Your own files, and Apple Music
As many libraries as you like, one wall of covers. Add as many music servers as you have, and Apple Music alongside them. Files from your own servers play through Lindale’s own audio engine: the actual file, the output set to the recording’s rate, the album end to end. Apple Music comes in beside them, tidied up rather than re-plumbed. An album you own twice shows up once, and you say which copy plays.
What each side does
Your own files
Lindale’s own audio engine, end to end: the file rather than a transcode, the output moved to the recording’s rate, gapless albums, and a readout that admits it when the path could not carry them. Everything further down this page is about this side.
Apple Music
Apple’s playback stays Apple’s, so your Lossless settings keep applying. What changes is the library around it: your own records first, no storefront, and albums Apple Music splits into four entries over a guest credit put back together as the one release they are. The whole story →
The one thing the two never do is share a queue, because two different players are doing the work. Browsing and searching span everything at once.
What it connects to
Today that means any server speaking OpenSubsonic, a documented interface built for third-party apps, so nothing here leans on one server’s private internals. Lindale is not built around a single brand of server, and more kinds can follow.
Navidrome, for now
It is what Lindale gets used against every day, and what gets tested when something changes. Navidrome also reports each file’s sample rate and depth, which is what makes the careful playback below possible.
Other servers
Only documented endpoints are used, so a compatible server should be fine. They have not all been tried. A server that keeps its file details to itself still plays. It just gives up the rate matching.
More than one
Add the machine at home and the one at your parents’ house. Switch between them, or look at both at once. Switching does not stop what is playing.
Built like a record shelf
A wall of album covers
Albums arrive as a wall of artwork, sorted alphabetically or by what turned up most recently. Your playlists sit alongside them, and so do the internet radio stations you saved on the server, the one thing here that is not a file.
Box sets stay box sets
A four-disc set shows as four discs, numbered from one each time, instead of one run of sixty tracks. A details panel tells you the format, rate and depth.
Search one server or all of them
Pick the scope per search, and results come back grouped by where they came from. If one server is asleep, the others still answer.
Your play counts keep working
Finished tracks are reported back, so counts, last played and recently played stay right. Whether that travels on to Last.fm or ListenBrainz is your server’s business.
The part that took the longest
Your own files go through Lindale’s own audio engine, the one thing the Apple Music side can never offer: the whole path from file to speaker under one roof.
The file, not a version of it
Tracks are downloaded whole, so what plays is what your server stores. No transcoding is ever requested.
The output follows the recording
Lindale reads what a track really is and moves the output device to match, so nothing gets resampled on the way. On the Mac that is exact. On iPhone and iPad it is a request the system may overrule.
No volume slider
There isn’t one, and that is the point. A slider in the app would mean touching every sample. Volume stays with your keyboard, your amplifier and the system.
Albums that run, run
The next track is lined up before the current one ends, so a live record or a mix plays through. Two tracks with genuinely different rates need the device reset between them, and that short pause is the honest cost of resampling neither.
It starts straight away
Playback begins as soon as the start of the file has arrived and the rest catches up while you listen. A 24-bit album no longer means staring at a spinner.
It stops instead of improvising
Pull out the headphones, walk away from the speaker, take a call, and it pauses. Your record does not suddenly come out of the laptop at full volume.
What it plays
Lossless
FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, WavPack, Monkey’s Audio
Lossy
MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, Opus
And the odd ones
DSD, Shorten, Speex, and the old tracker formats
Musepack and TrueAudio are the two that did not make it. If your library leans on either, this is not your app.
Setup, and being careful with your keys
HTTPS, and your own certificate
Your login crosses that connection, so a plain HTTP address is turned down and there is no setting to change it. Self-signed and private-CA certificates are fine: you get a sheet showing what could not be verified and who issued it, and accepting it trusts that one certificate from then on.
Where your details live
Passwords go in the Keychain, never into a file or a log, and never to the server itself. Your list of servers follows you to your other devices through your own iCloud. With iCloud off it is simply local, and nothing breaks.
The cache looks after itself
Music you play is kept on disk up to a size you set, oldest out first. Nothing to manage, and clearing it costs you a download.
What it leaves to your server
Your server already has a web interface, and doing that job a second time badly helps nobody. So there is no:
- Editing tags, playlists or anything else on the server
- Stars and favourites
- Searching for single songs (search covers albums and artists)
- Rearranging the queue, or adding a track to play next
- Keeping an album for offline listening on purpose
- Equaliser, or anything else that processes the sound
Requirements
- macOS 26, iOS 26 or iPadOS 26, or later
- A music server you can reach over HTTPS, anything speaking OpenSubsonic today
- For real bit-perfect output, a device whose rate can be set. Most can
Lindale is not on the App Store yet, and it will be free when it gets there. Say hello if you want to hear when that happens.