Sol, a native macOS music player with no lock-in, goes free and open source

Sol, a native macOS music player and jukebox app, is now free and open source. The developer announced the change in a Show HN post on Hacker News, and the project's GitHub README confirms the app ships under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later, with signed and notarized builds on the Releases page, a Homebrew cask, and no paid tier, subscription, trial, in-app purchase or account.

Plays the library in place

Sol's central idea is that it leaves your music alone: point it at folders on internal disks, external drives, network shares or iCloud Drive, and it plays the files where they are, without importing them into a proprietary database. According to the README, libraries that go offline are detected instantly and greyed out, then rescanned on their own when the drive or share comes back. The classic pane browser files music by library, genre, artist and album, joined by a grid view, an album carousel, a multi-pane view and a resident mini player. Browsing is claimed to stay instant at collections running to hundreds of thousands of tracks, and a single search bar covers songs, albums, playlists and podcast episodes across every library and server at once.

Format support and audiophile output

The player handles FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis and Opus, plus less common formats such as DSD, Monkey's Audio, Musepack and Wave64. Cue sheets work both as sidecar files and embedded inside the audio file itself. Playback features include gapless support, crossfade, a full equalizer with presets, and ReplayGain levelling with clipping protection. A sample-rate matching mode switches your DAC to each file's own rate and depth, and a bit-perfect mode passes the file's bits through untouched when the hardware supports it, falling back to normal output when it does not.

Self-hosted streaming beside local files

Alongside local folders, Sol streams from Navidrome, Subsonic and OpenSubsonic servers, with two-way sync of playlists, favourites and ratings, plus downloads for offline listening. Beyond music, the app includes podcasts with subscriptions, transcripts, chapters and a Voice Boost option, one-click import from Apple Podcasts, internet radio with station artwork and live song titles, line-by-line lyrics, a full-screen visualizer and karaoke. A feature called Sol DJ builds an endless, radio-style mix that leans toward tracks you love, digs up music you have overlooked and avoids repeats.

Tags written into the files

The metadata editor covers thirty fields written directly into the files themselves, artwork included, with multi-file editing, find-and-replace using regular expressions, and MusicBrainz lookups. Ratings and loves also go into the files' actual tags, so they stay readable by other players. Smart playlists support nested rule groups across more than thirty fields, and there is a duplicates finder, play statistics, and an import organizer that renames and files new music according to a user-defined template.

Mac integration and codebase

On the Mac side, Sol offers AppleScript support, sixteen Shortcuts actions, media keys, Dock transport controls and system Now Playing integration, plus Last.fm scrobbling and Discord Rich Presence via a free GPL-3.0 companion app; the README explains that Discord's IPC socket cannot be reached from inside the App Sandbox. The app is translated into 34 languages, collects no telemetry or analytics, and exposes an optional local control API for companion apps and automations.

Building it requires macOS 14 or later, Xcode 26 or later with the macOS 26 SDK, Swift 6 language mode with full strict concurrency checking, and XcodeGen, because the Xcode project is generated from a project.yml file rather than kept in version control. Audio decoding uses a trimmed fork of SFBAudioEngine, while TagLib, Monkey's Audio, Musepack, Ogg, Vorbis and opencore-amr are vendored as static libraries. The README notes there is no test target yet, pointing to several pure, deterministic components as the place to start.

Why it matters

Most music software on the Mac either wraps a streaming catalogue or manages local files inside a closed ecosystem. Sol is a counter-proposal: a native app where everyone gets the same feature set, metadata lives in the files rather than a private database, and self-hosted servers sit beside local folders with synced playlists and ratings. Moving to GPL-3.0 removes both the price and the lock-in risk, and lets users verify claims such as the absence of telemetry. For audiophiles who need bit-perfect output, or anyone running Navidrome or Subsonic at home, Sol is now one of the more complete free options on the platform, though potential contributors should note the missing test suite.