Best Free & Open Source Alternatives to Tidal

What is Meelo?

Meelo is a self-hosted music server designed for music collectors, focused on metadata integration and a polished UI. It runs as a Docker container, scans your local audio and music-video files, enriches them with metadata from MusicBrainz, Genius, and Wikipedia, and exposes a web player plus native Android and iOS apps. Where Plex, Jellyfin, Koel, and Black Candy treat music as one library among several, Meelo treats music as the only library, and that focus is reflected in features you typically do not see elsewhere.

Key features

• Music videos as first-class citizens, surfaced alongside tracks from the same album, artist, or song page, with interviews, behind-the-scenes, and trailers differentiated from the music videos themselves.
• B-side and rare-track detection so bonus tracks and loose singles stay visible on the album and artist pages instead of getting lost in a generic library view.
• Automatic featuring and duet detection to credit collaborators without manual tagging.
• Albums with releases — keep multiple pressings or editions of one album side by side, with the main release on browsing pages and the others reachable from the album page.
• Songs with tracks and versions, so the same recording across different edits or mixes does not appear as duplicates.
• Album and song types — quickly filter for instrumentals, live recordings, demos, remixes, and more.
• Compilation-aware filtering to hide tracks that are exclusive to a compilation rather than the original album.
• Universal format support through on-the-fly transcoding; any audio or video container that ffmpeg understands can be ingested and played back in the browser.
• Flexible metadata parsing from embedded tags, filenames, or both, with regex support for path-based tagging.
• External metadata enrichment from MusicBrainz, Genius, Wikipedia, and other providers, plus cover art scraping.
• Scrobbling to ListenBrainz and Last.fm.
• Synced lyrics downloaded automatically, plus fallback to embedded metadata and .lrc files.
• Mobile apps for Android (APK on the Releases page) and iOS (TestFlight).

Self-hosting

Meelo ships as Docker images with docker-compose.yml, docker-compose.dev.yml, and docker-compose.prod.yml. The wiki covers the full setup. Transcoding is performed on demand only when the browser does not natively support the source codec, so the server stays light at idle. The maintainers note that Meelo is intended for private use rather than as a public downloading platform.

How it compares to Spotify and Apple Music

Where Spotify and Apple Music stream from a catalogue you do not own on infrastructure you cannot touch, Meelo plays the files in your library on hardware you control. Metadata enrichment via MusicBrainz gives a comparable depth of artist and album information, the scrobbling integration keeps your Last.fm and ListenBrainz history accurate, and the music-video support goes further than either service exposes. The tradeoff is the usual one for self-hosted software: you bring your own files and your own server.

DroppedNeedle is a self-hosted music requests, discovery, and library automation server. You search the full MusicBrainz catalogue, request an album or a single track, and the built-in engine drives your own download client, scores the candidates, verifies every file (readable tags, sane duration, optional AcoustID fingerprint), and shelves the result in your library. Confident matches are auto-accepted, close calls park for review, and bad sources get quarantined so they stop winning. Failed and partial requests keep getting re-searched on their own.

Beyond requests, DroppedNeedle is a full discovery hub: trending and charts, genre browsing, recommendations built from your ListenBrainz and Last.fm history, a weekly mix that can queue up to five missing albums, new-release radar with optional auto-download, and Ticketmaster and Skiddle gig alerts for artists you follow, per user and per city. It includes a built-in web player with queue, shuffle, a 10-band EQ, embedded lyrics, and playlists that can mix Jellyfin, Navidrome, Plex, local files, YouTube, and Spotify imports in one place.

It ships as a single Docker container and connects outward to Jellyfin, Navidrome, Plex, and local files, while exposing OpenSubsonic and Jellyfin-compatible APIs so mobile apps like Symfonium, Finamp, Feishin, and Amperfy can play directly from it. Unlike paying monthly for Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube Music, you buy or fetch the files once and they stay yours; it plays nicely with the streamers you already run on your home server. A roles system (Admin, Trusted, User) with an approval queue makes it safe for a household or homelab community.

Helix is a self-hosted music player, discovery tool, and shared listening system built on top of a Subsonic-compatible music library such as Navidrome. It is aimed at people who already run their own music server but want a more modern listening experience: full search, queues, playlists, generated radio stations, and shared listening sessions in one web interface. The software is early-stage, so expect rough edges, breaking changes, and some setup work.

The discovery features are modeled on listening radio. You can generate stations from artists, artist collections, or tags, and tune each station with settings like artist variety, discovery level, tag strictness, and repeat avoidance. Stations automatically keep filling the queue ahead of playback, similar to how Pandora builds an endless personalized stream. Helix can also import playlists from Spotify, YouTube Music, and Pandora — imports are previewed first, matched against playable music, and you approve each track before anything is added.

Beyond listening, Helix adds a fulfillment workflow: when a track is not in your library, you can request it, and Helix stages the download, repairs metadata via beets, and then imports it into your Subsonic library. Optional slskd/Soulseek integration asynchronously replaces Helix-added tracks with higher-quality copies, including lossless upgrades. Shared lobbies let multiple listeners join a synchronized queue with a five-letter code and optional password, and an optional companion bot mirrors a lobby into a Discord voice channel. A native Android client is also available for mobile playback and control.

Compared to Spotify or Pandora, the trade is control for convenience: you supply and store the music yourself, there is no subscription and no advertising, and recommendations come from your own library and optional ListenBrainz integration rather than a commercial catalog. There is no bundled store or licensed catalog — for music you cannot fulfill yourself, you still play from your existing sources or resolved playlist imports.

Noctis is a cross-platform lossless music player built on .NET 8 and Avalonia UI, designed to play back your own local music library in a privacy-respecting way. It runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with full support for lossless formats (FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, APE, WavPack) plus lossy formats (MP3, AAC, OGG, Opus, WMA, M4A), and uses libVLC as its audio engine.

Features

• Plays back local libraries with gapless playback, crossfade, replay gain, and a 10-band equalizer with presets
• Organizes albums, singles, EPs, and compilations with filter chips, smart playlists, favorites, and a Cover Flow browser
• Pulls artist images and bios from MusicBrainz and Deezer, with artwork lookup from iTunes
• Synced lyrics panel powered by LRCLIB and NetEase (with offline cache) and an in-app lyrics editor that exports .lrc sidecars
• Scrobbles to Last.fm and ListenBrainz, plus Discord Rich Presence integration
• Streams from remote sources like Navidrome, SMB, and WebDAV with offline cache
• Built-in batch audio converter (ffmpeg-backed) to transcode between FLAC, MP3, AAC, and more
• Full metadata editor with artwork, per-track options, and dynamic ambient backgrounds

How it compares to Spotify and Apple Music

Spotify and Apple Music are streaming services: a licensed catalog of over 100 million tracks, accessible from any device with an internet connection, with recommendation engines, curated playlists, and social features. Noctis is a different kind of tool. There is no streaming catalog, no subscription, and no telemetry — Noctis plays the music files you already own, in their original lossless quality, with rich metadata editing and library management. It is best understood as a privacy-focused, audiophile-grade alternative to players like Foobar2000, MusicBee, or Strawberry, and a natural fit for users who want a self-managed replacement for the local-library half of iTunes or Apple Music.

Noctis is free and MIT-licensed. The app is distributed as a self-contained Windows installer (also on winget, Scoop, and Chocolatey), a macOS .dmg, and a Linux AppImage. Active development is steady, with regular releases.

Sunoh is a free, open source music app for Android that brings multiple streaming sources together in a single interface. It plays from YouTube Music, Gaana, and JioSaavn — including the YouTube Music home feed with its editorial rows, moods and genres, playlists, albums, and artist pages with one-tap radio — alongside the music already stored on your phone, so a single search covers every source. Podcasts and audiobooks are handled in the same app.

Playback is powered by mpv, with a gapless, reorderable queue, shuffle and repeat, an equalizer, a sleep timer, Chromecast support, and synced lyrics via LRCLIB. On YouTube tracks, a SponsorBlock integration skips sponsor reads, intros, outros, and other non-music segments. Downloaded tracks play offline, and full Android Auto support covers browsing, playback, radio stations, and voice search.

Sunoh is built for listeners who want one app instead of juggling separate clients for each service. Unlike Spotify or YouTube Premium, it requires no account, shows no ads, and collects no analytics — there is no sign-in anywhere and no telemetry SDK in the app. It is built with Flutter and Kotlin, distributed as APKs from GitHub Releases with Obtainium support, and licensed under GPL-3.0.

What is Yuzic?

Yuzic is a free and open-source music player built with Expo and React Native that connects to your own music library instead of a subscription service. It streams from Navidrome, Jellyfin, Emby, Plex, or any Subsonic-compatible media server, and can also play local files stored privately on your device.

Features

• Native playback engine with streaming up to lossless quality, crossfade, replay gain, a ten-band equalizer, sleep timer, playback speed control, and autoplay
• Full library browsing — artists, albums, tracks, playlists, and genres, with on-device and server-side search
• Offline downloads — save songs, albums, and playlists for listening without a connection; offline changes sync when you reconnect
• Ratings that stick — rate what you play and your server keeps the ratings
• Casting beyond the phone — AirPlay on iOS, DLNA/UPnP on your network, and your server's jukebox where available
• Weekly reports and music discovery features to reconnect with your library

Why use Yuzic instead of a streaming subscription?

Apps like Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, or Tidal tie you to a monthly subscription, their catalog, and their platform. Yuzic works the other way around: your server holds the music, and Yuzic is just the player — no ads, no listening data sent to third parties, no dependency on a catalog that can shrink overnight. Because it is GPL-3.0 licensed, the whole codebase is auditable and community-driven, with a Discord for direct feedback to the developers.

Platforms and availability

Yuzic ships as native apps for iPhone/iPad (App Store) and Android (Google Play), plus a web player at yuzicapp.github.io. It is actively developed with frequent releases.