ink music

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What you hear

Tap the format over any cover and ink music shows the sound's whole way to your ears: where it came from, the file, which decoder, even volume and the equalizer (turn them off right there and watch it change), what Android does to it, and where it plays. Casting to a receiver, it asks the receiver itself: a Denon in Direct says so, and the page says exact: yes. Covers move where a record has a moving one, a song's Spotify Canvas plays behind, and each takes its own effect in settings, the look. Your computer does all of it too: the whole path as mpv plays it (Core Audio, WASAPI, PipeWire, and whether it has the output alone), moving covers, the effects, and the Canvas, signed in on your phone.

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New in 2.0

• ink music on your computer. Mac, Windows and Linux, in the same look: a rail of words down the side, the page, and what's playing beside it. Your music folder, your server, YouTube Music and the radio, all there.
• Your phone and your computer in step. Pair them once with a code, and they keep each other current over your wifi: what you've heard, what you love, your sign-ins, what you were playing. Nothing goes through anyone else's server.
• Continue here. Start a record on your phone, pick it up on your computer where you left off (or the other way round), and steer the phone's music from the computer's bottom bar.
• INK, a place of its own: ink weekly as its cover, the record of the day, what critics and DJs are picking (Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, NPR, the Quietus and more), what's out this Friday, festivals coming up, and moods made by ink.
• Made for you, from your listening and nothing else: fresh finds, deep cuts, loved long ago, a year ago today, new to you.
• New from your artists at the top of listen.
• YouTube Music kept offline: a song, a record or a whole playlist.
• Private listening: while it's on, nothing you play is kept or sent.
• ink music keeps itself up to date: a new version shows on listen, with what's new in it.
• Easter eggs. We said we wouldn't tell.

Every version's changes are in the releases. Want something? Ask for it: what goes in says who asked. Or come say hi at r/inkmusic: what you're playing, questions, ideas.

On your computer

The same ink music, made for a big screen and a keyboard:

• The player full screen as a record's inner sleeve: the cover, the lyrics big, up next, the notes.
• A mini player, a small strip that stays over your other windows.
• On a Mac, the media keys and Now Playing in Control Center and on the lock screen.
• Exact sound: pick the output, take it over alone (exclusive), and play files as recorded, at their own rate and depth. Sound by mpv: FLAC, ALAC, AAC, Opus, gapless.
• Play on your speakers from the computer too: Chromecast, Google Nest and DLNA.
• Your year a keystroke away (⌘Y on a Mac, Ctrl+Y elsewhere).
• YouTube Music signed in from your phone: the computer has no browser to sign in with, so the phone hands its sign-in over, sealed, when you pair.
• The look: moving covers, a background behind the player, blur, fluted glass, pixels or dither, and a song's Spotify Canvas (signed in on your phone, handed over as YouTube's is).
• What you hear: click the format over the cover for the sound's whole path, step by step.

Your music, from wherever it lives

The phone's files	Everything in its music folder, filed by record and artist, with the covers your files carry.
Your own server	Navidrome or any Subsonic server: your whole library streamed from home, or kept on the phone to play with no signal. Loves are the server's stars and playlists are its playlists, so every app you use agrees.
YouTube Music	Search and play without an account, through NewPipe Extractor. Signed in: your playlists, likes, mixes and artists, saved and followed both ways, your uploads, and Premium's 256 kbps if you have it. full build only.
Spotify playlists	Brought in from a file (Exportify or Spotify's own data download), each song found in your music or on YouTube Music, then kept as a playlist.
ink radio	Independent, listener-powered stations chosen by hand, each saying what it's playing (below).

ink radio

Sixty-two independent, listener-powered and community stations, chosen by hand: KEXP in Seattle, NTS in London, dublab in Los Angeles, WFMU in Jersey City, Radio alHara in Bethlehem, and on round the world.

Each says what it's playing, from its stream or its own playlist, on the player, the lock screen, the widget and the car, its name sending out rings in 1-bit dither all the while.

Thousands more by genre from radio-browser.info.

Something to play the moment it opens

Pick a few artists you love and the listen page fills with their mixes and records, the songs indie radio played most this week (KEXP, KCRW and WXPN, counted), ink radio, and what you played lately. Even with nothing on the phone. And every Friday night, ink weekly: what we're listening to at ink, picked by real people.

Features

The player

• Whole-screen over the cover, in five looks: blur, fluted glass, pixels, dither, plain.
• Circle a thumb round the cover to scrub, as on an iPod; flick it sideways for the next song.
• Synced lyrics from lrclib, or YouTube Music's where lrclib has none.
• An equalizer of its own, ten bands, with corrections for thousands of headphones from AutoEq.
• Even volume (ReplayGain) from the files' own tags or the server's. A record played through keeps its own quiet and loud.
• Soft pause: the music eases out and back in. And it says exactly what reaches your ears: codec, bit depth, rate.
• Small words step up a brightness in sunlight, read by the light sensor, so it reads outdoors.
• Motion to suit the phone: full, or less on a slower one (no cascades or softening), as Android says by default.

Listening

• Radio: when the queue runs out, more like it. Your server's similar songs first, then YouTube Music's mix.
• A path from one song to another, a step at a time by how they sound, on Navidrome with AudioMuse-AI. Keep it as a playlist.
• Playlists made and changed here, kept on your server.
• A sleep timer that eases the music out, shuffle and repeat, and an up next you can reorder.
• The library shuffled anew each time you open it, if you like.
• Artist pages: their photo in dither, top songs, records, the story, who fans also like.
• Scrobbling to ListenBrainz and Last.fm.

Everywhere else

• Play on Chromecast and Google Nest speakers, TVs, speaker groups and DLNA receivers (Denon HEOS and others), sending the original hi-res file where the speaker can take it. No Google Play services needed.
• Android Auto: records, artists, lists, search, and "play … on ink music".
• A home-screen widget, the mini player in ink's look.

Yours

• Your year, any day of it: the minutes, and the songs, artists and records you played most.
• Share a song or your year as a poster sized for a story.

Privacy

No ads, no accounts, no analytics, no tracking. Nothing of yours leaves your phone or computer except to your own server, to your other devices on your own wifi, and to the services that answer what you ask for:

Service	What it receives	Why
Your Navidrome / Subsonic server	Sign-in (a salted token, never the password), plays, stars	Your library
lrclib.net	A song's artist and title	Lyrics
YouTube Music (full build)	Your searches, the artists you pick; signed in, your sign-in and the songs you play (your history there, off in settings)	Search, mixes, radio, your library
ListenBrainz / Last.fm, if you connect them	What you play	Scrobbling
AutoEq on GitHub	Nothing personal, when you look up your headphones	Their tuning
radio-browser.info	Nothing personal	The station list
The stations' own playlists	Nothing personal	The indie chart, what's on air
Your paired phone or computer, on your wifi	What you've heard, loves, sign-ins (Spotify's an hour's pass), what's playing, sealed with a key only the two of them have	Keeping them in step
Apple Music's catalog	A record's artist and title	Moving covers
Spotify, if you sign in (full build)	Your sign-in, a song's artist and title; your playlists when you import one	The Canvas behind a song, importing playlists
Publications' and stations' own feeds (Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, NPR and others)	Nothing personal	INK's picks
iTunes, Deezer and YouTube Music	A record's artist and title	Covers where your files have none
Last.fm's tags	Nothing personal	INK's moods
GitHub	Nothing personal, every six hours ( build and computers)

What you've played is kept on your own devices only.

Download

Everything is on the GitHub releases, signed, with SHA-256 sums.

Android 12 or later. Obtainium keeps it up to date, and the full build updates itself. F-Droid is next. The full apks from releases have Last.fm; a build from source needs its own key.

Build	Sources	Where
ink-music-<version>.apk (full)	Files, your server, YouTube Music, radio	GitHub releases, Obtainium
ink-music-<version>-play.apk (play)	Files, your server, radio. No NewPipe code at all	The only build that may go to Google Play

The release certificate's SHA-256: 92eb2c4ea8d70b897db7cf000356f72cc2f3e698c39bb31f4b62ba717747e663 (check with apksigner verify --print-certs).

Mac (Apple silicon): the .dmg. It isn't signed by Apple yet, so the first time, macOS stops it: System Settings, Privacy & Security, Open Anyway.

Windows: the .msi, installed just for you, no administrator needed. Windows SmartScreen doesn't know it yet: More info, then Run anyway. To pair your phone, Windows' firewall has to let it in: ink music asks, in settings under your phone.

Linux: the .deb (Debian, Ubuntu) or .rpm (Fedora). It plays through your system's libmpv (libmpv2 on Debian and Ubuntu, mpv-libs on Fedora).

From the makers of ink

ink music is the music player from ink, a typographic home screen for Android phones and TVs, in the same look. Your apps as big words, the song playing along the bottom from any player, and your time back from the feed:

• Five seconds first. Open instagram and ink waits: its name, how many times today, a line filling slowly. Then open it, or not now. Daily limits and focus when you want them.
• Your phone as a console. Point it at your games folder: box art, shelves, time played, each system opened in its emulator.
• Your house as words. With Home Assistant, every light a little pixel lamp; your scenes, cameras and doorbell.
• ink tv. The same ink on your TV, and from your phone it turns off the TV's ads and tracking over your wifi. "Put it back" undoes exactly what changed.

No accounts, no ads, no analytics. ink is in a free test on Google Play now, everything open: join the test · inkhome.app

Building

JDK 21. The phone also needs the Android SDK (API 37); the computer's app needs a libmpv to play.

./gradlew :app:assembleFullDebug      # the phone: a debug build
./gradlew :app:assembleFullRelease    # the phone: a release build (R8)
tools/release.sh                      # both phone builds, signed, with SHA256SUMS, in build/release/

./gradlew :desktop:run -PdesktopOnly  # the computer's app, without the Android SDK

The computer's installers are each made on their own system (.github/workflows/): the Mac's .dmg on macOS, the .msi on Windows (:desktop:packageInkMsi, ink's own installer pages), the .deb and .rpm on Linux.

Release builds are signed with the key named in keystore.properties beside settings.gradle.kts (storeFile, storePassword, keyAlias, keyPassword; never committed). Without it they're signed with the debug key. Each release raises versionCode and versionName in app/build.gradle.kts and adds fastlane/metadata/android/en-US/changelogs/<versionCode>.txt.

The icon and store graphics are drawn from the bundled fonts: python3 tools/make-icon.py (fontTools, Pillow).

Built with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, Media3 (ExoPlayer and a MediaLibrarySession in its own process) and Haze on the phone; Compose Multiplatform and mpv on the computer, with what the two share in core/.

How it's made

Built by Bronson with Claude (Anthropic's AI) as a coding partner: the design, the decisions and the testing are mine. Every feature is tried on a real phone and computer before it ships, testers' notes come back as fixes within days, and ink weekly is picked by hand. It's all here to read, under the GPL, and every piece of someone else's work it stands on is named below, with its license.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. ink music has a strong look (black, two typefaces, no icons where a word works, no rounded corners), so for anything visible, open an issue first and we'll talk it through.

Thanks

• NewPipe Extractor (GPL-3.0), and the poToken provider from NewPipe (GPL-3.0), ported.
• Metrolist (GPL-3.0), for showing how YouTube Music can be done well on Android.
• yt-dlp's challenge solver (Unlicense, with meriyah and astring), which works out a signed-in stream's link from YouTube's own player.
• AutoEq (MIT), for the headphone tunings, from measurements by oratory1990, crinacle, Rtings and others.
• Media3 and Haze (Apache-2.0).
• On the computer: mpv (LGPL-2.1+, its Windows builds from shinchiro), Compose Multiplatform (Apache-2.0), JNA (Apache-2.0), JmDNS (Apache-2.0) and jaudiotagger (LGPL-2.1).
• Archivo Black and Silkscreen, both under the SIL Open Font License.
• INK's picks from the publications and DJs who make them: Pitchfork, Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily, NPR, NME, the Quietus, Aquarium Drunkard, Gorilla vs. Bear, Dusted, Stereofox, The FADER and more. Go read them.
• Lyrics from lrclib.net and YouTube Music; stations from radio-browser.info and the stations themselves; scrobbling to and .

Not affiliated

ink music is not affiliated with, funded, authorized or endorsed by YouTube, Google LLC, Spotify, Apple, Microsoft, Navidrome, any publication or any radio station. Trademarks belong to their owners.

License

GPL-3.0. Free, always: no paywall, ever.