Vleer

Vleer is an open source music player that a friend and I have been building since 2023. The idea came to me on 24 December 2022 :). I wanted a free alternative to Spotify or Apple Music for everyone who can’t afford them or just doesn’t want to pay for them. What it should be:

• free and open source
• lightweight and fast
• privacy first

What it does now

The current version is built in Rust with a GPU-rendered UI, and it’s all about your own library. Point it at your folders and it keeps them in sync live with a SQLite library, around 60,000 songs in about 10 seconds.

The part I’m proudest of is that your library is retag-proof. Songs are identified by their audio instead of their tags, so wrong artist names, missing artwork or garbage titles get fixed automatically without ever touching your actual files. The metadata comes from OpenMusicMetadata couth¹, an open catalog with a free API.

Besides that it has everything I’d want from a player:

• fuzzy search across songs, artists, albums and playlists
• synced lyrics from LRCLIB, or the ones embedded in your files
• loudness normalization and a proper 10 band parametric equalizer
• Last.fm scrobbling and Discord Rich Presence
• FLAC, MP3, OGG Vorbis, Opus, AAC and WAV
• self-updating with stable and nightly channels

Next up is support for Navidrome, Subsonic and OpenSubsonic, Soulseek integration and a recommendation system.

I also just recently reworked the website at vleer.app itself, so it finally matches where the app is at now.

The long way here

This is by far the project with the most work in it and it hasn’t always gone great. We rewrote the whole thing from scratch three times², so this is already attempt number 4.

With a few more years of experience under our belts I’m pretty sure it will actually work this time.

Website · GitHub · Docs