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.
It reads the library you already have. Point it at Navidrome, Jellyfin, Emby
or anything else that speaks the Subsonic API and it uses your tags, your
artwork and the server's transcoding. Or point it at a plain folder of files
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.
Features:
- Browse by artist, album, genre or track, with artwork
- Gapless playback, shuffle and repeat, a sleep timer, background and lock-screen audio
- Search across the whole library
- Playlists you make on the phone, plus the read-only ones your server already has
- Favourites and resume points that follow you between your own devices, and playback
that hands over rather than doubling up - starting on one device pauses the other - Offline caching: pin an album for a flight, and recent listening is kept
- Ask the owner for music you cannot find, and see what they did with the request
- Pair a phone by scanning a QR code - there is no password to type
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 on their dashboard 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.
Two things worth stating plainly. First, PearTune needs that machine running
the PearTune host - it is the source of the music, so this is not a player for
files on your phone. Second, some networks stop a phone and a host connecting
directly. When that happens PearTune can fall back to a relay PeerLoom runs,
which forwards encrypted data it cannot read and keeps no copy of it. Your
phone always tries a direct connection first.
When the relay is the only route to a library, PearTune asks before streaming
that library's music through it and remembers your answer. Browsing that
library goes over the relay without asking, which is a much smaller amount of
data and is stated here rather than left for you to assume. One switch in
Settings turns the relay off entirely.