Why I'm building own.audio

I'm Kornel — an engineer, but not a software one by trade. own.audio is a hobbyist programmer's project, built by someone who's also a music enthusiast, and it started from two problems I kept running into myself: not as an abstract market opportunity, but as the actual reason I got annoyed enough to start building something.

Libraries that already exist and don't get used

A lot of people have real audio libraries — audiobooks bought over the years, CDs ripped at some point, files that ended up scattered across an old laptop, a phone, a drive in a drawer. The library exists. It just doesn't get used, because actually turning it into something you can comfortably listen to — synced across devices, organized, shared with the rest of the household — usually means running your own server.

Self-hosting is genuinely a good answer for people who enjoy it — I've written honestly about what that actually takes, hardware and time included, in this site's self-hosting guide. But most people aren't sysadmins, don't want to become one just to listen to their own audiobooks, and shouldn't have to. That's most of the audio people already own, sitting unused for a reason that has nothing to do with the audio itself.

Paying twice for music you already own

The second problem is smaller to explain and just as common: a lot of people already own the music they listen to — a shelf of CDs, an old iPod, files downloaded years ago — and pay a monthly subscription on top of it anyway, for a catalog that mostly overlaps with what's already sitting at home. Not because streaming is bad. Because there was never a comfortable way to actually use what you already own instead of just paying again for access to a version of it.

What I'm building instead

own.audio is a private, personal and family audio locker: one place for the audiobooks, music, and podcasts you already own, that's comfortable to use without becoming the household's system administrator to get there. Something you own outright, not something rented back to you every month — and something you can share with the specific people you actually want to share it with, a partner, your kids, your parents, not broadcast to strangers.

It's a one-person project, and it's in development — nothing described on this site is available yet. The guides published here come directly out of building it: the formats, the storage math, and the self-hosting tradeoffs are things tested first-hand, not summarized from other articles.

Questions or corrections are welcome at [email protected]. If you want to know when own.audio is ready, there's a waitlist on the home page.