Free Software Collection
Free Music Players and Podcast Apps
A streaming catalogue is rented: albums disappear when licences lapse, some get replaced with re-recordings, everything stops when the subscription does, and what you listen to becomes data for recommendations and profiling. Podcasts were built on RSS, where anyone can read a feed, yet over the years platforms have pulled them into their own apps and account systems. This list takes the other route: music as files on your own disk, podcasts subscribed to directly by RSS. It falls into three groups — local playback, self-hosted servers, and podcasts and audiobooks. None of these tools supply content; they manage and play files you already have.
8 curated recommendations
Selection Criteria
- Open source and free, with no ads and no paid membership tier.
- Plays your own files or RSS feeds, tied to no streaming account.
- Listening history and progress stay on your device or your own server, not sent to third parties.
- Subscriptions and libraries export — OPML for podcasts, for example — so switching loses nothing.
Recommended Tools
Strawberry
A music player for people who still own their music files
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- Offline
Navidrome
Turn your own music library into streaming, uploaded to nobody
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- Cross-platform
Jellyfin
A fully self-controlled, free media server
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- No Sign-up
Audiobookshelf
Your own audiobook server, with progress that follows you between devices
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- No Sign-up
AntennaPod
An Android podcast client that subscribes over RSS, with no platform in between
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- Offline
VLC
The universal player that plays anything
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- Offline
mpv
A minimalist, high-performance open-source media player
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- Offline
Kodi
The open-source media center that turns your TV into a home theater
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- Offline
FAQ
- Tens of thousands of music files on my computer. Which player?
- Strawberry. An active fork of Clementine, it opens and searches libraries of tens of thousands of tracks instantly and plays FLAC, ALAC, APE, WavPack and DSF. Its tag editor pulls metadata from MusicBrainz and fills in cover art, and it has smart playlists and ReplayGain normalisation. It does not connect to streaming services such as Spotify or Apple Music, and it runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.
- My music is on a disk at home. How do I listen on my phone when I'm out?
- Run Navidrome at home. It is a single program written in Go, and a Raspberry Pi can serve a library of tens of thousands of tracks. Any Subsonic-compatible app on the phone connects back; on home Wi-Fi it streams the original FLAC, and on mobile data it transcodes to a lower bitrate automatically. It needs a machine that stays on, and reaching it from outside takes port forwarding or a mesh network such as Tailscale. If you already run Jellyfin for films and shows, it plays music too, and saves running a second service.
- How do I listen to podcasts without a platform app?
- On Android, AntennaPod. It subscribes to RSS directly with no platform account, and supports automatic downloads, per-show speed, intro and outro skipping and a sleep timer; subscriptions import and export as OPML. It is Android only. The built-in Podcast Index and iTunes directory search finds shows, but there is no algorithmic recommendation.
- What should I use for audiobooks, and will it remember where I was?
- Audiobookshelf. It organises the library by book rather than by file and keeps progress on the server, so chapter 12 on the phone picks up at the same point in the web player. Official Android and iOS apps offer offline downloads and speed control, and it can subscribe to podcast RSS as well. It needs your own server or NAS, deployed with Docker, and covers and descriptions for Chinese audiobooks often have to be filled in by hand.