Familiar Player vs Harmonitron

Familiar is a self-hosted music player that understands the sound of your music, not just its metadata. Ask for "something that sounds like rain on a window" and it actually works. Point Familiar at your own home server (macOS Docker, Linux, Synology, OpenMediaVault — whatever you run). Nothing leaves your network. No cloud accounts, no subscriptions, no tracking. • AI chat and playlist creation — Powered by the Claude API using your own key. Describe a mood, a setting, a vibe; Familiar pulls from your library. • Semantic audio search — CLAP embeddings let you match by how music sounds, not just artist or genre. • Deep feature analysis — BPM, key, energy, brightness, danceability, valence, instrumentalness, and more, extracted on your server. • Ambient mode — continuous drone plus ghostly snippets from your library, tuned to the current key. • Community analysis cache — opt in to share anonymized audio fingerprints so others skip hours of analysis, and benefit from theirs. • Smart playlists — rules-based playlists that update automatically as your library changes. • Offline playback, lock-screen controls, synced lyrics (LRCLIB), Last.fm scrobbling. • Works with FLAC, ALAC, MP3, AAC, Ogg, Opus. Familiar is open-source (MIT) and requires you to run your own backend. Setup guides for Docker, macOS, and common NAS platforms are on GitHub.

Harmonitron is a harmonic tremolo. The rich, swirling amp "vibrato" made famous by early-1960s brownface amplifiers. A normal tremolo just pulses your volume up and down. A harmonic tremolo goes deeper: it splits your sound into a low band and a high band, then sweeps them in OPPOSITE phase. As the lows swell, the highs dip and back again. That contrary motion is what gives Harmonitron its lush, watery, almost phaser-like character that an ordinary tremolo can't reach. Turn the Voice control and the effect morphs smoothly from a classic in-phase tremolo all the way to a full harmonic swirl. Drop it on guitars, keys, synths, pads, drums, or a whole mix. Standalone, or as an Audio Unit (AUv3) effect inside GarageBand, AUM, Logic, and other hosts. THE SOUND • True harmonic tremolo: anti-phase modulation of a low and high band • Voice: morph continuously from classic tremolo to full harmonic swirl • Split & Tilt: place the crossover and balance the two bands • Tube Drive and tone shaping for warmth and grit MOVEMENT • Rate from a slow tide to a fast flutter, shown in BPM • LFO Shape: sine, triangle, square, and ramp with adjustable edge Slope • Tempo Sync that locks to your project and lands on the beat, with musical note divisions from 1/1 to 1/32 (dotted and triplet) • Stereo Spread for auto-pan and rotary-style width HANDS-ON • A living hero orb whose two halves breathe in opposite phase — drag it to set Depth, tap to bypass • Grouped, color-coded controls: Motion, Sync, Harmonic, Stereo, Drive, Output • Factory presets: Brownface, Rotary Swirl, Slow Tide, Sync Chop, Wide Harmonic and more — plus your own saved presets PLUGIN & STANDALONE • Full AUv3 audio-effect support with host presets and parameter automation • Runs on iPhone, iPad, and Mac • Standalone mode with a built-in demo pad, live microphone input, or import a song and export the processed result