Hey everyone! For the past few months, I've been working on a personal project called AmberWave, a self-hosted music player and library management application. I've been collecting and organizing digital music for over 15 years, and I've used quite a few applications along the way — iTunes, MusicBee, Plex, Jellyfin, and others. They all have their strengths, but I kept running into little things that frustrated me. Sometimes the library management wasn't flexible enough. Sometimes the playback experience felt like an afterthought. Sometimes something that should have been simple required three different applications and a bunch of configuration. Eventually, I thought: What if I just built the music player I've always wanted? So that's what I've been doing. What is AmberWave? The idea is to combine detailed music library management, intelligent automation, and a genuinely enjoyable listening experience in one self-hosted application. My guiding principle is simple: Let the software do the work, without taking control away from the user. Some of the things I've been working on include: Detailed library management: Artists, albums, different releases and editions, recordings, credits, contributors, and more, using MusicBrainz data. I want to preserve the details that make a music collection interesting, rather than reducing everything to basic artist and album tags. Automatic music identification: Acoustic fingerprinting and metadata matching to identify tracks and find the correct album releases. The goal is to make importing music as effortless as possible, while keeping the results transparent and allowing manual corrections whenever needed. A music player that's actually enjoyable to use: Gapless playback, lossless audio, a Cover Flow-inspired interface, and a few deliberately unnecessary but fun animations. Yes, the CDs actually spin. Remote playback control: Control playback on another device from your phone, locally or over the internet. AmberWave automatically prefers a local connection when available and falls back to the remote connection when necessary. Advanced audio output: WASAPI Shared and Exclusive for standard Windows playback, plus ASIO support for professional audio interfaces. In ASIO mode, a single interface can host multiple independently configured virtual output devices — for example, a 5.1 speaker system on channels 1–6 and headphones on channels 7–8, or two separate stereo speaker setups on channels 1–2 and 3–4. Each output configuration can have its own speaker layout, channel routing, per-channel EQ, individual levels, delays, bass management, and other settings. Switching between these setups is as simple as selecting a different output device. DSP and VST3 support: I've been developing my own tape, tube, and transformer saturation effects, along with a surround upmixer. The more advanced models use physical modeling to simulate some of the nonlinear and time-dependent behavior of analog hardware. AmberWave also supports third-party VST3 plugins, running in separate processes with latency compensation and preset management. A big part of the design is keeping the complexity out of the way. Someone who just wants to import music and press Play shouldn't have to understand ASIO routing, signal processing, or any of the advanced settings. But if you're someone who enjoys tweaking your audio setup, using active studio monitors, experimenting with DSP, or managing a carefully organized music library, those tools should be available without having to jump between multiple applications. I'm also working on making the initial self-hosted setup as painless as possible, particularly the usual Docker permissions and configuration headaches. What about a release? AmberWave is already running and being used in my own setup, but it's not publicly available yet. I'm still working on the first-run setup, polishing features, testing things, and figuring out the licensing and distribution model. The current plan is to offer a fully functional, permanently free core, with optional paid features for specialized audio capabilities and additional convenience. I don't want the free version to feel like a deliberately crippled demo. It should be a genuinely useful music player and library manager on its own. I don't have a public beta date to announce, and I don't want to promise one before it's ready. I'd really love your feedback This is where I'd particularly appreciate some outside perspectives. What frustrates you most about your current self-hosted music server, library manager, or music player? What's that one feature you've always wanted but never quite found? Or something that existing applications technically support, but make unnecessarily complicated? I'm also interested in what you think of the UI, the overall concept, and whether the balance between simplicity and advanced functionality makes sense. I'm not promising to implement every suggestion, but I'd genuinely love to hear about the problems other people have run into. I've attached a few screenshots and a short demonstration of the interface. One more thing for transparency: I'm developing AmberWave with extensive AI coding assistance. The product design, architecture decisions, feature direction, and testing are driven by me, but I'm not going to pretend I hand-wrote every line of code. This started as a personal passion project, and I've been having an incredible amount of fun building it. I'd love to know what you think — including what you'd change. Thanks for taking a look!   submitted by   /u/lorenzoao1995 [link]   [comments]