Polaris

Polaris is a self-hosted music streaming server designed for accessing personal audio collections from computers and mobile devices. It functions as a central server that manages audio files and streams them to connected clients via a web interface or dedicated mobile applications. The software allows users to maintain full control over their media library without relying on external cloud services.

The software is deployed as a server application that runs on Windows, Linux, or BSD, with support for Docker containers for streamlined installation. It is specifically engineered to handle large music libraries exceeding 100,000 songs while maintaining responsiveness for the end user. This makes it suitable for collectors with extensive archives who require a stable way to organize and play their files across different hardware platforms.

Key features

• Support for flac, mp3, mp4, mpc, ogg, opus, ape, wav, and aiff formats
• Music browsing by album, artist, genre, or file tree
• Audio-waveform visualization for songs
• Multi-value field support for song metadata
• Search functionality with per-field queries
• Multi-user support with individual playlists
• Configuration via plain-text files or a built-in UI
• Dark mode variants and a customizable color palette

The system utilizes an OpenAPI documented API, which is distributed with every installation to provide interactive documentation for developers and administrators. Users can access their music through a standard web browser or via mobile applications, including the official Polaris app for Android and third-party clients like Polarios and Polarity. The server architecture emphasizes performance for high-volume libraries and provides specific maintenance runbooks to assist with long-term deployment.

Polaris is a free and open-source media server for users who manage their own audio files and prefer a self-hosted infrastructure for music streaming.