PMDA vs Sonarch

PMDA (pronounced "pimda") is one music lover's take on building the music library of his dreams — and now yours. Point the app at your own self-hosted PMDA server and enjoy your entire collection, beautifully organized, anywhere you go. WHY PMDA Most music apps lock you into a subscription and their catalog, or leave your carefully-built library a mess of mismatched tags and missing covers. PMDA is different: 100% self-hosted, private, and it actually understands your music. WHAT YOU GET • Your whole library, everywhere — browse artists, albums, genres and labels, with rich, clickable artist pages. • Real listening — gapless playback, history, cross-user recommendations, synced lyrics and waveforms. • Lossless, your way — stream bit-perfect FLAC or save data with smart transcoding; download albums for offline, even on a plane. • Clean and yours — your files, your server, your rules. No cloud lock-in, no ads, no tracking, no AI. HOW IT WORKS PMDA mobile is a companion to the PMDA server (a free, self-hosted music library app you run on your own machine or NAS). Enter your server's address, sign in, and your library is in your pocket. Nothing is stored on our servers — the app talks only to the server you point it at. Built for people who are in love with music. Welcome.

Sonarch plays the music you already own. Point it at folders on your Mac, a drive on your network, or a cloud account, and it builds one library out of all of them. Nothing is streamed from us, nothing is counted, and nothing about what you play leaves your device unless you ask it to. MIXES, ENDLESS AND YOUR OWN Your Mac listens to 30 seconds of every track and works out what sounds alike, with no service involved. Play a ready mix named after its artists, or start one from any track, and it goes on for as long as you listen. Drift wanders as near or as far as you like; Similar holds one mood. Narrow a mix to the artists or genres you choose, save it, and come back where you left off. With Sync, your iPhone plays them too. ONE TRACK, HOWEVER MANY COPIES A track you have as FLAC and again as MP3, sitting in two different places, is one row in your library — with every format and every place it lives behind it. EVERY FORMAT, GAPLESS BETWEEN THEM FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, MP3, AAC and Ogg Vorbis, with ReplayGain so a library built from many sources plays at one loudness. An album ripped as one file with a CUE sheet shows up as its own tracks. The output can follow each track's sample rate, and crossfade and silence trimming are there when you want them. SOUND THAT FITS YOUR HEADPHONES Import the AutoEQ profile for your headphones and everything you play is corrected, with its own profile for each output. Hi-fi style bass and treble controls are kept per output too, and a peak limiter lets both play louder without clipping. BROWSE VIEWS THAT FOLLOW THEIR RULES Any view can be restricted to the locations you choose, and a browse view takes rules as well, composed in its own filter engine. Each one is live and stays where you left it. WHERE YOU LEFT OFF A browse, a playlist, every album and every saved mix each keep their own place, and quitting loses none of them. Bookmarks save any moment inside a track, to come back to later. WHAT YOU PLAYED, AND WHEN History keeps every play with the time it happened, counts a track that came around twice, and remembers the view each one was played from — so it can be played again, or opened where it came from. FOLDERS, NETWORK SHARES AND CLOUDS Bandcamp, Dropbox, OneDrive, pCloud, S3 buckets, a WebDAV share or a Subsonic server, connected straight from your device with your own credentials. Your files never pass through our servers. Take what you want offline for the train. ACROSS YOUR DEVICES Sign in, and your likes, play history, tag corrections and playlists follow you between your devices. Pause on one and carry on from the same second on another. TAGS THAT STAY FIXED Correct a tag once and it survives every rescan — written into the file where that is possible, kept by the library where it is not. ON THE MAC Send audio to another output with a keystroke, mid-track, without a trip into Settings. Schedule a start time and decide what happens when it ends. Drag in a ZIP from Bandcamp and it joins the library, with the shop's own tags stripped on the way past. ON IPHONE CarPlay, the Lock Screen and Control Center, through the system player rather than a second interface to learn. Control the Mac from your phone over the local network. ALSO An editable playing queue. Lyrics from your tags or from LRCLIB. Scrobbling to Last.fm and ListenBrainz. Stop after this track, album or artist, or pause after a set time. Genre categories worked out from your tags. Playlists, statistics, and sharing tracks as files. NO TELEMETRY, NO ACCOUNT NEEDED No analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising identifier and no third-party SDK of any kind. There is nothing counting what you play. An account is optional — the player works perfectly without one.