NOORwave: TIDAL desktop music player

Your TIDAL library, at local speed. Your music videos, indexed. Your genres, drawn as a galaxy.

NOORwave is a desktop music player for TIDAL built for instant local search and fast library browsing. Your synced library lives in a SQLite database on your own machine, so searching your saved collection runs locally. Your library and listening history stay on your disk; TIDAL supplies the audio.

Music video indexing finds live performances, covers, and alternate versions of tracks in your library, bringing them together in a video wall you can browse by genre and year. Video stations turn that growing catalog into a daily lineup you can keep watching. Genre Galaxy maps your whole library as a navigable star field. Gapless hi-fi playback, automix, planned DJ transitions, and phone remote control round out the player.

Instant local search · fast library browsing · music video indexing and stations · Genre Galaxy · gapless lossless playback · planned DJ transitions · dockable player · animated backgrounds · phone remote

Download · Last.fm setup · Run from source · Phone remote · Project status

Streaming apps are built for browsing a catalogue. They are not built for the person who has thousands of tracks saved and wants to listen: to know what they own, to move through it fast, to have one record land on the next without a hole in the middle.

NOORwave is that second thing. It pulls your TIDAL library down into a SQLite database on your own machine, then builds a real desktop player on top of it. Search answers instantly because it never leaves your disk. The queue is something you shape, not something that happens to you. Transitions are planned instead of stumbled into. And your own taste becomes a map you can fly through.

TIDAL stays the source of the audio. Everything else, the library, the play history, the audio analysis, the learned similarity, lives on your machine and belongs to you.

Your whole TIDAL library is mirrored into SQLite on your disk. Search runs locally, so results land as you type: no spinner, no round trip, no rate limit. Artist pages, album pages, filters, and shuffle all read from the same local copy, and incremental sync keeps it fresh in seconds.

Discovery is what you expect: search TIDAL's full video catalogue, play it in-app over HLS with a quality selector, autoplay through results, and pull in TIDAL's video mixes.

Library indexing is the part no other client does. A background pass walks the artists in your library and asks TIDAL what videos exist for the tracks you have liked, then keeps every hit. Not deduped down to one canonical clip: live takes, covers, and alternate cuts are all kept on purpose, because a richer wall beats a tidy one. Four different videos titled "Jamming" get told apart by release year and runtime. The result is a filterable wall of videos for music you already love, sortable by genre, year, and recency, with Play all and Shuffle across the lot. When a match is wrong, hide it once and it stays hidden through the 90-day re-scan.

Every clip plays with its own video session queue and a Keep exploring row of related artists underneath.

Open Videos -> Stations for a daily lineup drawn from your taste and the indexed catalog: a rotating artist spotlight, a wild card, pure shuffle, deep cuts, big ones you missed, and a station for each of your genres, each showing how many videos you have not seen yet. Stations refill as you watch, drawing on genres, artist relationships, tags and charts where the catalog has enough videos. The page explains when discovery is still building the catalog or there is not enough to play.

Background discovery fills in liked artists first, then explores related and new artists. Video radio and related-video suggestions use those connections, with videos you watch and enjoy helping guide the search. In Settings -> Services -> TIDAL -> Video discovery, choose Full, Limited for about a tenth of the requests, or Off to stop background discovery while retaining lookups for video radio you start.

Your library, drawn as gravity. Fourteen families, nearly two hundred genres, sized by how much of it you own and how much of it you actually play. Fly in, click a cluster, and start a session from it. Four lenses on the same map: Map for structure, Heat for what you have been playing, Vibe for mood, and Rediscover for the corners you have not touched in months. Toggle between your library's genres and TIDAL's, with auto drift on or off.

Genre runs through the rest of the player too: genre shuffle, genre-aware automix, genre video stations, and tags from MusicBrainz and Last.fm normalised into one taxonomy.

A NearEnd event fires 15 seconds before a track ends so the next one is already decoded and buffered when the current one runs out. On every transition the output stream is rebuilt to match the source sample rate, so a 96 kHz record plays at 96 kHz instead of being quietly resampled to whatever the device was last set to. On Windows, NOORwave drives WASAPI in exclusive mode directly, which means the OS mixer is out of the path entirely. Crossfade, DASH segment seek, media keys, and tray transport are all in the core player rather than bolted on.

The DJ cockpit reads the outgoing and incoming tracks as audio profiles and plans the cues, duration and gain changes ahead of time. Blends, cuts, bass swaps and energy changes use the available beat, phrase and harmonic evidence. Conservative, Balanced and Adventurous preferences guide the choices; uncertain analysis falls back to a safe crossfade.

DJ and Automix show the outgoing track, transition and incoming track together, with animation driven by confirmed playback. Why this transition?, Fine Tune and Diagnostics expose the reasoning and controls. Harmonic and BPM matching use Camelot key detection, tempo and energy analysis. Compatible keys get favoured, clashes get penalised, and unanalyzed tracks keep neutral scores. Seeking through a mix follows the incoming track's original audio and position, including while paused.

Automix keeps a running runway of tracks ahead of you and tells you why each one is there. It prefers learned neighbours from an embedding model trained on your own listening history, penalises hub tracks so the same twenty songs do not leak into every genre, and falls back to a session taste profile when the model has nothing to say. Clear the queue by hand and it backs off for a minute instead of immediately refilling what you just deleted. Four shuffle modes sit on a separate axis: plain, weighted by favourites and recency, genre-bucketed, and harmonically stabilised.

• Dock the player on the right, the left, or as a bar along the bottom. On narrow windows it folds into a mobile layout.
• 25+ colour schemes (Iris, Clay, Ember, Abyss, Neon, Obsidian, and more), each in light, dark, or following your system.
• 50+ animated backgrounds: aurora ribbons, liquid chrome, spiral galaxies, stained glass, synthwave, live spectrum analysers. They pulse to the music, bend toward your cursor, and can take their colours from the album art.

There is a full PWA at /remote, served by the same process on the same port. No companion app, no second service, no cloud round trip. Settings -> Remote -> Phone remote owns the whole setup: enable trusted-LAN access, scan a one-use QR code (or enter its temporary six-digit code), and manage each paired phone by name. Local discovery provides a stable .local address when the network supports it, with a direct Wi-Fi address as the fallback. Once connected you get transport, the live queue, search, artist and album browsing, action sheets, and a sleep timer. Add it to your home screen and it behaves like a native remote.

Incremental TIDAL sync, instant local search, artist and album pages, playlists, duplicate detection, and metadata enrichment from MusicBrainz, Last.fm, and Discogs. Anything you want on disk, you can have on disk: right-click a track, album, or playlist and save it as bit-perfect FLAC or 320 kbps MP3, tagged, into an Artist/Album/NN - Title tree you pick once.

TIDAL catalogue replacements preserve track identity, original library dates and explicit favorite choices through sync. Playlist search also finds user-made Spotify playlists, with fallback sources for searching, opening and saving when the metadata proxy is unavailable.

Not a year-end slideshow. A ridgeline of when you actually listen across the day, peak hour, session count, completion rate, skip rate, and how all of it has moved over 24 hours, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, or all time.

This is the single highest-value thing you can do after signing into TIDAL. NOORwave works without it, but a meaningful slice of what makes it interesting is dark until you connect it.

With a Last.fm API key in place you get:

• Genre tags across your whole library. This is what fills in Genre Galaxy, the genre shuffle mode, and genre-aware automix. Without it, large parts of the map are empty.
• Similar-track radio. Last.fm similarity is the producer behind the radio queue. Song radio and artist radio get much better reach.
• Trending and charts data.
• Scrobbling to your Last.fm profile, once you add the shared secret as well.

It also compounds: the more your library is tagged and the more listening history accumulates, the better the learned similarity model gets, which is what automix and discovery lean on.

How to set it up:

1. Create an API account at last.fm/api/account/create. It takes about a minute and is free.
2. In NOORwave, go to Settings -> Services -> Last.fm and paste the API key. Add the shared secret too if you want scrobbling.
3. Run the enrichment pass from the same panel. It is resumable and shows progress. Leave it running while you listen.

No Last.fm key ships with the app, so this step is on you. It is worth the minute.

Latest build: GitHub Releases. Every release ships notes on its release page, with the full history in docs/releases.

Windows builds are not CA-signed yet, so SmartScreen can warn on first launch. The updater payload itself is signed with the project's Tauri updater key.

The Windows portable zip remains the recovery option if installation or updating is blocked. Installed app code lives under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\NOORwave, with your database, settings and logs under %LOCALAPPDATA%\NOORwave.

You need Rust stable, Node 24, pnpm 10, and a TIDAL account (you sign in from inside the app).

Fastest path, backend and frontend together:

.\scripts\dev.ps1

Or run them yourself:

cargo run -p noor-server

cd frontend
pnpm install
pnpm dev

• Dev server with hot reload: http://127.0.0.1:17601
• Backend-served production UI: http://127.0.0.1:17600

For the full desktop shell, which launches the server for you and adds the tray, media keys, and updater:

cargo run -p noor-app

On first run the server prints its master access PIN in the startup banner. On loopback the desktop UI fetches it automatically. Normal phone setup uses the QR flow in Settings -> Remote -> Phone remote. Under the desktop app the PIN only works on this computer until you turn on PIN sign-in there (which also creates a new PIN) for a browser that cannot pair; New PIN rotates it without unpairing phones.

In the installed desktop app:

1. Open Settings -> Remote -> Phone remote and enable Allow phone remote. Use this only on a trusted local network.
2. Optional: enable Start NOORwave in the tray when I sign in so the remote is available without opening the main window first.
3. Select Pair phone, then scan it with the phone's camera. If NOORwave is already installed on the phone's home screen, enter the temporary six-digit code instead. The QR and code expire after two minutes and work once.
4. Open the paired remote and optionally add it to the phone's home screen. The device receives its own persistent credential; the permanent master PIN is not embedded in the QR.
5. Back on the desktop, use Paired devices to rename or revoke individual phones. Reset all remote access rotates the master PIN and disconnects every remote session.

If the friendly .local address does not open, choose the direct Wi-Fi address under Use a different connection address, refresh the QR, and pair that origin separately. Windows may show a firewall prompt the first time LAN access is enabled; allow NOORwave on private networks. Guest Wi-Fi/client isolation and VPNs can prevent local devices from seeing one another.

For a standalone noor-server, run with --host, open http://<LAN-IP>:17600/remote, and use the master PIN (a standalone server accepts it from the LAN unless PIN sign-in was turned off). QR generation and paired-device management are deliberately restricted to the local desktop settings surface. Phone Remote is same-LAN only: it does not use a cloud relay, port forwarding, or internet discovery.

The backend port is baked into the frontend at build time. If you change NOOR_PORT, rebuild the frontend so the UI points at the right place. The dev-server port is the only origin the backend trusts for CORS in dev, so keep it in sync on both sides.

The server listens on 127.0.0.1 by default, so nothing off your machine can reach it. To expose it on your LAN, use the tray's Network access toggle, pass --host, or set NOOR_ADDR=0.0.0.0:17600.

Precedence, highest first: NOOR_ADDR > --host > the saved Network-access setting > loopback.

All optional. The app ships with working defaults, including built-in TIDAL credentials.

A few cache-tuning knobs exist (DISCOVERY_CACHE_TTL_DAYS, RESOLVE_CACHE_TTL_DAYS, RESOLVE_RETRY_AFTER_DAYS, RESOLVE_EAGER_N, RESOLVE_BULK_CONCURRENCY). Defaults are fine.

noor-app       Tauri 2 desktop shell: tray, media keys, updater, sidecar manager
noor-server    Rust Axum server: SQLite, audio engine, integrations, WebSocket events
frontend       SvelteKit 2 + Svelte 5 UI, static build served by noor-server
docs           Specs, plans, inventories, design memory
scripts        Build, dev launcher, smoke tests, data utilities

• Sidecar model. The Tauri shell spawns noor-server as a child process, waits for GET /api/ping, then opens the WebView. Shutdown goes through POST /api/shutdown before any force kill.
• One server, two front doors. The same process serves the desktop UI and the LAN /remote PWA. That is why it stays a real HTTP server.
• Auth. The desktop loopback session is automatic. Phones normally receive individually revocable credentials through a one-use, two-minute pairing ticket; the shared master PIN remains a recovery fallback. Protected HTTP requests use a bearer header and WebSockets use a query credential because browsers cannot set headers on an upgrade.
• Storage. One local SQLite file. No account, no cloud, no sync.

Verify a change:

cargo test --workspace --locked

cd frontend
pnpm check
pnpm test
pnpm run build

Release mechanics live in docs/release-checklist.md.

1.0, built by one person.

It is not a demo. It is the player I use every day, and the daily-driver path (sync, search, queue, gapless playback, remote) is genuinely solid. 1.0 means the whole app now shares one design and one way of working. It is still one developer's project moving fast, and it shows in places.

What that means for you:

• Rough edges land and get fixed quickly. Expect frequent releases.
• Genre Galaxy works and is a lot of fun, but interaction and rendering polish is ongoing.
• Windows is the priority platform. WASAPI exclusive output is the most tuned path by a wide margin. macOS and Linux build and run, but portable-only and less exercised.
• ACRCloud audio fingerprinting is scaffolded, not finished.
• This is a single-user local app. There is no hosted mode, no multi-user auth, no quotas.
• Some panels are further along than others. If something looks unfinished, it probably is.

Bug reports are genuinely useful. Screenshots and the version string from the sidebar help a lot.

Small, focused changes. Rust, Svelte, and TypeScript are the first-class languages. Do not commit local databases, build output, secrets, signing keys, or machine-local config.

cargo fmt --all -- --check

To refresh the screenshots in this README, drop 2000-wide window captures into docs/assets/raw/ named <surface>-<theme>.webp (for example home-dark.webp), then:

python scripts/build-readme-tour.py

It crops the caption strip, rounds the corners into docs/assets/shots/, and bakes the rotating tour.webp and themes.webp.

NOORwave uses TIDAL's unofficial API through PKCE OAuth2. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with TIDAL Music AS or MQA Ltd. Credentials are stored locally, encrypted, in SQLite. Intended for personal use only.

NOORwave is source-available under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. Personal, educational, research, hobby, and other non-commercial use is free. The license does not limit rights you may have under applicable law, including fair use.

Commercial use, managed hosting, redistribution, and OEM use require a separate commercial license from the copyright holder.

Earlier releases published under MIT remain available under their original terms.