open-source A field note by Vikrant Sharma
Sol music player went open source and nobody noticed the jukebox
A solo developer just open-sourced their macOS music player. The interesting bit is not the player, it is the local jukebox mode that turns your Mac into a shared library for other devices.
Someone called FulltimeFeline just open-sourced Sol, a macOS music player they have been working on. The project hit Hacker News this morning and most of the comments are about the UI design or which other players people prefer. The thing nobody is talking about is the jukebox feature. Sol runs a local server that lets other devices on your network browse and play from your Mac’s music library. No cloud sync, no account signup, just point your phone at an IP address and you are in. This is the sort of feature that should have been built into Music.app a decade ago. Instead we got Apple Music streaming and the local library became a second-class citizen. If you have a large FLAC collection or music that is not on streaming services, you are stuck with clunky workarounds or running Plex. The code is Swift and SwiftUI, MIT licensed. The server implementation looks straightforward, probably something you could fork and adapt for other media types. I wonder if this pattern, the local-first jukebox, will show up in more apps now that people are getting tired of subscription fatigue. One limitation: it only works if your Mac is awake and the app is running. No background daemon, no wake-on-LAN. That makes sense for a solo project but it means this is more of a weekend listening setup than a household media server. Still, it is rare to see someone open-source a polished native Mac app instead of letting it rot in the App Store. The README says the developer wanted to focus on other projects. That is how good tools become community tools.
Source: Show HN: Sol, my macOS music player and jukebox app, is now free and open source
