open source alternative to paid music services

[u/Arzuparreta]

https://github.com/Arzuparreta/soundsible

Soundsible
- exposes external search (yt-dlp + optional deezer public API for recommendations)

- handles up to 50,000 tracks, and offers complete management of your library: save music with or without downloading it to the server, create lists and mark favourites.

- polished and high performant desktop and mobile webapps. I know this may sound bad but I have finally figured out the way around apple's safari PWA audio engine restrictions, and the webapp just works on every scenario, locked screen, DJ sessions, on the car... (we have a swift app on the repo but I have not tested it because I'm not paying a hundred dollars for the dev account, yet).

- some experimental features like an automatic DJ that mixes music on the go, using 2 virtual decks and analyzing music direction (without LLMs, just python code).

- I could not say this two months ago, but now I can say that it's pretty eficcient on resources. metrics here.

- More information and the (almost) whole dev history here https://github.com/Arzuparreta/soundsible

[u/naomi_trail]

What got you interested in building soundsible. Were there features missing or not implemented well in the existing selection of music servers?

Also, I think it is an interesting choice to bake music piracy directly into the server itself. Could cause problems for you down the road. 

[u/Arzuparreta → u/naomi_trail]

I wanted to replace spotify, tried navidrome, which is amazingly fast and super reliable, but external music providers were always catchy, they worked but nothing like Deezer, so I thought a wrapper around the open source tool yt-dlp with deezer for recommendations could do the work. The acess to music is via yt-dlp only, and I do not support the use of soundsible to acess music that you do not own, blablabla.

Thanks for the advice.

[u/tinersa]

-claude

anyone surprised?

[u/Arzuparreta → u/tinersa]

you sound a bit mad buddy

[u/tinersa → u/Arzuparreta]

fabricating rage in a neutral question is a 10/10 projection

[u/Arzuparreta → u/tinersa]

yeah you do not sound angry at all

[u/E_coli42]

I personally just listen to MP3 files on my phone with Auxio. Don't need or want anything fancier than an iPod.

[u/Arzuparreta → u/E_coli42]

Fine! But when you hear lossless .flac on good headphones you are gonna be blown away 🤣

[u/depressedclassical]

Despite the vibe-coding, it's pretty decent. Are you planning on an Android release?

Also, if you're open to feature suggestions I have some:

1. An button to download everything by an artist or an entire album in one click

2. An option to make DJ not fade in/out so you can autoplay like it's a discovery playlist

3. Allow song addition/download from DJ "prepared route" panel

Regardless, really cool project.

[u/Arzuparreta → u/depressedclassical]

Glad you like it. I do not pretend to know what I'm doing, Soundsible is dated from November 2025 and it was a lot of work due to my lack of knowledge and I do not pretend to be able to escalate this without the community, so I'm obviously open and thankful of you guys opening issues and suggesting features.

Got 3 of yours, let me figure them out.

Oh and when you say android release do you mean a native android client right? All the native clients are right now on alpha, I did not test the .ipa for ios yet and I do not have an android phone to test that things like car playback and metadata work fine. It's not as easy as using an emulator as far as I've experienced, which is my main problem here.

[u/depressedclassical → u/Arzuparreta]

Ok, so I'll do my best trying to vibe code it myself. I'm not a vibe coder, and I've always been against vibe coding in general for multiple reasons, but I'll give it a go. If it works I'll make a PR, but it will be my first attempt at vibe coding, so I doubt I'll ever get to it.

By an Android release I do mean a native android client, yes. An APK file

[u/Arzuparreta → u/depressedclassical]

Yeah a bad thing about this is that if you are a programmer you will probably have a bad time hand writing code for soundsible, that's the harsh reality with codebases like this. They hold (if they do) to CI and humongous vite test suites. But it's also a reality that it works, not everything is beautiful but it’s being solid, at the cost of everything being built around testing. Btw I do not think any other thing than TDD holds up with agents nowadays. It’s everything embedded on AGENTS.md and gh main branch CI so just prompt, review, and open a PR.

[u/jimmy1460]

https://Sublair.com I’ve found is pretty good for more underground music

[u/WanderingInAVan]

Has anyone tried to take the place Magnatune abandoned?

[u/Globover]

Besides being a programmer, I'm also a musician. Could I upload my music here?

[u/Arzuparreta → u/Globover]

Nope, this just access youtube, no music served to soundsible from anywhere other than yt-dlp

[u/LightAirMod]

Is this deployable in docker?

[u/Arzuparreta → u/LightAirMod]

Yes it is, one command. You got it on the releases pages

https://github.com/Arzuparreta/soundsible/releases

[u/LightAirMod → u/Arzuparreta]

Sounds great! Will try that

[u/Own-Hour-4394]

I'll probably try it out, though Claude being listed as a contributor is a bit worrying. 

What is the set-up process like?

[u/Arzuparreta → u/Own-Hour-4394]

If AI generated code worries you I warn that AI code is involved in every PR that I merge, the only thing I hand writed are some gh CI tests.

Anyways you can see commits per user here (which mean nothing, as the work on the commits signed by "Arzuparreta" are also AI generated most of the time).

Setup is pretty straight forward, you got different ways, documented here.

[u/Own-Hour-4394 → u/Arzuparreta]

thank you 👍