and a web player backend, a modern interface, scrobbling of playback to your server, a smart playlist editor for Navidrome, and synchronized and unsynchronized lyrics, with built-in lyric fetching in the desktop app. The project recommends the desktop app as the main way to use it, with macOS notes about quarantine and accessibility permissions, a Flathub package and an AppImage install script for Linux, including an experimental Wayland option.

A hosted web instance is available at feishin.vercel.app, and the web app can also be run with Docker. Feishin is written in TypeScript, uses Electron for the desktop build and is licensed under GPL-3.0. It suits people who run Navidrome or Jellyfin at home and want a polished player.

Ampache is a web-based audio and video streaming application and file manager that lets you reach your music and videos from almost any internet-enabled device. It presents an already organized collection in a useful way rather than reorganizing your files.

Its usefulness depends on extracting correct metadata from embedded tags or file names, and it assumes you manage your files yourself. It runs on web servers including Apache, lighttpd, nginx and IIS, with most testing on Apache, and a documented API supports clients. The development branch, Ampache 8, adds an opt-in Jellyfin-compatible API so third-party clients such as Finamp and Symfonium can browse and stream a library.

The project recommends the stable release 7 branch for most users, notes that the develop branch can be unstable and needs PHP 8.5 or later, and provides a Docker image, wiki and admin and user guides. Ampache is written in PHP and licensed under AGPL-3.0.

Gonic is a free-software music streaming server that implements the Subsonic server API, so it works with the many apps that speak that protocol. It is written in Go, which keeps it lightweight enough for devices such as a Raspberry Pi, and ARM images are provided. It is licensed under GPL-3.0.

You can browse your collection by folder, which keeps your directory tree intact, or by tags read with taglib for formats including mp3, opus, flac, ape, m4a and wav. It supports on-the-fly audio transcoding with caching through ffmpeg, the Subsonic jukebox mode for gapless server-side playback, podcasts, multiple users with their own playlists and preferences, and scrobbling to last.fm and ListenBrainz. Artist biographies and similar artists come from the last.fm API.

A web interface handles configuration, such as connecting last.fm, managing users and starting library scans. The project lists tested clients including DSub, Symfonium, Amperfy, Tempus, Strawberry and Ultrasonic. Installation is possible from source, with Docker or with systemd, and the default login is admin, which you should change after the first sign-in.

Tempus is a native Android music player for Subsonic-compatible servers. It lets you stream and play your own library from your phone, and it is described as open source and privacy-focused, built around your listening history and randomness rather than opaque recommendation algorithms. It is a fork of the Tempo project.

It integrates with your Subsonic server to give access to the whole collection, with a clean interface using Material You styling, offline support and optional connections to ListenBrainz and Last.fm if your backend supports them. The GitHub release includes Android Auto and Chromecast support, while a separate de-Googled build without those features is distributed through IzzyOnDroid, with both 32-bit and 64-bit builds available.

The app is written in Java and Kotlin, licensed under GPL-3.0 and distributed through F-Droid, GitHub and IzzyOnDroid. It needs a Subsonic-compatible server that you run or have access to, such as the ones self-hosters typically use. It suits people with a personal music server who want a free, open-source Android client.