Introduction

SoundChex is a self-hosted media library for music, films, television and books — one catalogue, one player, on every device you own. It runs on your own machine; your files stay yours and are never uploaded anywhere.

How it's put together

A SoundChex install has two halves:

  • The server — a Laravel application (PHP 8.4, SQLite) running on one machine in your home. It watches your media folders, catalogues what it finds, fetches metadata, transcodes video, and serves the library to everything else.
  • The apps — native shells for macOS, iOS and, in time, Windows, Linux, iPadOS and Android — plus any web browser, which gets the full experience.

The interface itself is served by your server rather than compiled into the apps, so when the server updates, every device gets the new version on its next page load. Only the connect screen and the offline shell live inside the app binaries.

The database is a single SQLite file — one file to back up, no database service to keep running, and a library of a few thousand items never gets near its limits.

One catalogue, four media types

Music, films, TV and books share a schema, a search box and a player. A song, an episode and a chapter are all things you were part-way through, and SoundChex treats them that way: resume points, history and watchlists work identically across all four.

  • Music — identified by fingerprint (Chromaprint/AcoustID) and tags, organised Artist/Album/.
  • Films & TV — hardware transcoding, caption tracks, skip markers, and search inside dialogue.
  • Books — EPUB, PDF and CBZ with highlights, private notes, and OCR of scanned pages so the text is selectable and searchable.

It plays well with others

Libraries are organised the way Plex, Jellyfin and Emby already read — Artist/Album/, Title (Year)/, Series/Season 01/ — so your files stay legible to anything else you point at them. Adopting SoundChex doesn't lock you in, and leaving it doesn't scramble your folders.

What it costs

Nothing. SoundChex is AGPLv3-licensed and the source is public at github.com/tripsittr/SoundChex. There are no feature gates. The optional SCNet subscription (the SoundChex Network, coming soon) buys remote access through a hosted relay for people who don't want to run their own tunnel — convenience, never capability.

Where to next