PearTune

PearTune plays a music collection that lives on a computer at home, from anywhere, with no port forwarding, no VPN, no dynamic DNS and no account. The files never leave that machine and are never copied to anybody else's server.

Self-hosted music servers are good at playback. The hard part is reaching them from outside the house, which usually means a reverse proxy, an open port, a VPN on every phone or paying for someone's remote-access tier. PearTune removes that step. You install the host on the machine with the music, scan a QR code with your phone once, and it works on wifi and on mobile data.

The machine does not have to be yours. A library's owner can let a friend or family member in as their own person with their own devices, give a guest a pass that expires on its own, and cut anyone off in a second, mid-song if need be. Nobody is handed a password or a login to share.

The host reads an existing Navidrome or other Subsonic server, a Jellyfin server or a plain folder of music files, whose tags and cover art it reads itself. It can add audiobooks from Audiobookshelf. It runs as a desktop app on Mac, Windows and Linux, or on an Umbrel or any Docker host.

The app has gapless playback, shuffle, repeat, a sleep timer and background playback, playlists, albums pinned for offline listening, and favourites and resume points that follow you between your own devices. People you let in can request music, and an owner can manage every device from the phone.

Phones connect straight to the host over an encrypted peer-to-peer connection that proves which device is calling, so there is no password to leak. When a mobile network refuses a direct connection, it can fall back to a relay that forwards only encrypted traffic and keeps nothing, and that fallback can be turned off.