Why we think audio deserves better — family sharing, ownership, self-hosting's real tradeoffs, and how we're building it.
The self-hosted server (AGPL) and the Music, Books and Podcasts apps for iPhone (MPL) are on GitHub. Run the server on a Pi or a NAS, build the apps in Xcode, or try the public demo — today.
The open-source own.audio server on a Raspberry Pi 4 from a drawer, with a 32 GB SD card: memory, scans and listeners, measured at home and remotely.
Streaming prices keep rising, most of what we stream is music we've heard for years, and much of it we already bought once. What the subscription really buys.
Free native apps on every screen, your library as a folder like iCloud Drive, your original files always, offline and in the car. You pay for storage.
What a home-screen web app can do for offline audio on iOS 27, what Safari 27 fixed, and how we built song downloads that survive a dropped connection.
Where a family music server's smart playlists should run, why a rule beat a model, and two production bugs a real database caught that no test did.
own.audio is adding personal episode translation: pick a language, get a narrated version in your library. Not a broadcast dub, but enough to follow along.
Why the mark on every page is a family dancing in a circle around a spinning, pulsing center, and what each piece means. With the animated pieces, live.
Every family's stories end up scattered across phones, drives, and USB sticks. Here's why we think family audio deserves one shared home instead.
Self-hosting is powerful, but it's not free and it's not simple. An honest look at what it really costs families, and why we're building a different path.
A guitar riff, a bootleg recording, a story your father read into a cheap microphone: why sharing the audio that matters is still so hard in 2026.
A NAS for the family's audiobooks and music sounds smart. Here's the real cost in money, time, and complexity, and why many end up unplugged.
Audible gives you access to books, not ownership. Why families who already pay for a subscription still need a personal library for everything else.
Music collectors, audiobook listeners and podcast hoarders store the audio they own in the worst possible way. Why, and what a real home for it looks like.