PearTune: Self-Hosted Music

PearTune plays the music library on a machine you own - an Umbrel, a NAS, an old desktop, a laptop - from anywhere, over a direct encrypted connection between your phone and that machine.

No port forwarding, no VPN, no dynamic DNS, no account, and no copy of your library in anyone's cloud. The music never leaves your hardware: it streams through the live connection while it plays.

PLEASE READ FIRST

PearTune needs that machine running the free PearTune host, which is the source of the music. It is not a player for files stored on your phone. If you do not have a server yet, setup offers "I don't have one yet", which plays a small built-in demo library so you can look around before you have a library to connect to.

READS THE LIBRARY YOU ALREADY HAVE

Point the host at a music server you already run and PearTune uses its library, its artwork and its transcoding. It speaks the Subsonic API, so Navidrome, Gonic, LMS, Ampache, Funkwhale, Koel, Nextcloud Music, Supysonic and Airsonic all work, and it reads Jellyfin and Emby servers directly. Point it at a plain folder of files instead and PearTune reads the tags itself - artist, album, track number, year and embedded cover art - so a folder is a real library, not a list of filenames.

IN THE APP

- Browse by artist, album, genre or track, with artwork
- Search the whole library
- Gapless playback, shuffle and repeat, a sleep timer
- Background and lock screen audio
- Playlists you make on your phone, plus the read-only ones your server already has
- Favourites and resume points that follow you between your own devices
- Playback hands over rather than doubling up - start on one device and the other pauses
- Downloads: pin an album to keep it on the phone, for a flight or a tunnel
- Ask the owner for music you cannot find, and see what they did with it

THE LIBRARY DOES NOT HAVE TO BE YOURS

Someone can let a friend or a family member in, each as their own person with their own devices, their own favourites and their own resume points, and no login to pass around. The owner sees every device and can revoke one, or everything one person holds, in a second - mid-song, not on next login. Nobody who is let in ever receives a copy of a file.

PAIRING IS ONE SCAN

Scan a QR code and you are in. There is no password, no server address and no account to create. The connection itself proves which device is calling, so there is no token to leak, copy or forget to rotate.

WHEN A DIRECT CONNECTION IS NOT POSSIBLE

Some mobile networks and locked-down wifi refuse a direct connection between two devices. When that happens PearTune can fall back to a relay run by PeerLoom, which forwards encrypted data it cannot read and keeps no copy of it. Your phone always tries a direct connection first, PearTune asks before streaming a library's music through the relay, and one switch in Settings turns it off entirely.

OPEN SOURCE

PearTune is MIT licensed and developed in the open. The host you run on your own machine is free, and so is the app.