Questions, and honest answers

A player for Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. It brings your own music server, your Apple Music subscription and your Audiobookshelf library into one collection of cover art, and then lets you get on with listening. It does not manage or edit your library, because your servers and Apple already do that.

Not yet. It is still being built and has not gone to the App Store. This site is where that will be announced.

Nothing. Lindale will be free. It was built for one person’s own listening, and there is nothing to earn from it.

No, the source is not published. The audio components it builds on are all permissively licensed, and their licence texts ship inside the app under Settings, in Acknowledgements.

Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, on macOS 26, iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and tvOS 26 or later. Each one gets a layout built for it. There is no Android, Windows or web version, and none is planned.

No. Apple Music on its own is plenty, and Lindale then works as a calmer, album-first player for the subscription you already pay for. More about that.

No. A server on its own is plenty too, and it is the side Lindale was designed around first. A subscription only matters for playing Apple Music content, and without one you get previews.

Never, and that is not a decision Lindale gets to make. Spotify does not allow third-party apps to play its catalogue. Their platform lets an app control the official Spotify client, not stream the music itself. So a Spotify library cannot appear on the shelf here, and no amount of asking changes that. Apple Music does allow it, which is why it is the one subscription supported.

Anything that speaks OpenSubsonic, reachable over HTTPS. A self-signed certificate is fine. Navidrome is what gets used and tested daily. Others should work, since only documented endpoints are used, but they have not all been tried.

Yes, both. See audiobooks and podcasts. They come from an Audiobookshelf server, the only provider so far. Your position, chapters and finished state all sync back to that server.

No, only OpenSubsonic for music and Audiobookshelf for books and podcasts. Other kinds of server are an idea for later with no date on it, so do not count on it.

Yes. Add as many as you like, switch between them, or browse them all together. One source is active for browsing at a time, and a queue always belongs to a single source.

Yes. Lindale explains what it could not verify and shows who issued the certificate, so you can recognise your own server. Accept it and that one certificate is trusted from then on, and if it ever changes you get asked again. Plain unencrypted HTTP is the one thing it will not do.

FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, WavPack, Monkey’s Audio, MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, DSD, and a long tail of older formats. Musepack and TrueAudio are the two that did not make it.

For files from your own server, when the output route allows it. The original file is fetched rather than a transcode, and on the Mac the output device is set to the recording’s own rate. On iPhone and iPad the system has the final say. Apple Music sits outside the claim entirely.

No. AirPlay re-encodes and Bluetooth codecs resample, so there is nothing left to be exact about. Lindale marks the track as resampled instead of showing a badge that means nothing.

Yes, for tracks that share a format, which within an album they almost always do, so live records and continuous mixes play through. Two tracks with genuinely different rates need the hardware reset between them, and that short pause beats resampling either one.

Because a slider in the app would mean scaling every sample, and that is the thing all this care is meant to avoid. Volume stays with your keyboard, your amplifier and the system. No equaliser either, for the same reason.

No. Lindale plays things, it does not curate them. Playlists, tags and adding albums stay in your server’s own interface and in Apple’s apps, which do those jobs properly. None of that has a date on it, and none of it is ruled out.

No. Search returns albums and artists, which suits an album-first app and does mean you cannot look up a track by name. Nothing planned there, though it is not ruled out.

Only by luck. What you played recently is still on disk and may well play without a connection, but there is no way to keep an album or a book on purpose, and the cache clears itself as it fills. Do not plan a flight around it.

No. Two completely different players are doing the work, so a queue belongs to one source and starting something elsewhere begins a new one. Browsing and searching do span everything at once.

Not by itself. Lindale reports plays to your own server, and passing them on is a switch inside Navidrome, which is already good at it. That also keeps another set of credentials out of a music player.

Not planned, which is not the same as never.

None. No analytics, no ads, no tracking library, no account. It talks to the servers you configure, to Apple Music if you connect it, and to your own iCloud.

In the system Keychain, one per server, and never in a file or a log. They are not sent anywhere else either.

Partly. Your sources sync through your own iCloud, passwords through iCloud Keychain, and so do your hidden albums and preferred copies. Where you got to in a record stays on the device. Where you got to in a book goes back to Audiobookshelf.