Feature overview
This page sums up what Tunetorch can do, each with a link to the chapter that covers it. Listening is completely free: playback, quality, the equaliser, audiobooks, offline and casting don't depend on any subscription. A few convenience features and larger installations belong to the optional Pro subscription. They're marked Pro below.
Listening
| Feature | In short |
|---|---|
| Web player | Separate layouts for desktop, tablet and phone. On a phone the player opens full screen, and you swipe it open and closed. |
| Three quality levels | Original, low and high compression, switchable at any time. |
| Loudness normalisation | Brings loud and quiet tracks to −16 LUFS (EBU R128), with protection against clipping. |
| 10-band equaliser | Seven presets and as many profiles of your own as you like, available on every device. |
| Dropout-free playback | Every track is loaded in full before it starts, and the next one is preloaded from 80 %. |
| Headphones & lock screen | Title, artist, album and cover art on the lock screen. Bluetooth and hardware buttons work reliably. |
| Transitions | Seamless, or with a short pause of 0.5, 1 or 2 seconds. |
→ Interface & navigation · Playback & audio quality
Finding & browsing
| Feature | In short |
|---|---|
| Fast start | The library is cached on the device and is there instantly the next time you open it. |
| Smooth lists | Grids and tables stay smooth even with very large libraries; cover art loads as you scroll. |
| Library search | Searches artists, album artists, albums and tracks and sorts by relevance. Accents don't matter. |
| Artist profile page | A large image, “Most played tracks”, albums, biography and band members. |
| Filters & sorting | By genre, year, tags, audio (format, quality, bitrate, channels), maintenance (offline, missing cover/year/genre, duplicates) and favourites, on desktop and phone. |
| Detail panel | A click on a card opens cover art, track list and total duration right below it. |
| Colour scheme & layout (Pro) | Nine colour schemes (eight dark, one light) and two layout variants, chosen per user. Without Pro the default applies, but your choice stays saved. |
| Your own server name (Pro) | Your installation is called, say, “Smith Family Music” instead of “Tunetorch”, in the header, in the browser tab and on the sign-in page. |
Collecting
| Feature | In short |
|---|---|
| Playlists | Name them, describe them, make them public, reorder them by drag and drop. |
| Queue | Lives on the server, so you carry on listening on the next device. In the playlist manager you edit it with more room. |
| Favourites | A heart for tracks, albums and artists, with its own filter on every tab. |
| Audiobooks | Remembers the position per album, asks whether to resume when you start, speed from 1× to 2× and a sleep timer. |
| Statistics & history | Personal statistics with charts and a complete playback history. |
→ Playlists & favourites · Audiobooks · Statistics & history
Curating
| Feature | In short |
|---|---|
| Upload | Files or whole folders by drag and drop; correct the metadata right in an album table. |
| Collection import | Mount an existing collection read-only once and let Tunetorch take it over. |
| Rip CDs | Add CDs from a drive attached to the server to the library, as FLAC or, to save space, as Opus, MP3 or AAC. Every CD is read in two passes and checked against AccurateRip, and you get a report per track. Metadata comes from the CD-Text, from you, or (Pro) from MusicBrainz including cover art. Off out of the box. |
| Metadata editor | Change title, album, artist, genre and cover art, also for all of an artist's albums at once. |
| Metadata assistant (Pro) | Searches the whole library for artists that can be split up, duplicate spellings, additions in the title such as “(Live)” or “(feat. …)”, normalisation mismatches and small oddities such as “l” instead of “I”. You pick an area, search it or work through it in batches (10 to 500 per view). Findings that are right you mark “Correct as is”, and they don't come back. Plus find & replace across tracks, albums, artists and genres with a preview, and a change history where you undo any metadata change of the last 180 days individually or as a whole operation, and restore it if needed. |
| Contributors | Collaboration albums and guest appearances show up on the profiles of everyone involved. |
| Online image search (Pro) | Cover art and artist photos from CoverArtArchive, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, without an API key. |
| MusicBrainz enrichment (Pro) | Master data, description, photo and band line-up at the push of a button. A person stays the same person across several bands. |
| Tags & notes | Filterable attributes (Live, Remaster, Acoustic …) and notes, shared or private. |
| Export | Single albums, whole artists or playlists (with an .m3u8) as a ZIP or into a server folder, original or converted. Free. |
.ttdb export + whole database (Pro) | An entire collection including the music in one file, for moving to another installation. The slim .ttdbl (information only, no music) stays free. |
→ Adding music · Managing metadata · Exporting music
Devices
| Feature | In short |
|---|---|
| Installable PWA | Add it to the home screen on desktop and iOS; it then runs without the browser bar. |
| Android app | Comes through the Google Play Store (publication is still under way). Keeps playing reliably in the background. |
| Offline mode | Downloads and fully cached tracks play without a network too. What you listened to offline is recorded later. |
| Android Auto | Four tabs, voice search, cover art, a favourites heart during playback, a streaming quality of its own for the car, continue listening and audiobooks that remember your spot. |
| DLNA casting | Playback on speakers and receivers on your home network, with volume control and gapless transitions. |
→ App, PWA & offline · Casting on your home network
Administration
| Feature | In short |
|---|---|
| Users & permissions | Five additional permissions plus admin, granted individually per account. |
| Restricted accounts | Children's and guest accounts only see music that has been shared with them. A supervisor looks after what's shared, not the admin. |
| Server settings | Almost everything can be changed while the server is running, without a restart. Every section has a button to reset it. |
| Maintenance & cron | Scan, clean-up, cache limit, loudness measurement and VACUUM on a schedule. |
| Log viewer | Server logs from the last hour up to 28 days, filterable by source and level. The filters apply when the logs are fetched, so the upper limit only counts the filtered entries. |
| Brute-force protection | Blocks IP addresses after too many failed attempts (Fail2Ban); time window and block duration are adjustable. |
| Deletion with a grace period | Deleted tracks and accounts only disappear for good after a retention period. |
→ Users & permissions · Server administration · Security & backup
What Tunetorch deliberately doesn't do
- No telemetry, no tracking. The server reports nothing to the outside, and your data stays on your server. It only connects to the internet for three features, all of which require Pro: the online image search, MusicBrainz enrichment and the licence check. On top of that comes one you switch on yourself: when ripping CDs, the server asks AccurateRip for each CD whether others have read the same data. That works without Pro too. As long as CD ripping is off (which it is out of the box), a Free installation doesn't open a single connection to the internet.
- No third-party streaming catalogues. Tunetorch only plays your own files.
- No external content in the browser. Tunetorch brings its own fonts and charts. A strict Content Security Policy prevents the interface from loading anything from other servers.