Noctis

Cross-platform lossless music player with rich library management, synced lyrics, and gapless playback for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Open source alternative to:

Spotify

Apple Music

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.