The music
player for
listening.
A desktop player for people who own their music, lossless, gapless, with a real spectrogram and credits that actually load.
Phonos Player started as a side project: an interface for our own collections that didn’t patronise us. Native macOS, Windows and Linux. Plays FLAC, ALAC, DSD, Opus, MP3, whatever you have. Pulls credits from MusicBrainz and Discogs so the names of the people who made the record actually appear on screen. Free, no account, no telemetry.
Built for the moments you’re actually listening.
A late-evening listening session. The player shows the record, the queue, the credits, and a live spectrogram, not a banner ad for a podcast you didn’t ask for.
Up nextSpooky · 1992
Credits
The player itself is a kind of attention.
Three things mainstream players get wrong, and what Phonos does instead.
Bit-perfect matters.
Most desktop players resample silently. Phonos passes audio bit-perfect to ASIO, WASAPI exclusive, or CoreAudio, whatever your DAC speaks. Gapless playback works for all formats, including DSD.
Credits are music.
Knowing who produced the record, who played the bass, who mastered it, this is part of listening. Phonos pulls personnel from MusicBrainz and Discogs and shows them while you listen, not three menus deep.
No account.
Phonos doesn’t have an account system. There’s nothing to log in to, no telemetry, no recommendations engine. Your library lives on your disk. The player respects that.
Roadmap to v1.0.
A small project, shipped slowly. Stable build every 8 weeks; no breaking changes after v1.0.
macOS & Linux builds.
Native Cocoa on macOS; GTK4 on Linux. Bit-perfect output via CoreAudio and ALSA/PipeWire.
MusicBrainz credits.
Personnel pulled live and cached locally. Discogs as a fallback when MB lacks data.
Windows build.
WinUI 3 with WASAPI exclusive and ASIO support. Beta NDA-only at the moment; public open by year end.
Synced lyrics.
Community-contributed LRC display synced to playback. Read-only; no contribution tooling in v1.0.
General availability.
Stable v1.0 across all three platforms. Free forever; no enshittification clause in the licence text.