Your own music server, on your phone

StarSonic plays the music you already host yourself. Point it at your Subsonic, Navidrome or Airsonic server and it copies the catalogue onto the phone, so browsing your library does not wait on the network — and neither does the train tunnel.

No account of ours, no server of ours, nothing in the middle. Every byte comes from a machine you run.

What it does

• Your library, on the deviceArtists, albums, tracks and playlists are copied into a database on the phone and browsed from there. Scrolling your collection is instant, and it works with the server unreachable.
• More than one server at onceTwo servers are not two profiles to switch between: they coexist, every album knowing which one it came from. A NAS at home and a server somewhere else are one library.
• It syncs the way Android wants toServers are added as system accounts, and the library refreshes through Android's own sync mechanism — so it appears under Settings → Accounts, obeys the phone's sync and battery rules, and does not invent a scheduler of its own.
• The player where you expect itLock screen, notification, Bluetooth buttons, headset controls, and anything that browses media on Android — all of it works, because StarSonic is a media session and not a screen with a play button.
• ChromecastSend what you are listening to to a speaker or a TV, including music the phone has cached, which a Chromecast cannot normally reach.

How it works

Your server already speaks the Subsonic API — Navidrome and Airsonic both do — and that is all StarSonic needs. You give it the address, a username and a password; it authenticates the way the protocol prescribes, with a per-request token rather than the password itself, and pulls the catalogue in the background.

Music is streamed and cached as you listen, so what you have played recently stays with you. The player is a normal Android media session, which is why every surface that knows about music on your phone knows about StarSonic without StarSonic having to be open.

Honest about where it is

The app was built in 2022 and set aside. It works — the library, the sync, the player and the casting are all real — and it is in the F-Droid repository, but it still needs work:

• Jellyfin is offered but not implemented. Jellyfin speaks its own protocol and shares nothing with Subsonic. Until it is written, only Subsonic-compatible servers work.
• The toolchain is four years old and has to be brought forward before anything else.
• The audio engine predates the one Android now recommends, and moving to it is what would bring gapless playback and wider format support.

That list is the roadmap, and it is public on purpose: this page says what the app does today and what it does not.

Privacy in one paragraph

StarSonic has no account, no telemetry and no server belonging to its author. Your credentials stay on the device, in Android’s own account system; your listening goes nowhere except to the server you configured. The full text is on the Privacy Policy page.

Get it

StarSonic is published in the same self-hosted F-Droid repository as the other apps here; use the F-Droid badge at the top of this page to add the repository to your client. It is not on Google Play.

• Changelog — what changed in each release
• Privacy Policy · Terms of Service