Meelo

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.