For many years, MusicBee was my music player. Powerful, fast, a little nerdy: exactly right. Then I moved to Linux, and MusicBee, being a Windows app, stayed behind.
So I went shopping for a Linux music player that could do the same, and tried a few.
- The first one rewrote my tags in ways I'm still discovering.
- The second imported my collection so enthusiastically that every album showed up three times.
- The third worked fine, but looked like a settings dialog from 2003.
To be fair, all of this is most likely my own Linux incompetence. I was probably holding it wrong, and real Linux people have surely tuned all three to perfection.
But at some point, writing a music player felt easier than reading one more forum thread. The first commit happened in December 2023, the first real versions in autumn 2026, with a long break in between. Today, LocalSound runs the same on Windows and Linux, keeps ratings and tags in your music files, files your tracks into tidy folders, and looks good doing it. Mission accomplished, mostly.
And the name? LocalSound started as a plain web app that I opened in the browser at localhost. A day later it moved into its own window, but under the hood it still works that way: a small web server that only answers on your own computer, at 127.0.0.1, and nobody else. So the "Local" comes from localhost. That it also says where your music lives is a nice bonus.
