Bånder is a self-hosted server for organizing and playing a personal media collection. You provide the media files and run the server; Bånder turns those files into a catalog you can search, browse and play through a web interface.
The main browser workflows cover music and movies. Music is organized around artists, albums, songs and genres, with playlists, listening history and a player that stays available as you browse. Movies have their own catalog and playback view. Separate user accounts let you give other people access to selected libraries on your server.
A library connects a named collection to a directory of media files. Scanning it finds files and queues them for ingestion. Workers read their tags and technical information and add them to the catalog. You can keep collections in separate libraries and rescan them as files change. Continuous filesystem watching is available through a separately started watcher.
In the web app, move between artist pages, albums, track lists and genres, or search for artists, albums and songs directly. Album covers can be extracted from embedded artwork, so a tagged music collection provides the starting point for browsing. Recent listening on the home page helps you return to music you have already played.
The library guide explains scanning, supported file formats, cover extraction and file watching.
Bånder can supplement file tags with information from external services. MusicBrainz provides the primary music metadata source, Discogs supplies fallback release information and artwork, and Last.fm supports optional lookups for artist biographies, tags and related artists. Provider configuration determines which sources are available; enrichment sends requests to those services.
Lyrics can come from .lrc files alongside your tracks or be fetched from LRCLIB.
Automatic metadata synchronization and automatic lyrics fetching for newly indexed
music are optional settings, both off by default. Operators can also start these
jobs explicitly.
See external APIs for provider setup and the library guide for the settings that apply when a scan discovers new music.
The music player includes a playback queue, shuffle and repeat controls. You can browse the catalog while listening, choose what plays next and return to the current track without leaving the web app. Playback preferences include crossfade.
The equalizer offers presets and graphic or parametric controls, with saved profiles for different audio devices. Additional controls include compression, stereo width and crossfeed, allowing listeners to adjust the sound for their headphones or speakers.
For clients that need another audio format, the server can transcode tracks to Opus, AAC or MP3. Audio transcoding must be enabled explicitly. Internet radio is also available in the web interface, with country browsing and starred stations.
Create playlists by choosing songs yourself, or use smart playlists whose rules select music from the catalog. Playlists have their own pages for browsing and playback, and can be shared with other users on the same server. Collaborator permissions control who can contribute to a shared playlist.
Movies have browse and detail pages with an integrated video player. Background workers use FFmpeg to prepare video for streaming, while the web server delivers manifests and media segments to the client. Video transcoding supports multiple quality tiers; the actual playback formats depend on the worker's encoder capabilities and the client.
The transcoding guide covers video and audio conversion, quality settings and execution capacity. Browser codec support and host resources still matter when choosing a playback setup.
Bånder supports separate user accounts, administrator-managed library access and personal settings. Authentication includes password login, passkeys and TOTP two-factor authentication. Users can manage registered devices and passkeys, while operators manage accounts and roles.
Notifications can appear in the application or be delivered through configured email, browser push and webhook channels. Email and push require their respective service settings and keys; webhooks are managed by administrators.
The user-management guide explains account administration. The notification guide and security guide cover channel setup and operating an instance with its own credentials.
An instance includes the web application, persistent media storage, PostgreSQL, Redis and a separate background worker deployment. PostgreSQL holds application data; Redis supports queues and caching. The web process handles requests and client connections. Workers handle queued jobs, scheduling, notification delivery and media encoding.
Web and workers need access to the same media paths through shared named volumes. Source media and generated output have different access requirements. The worker controller runs on the trusted Docker host and admits separate control and execution containers with explicit CPU and memory budgets. Read the deployment prerequisites before choosing hardware: the worker requirements are larger than those of the web process alone.
Health endpoints, background-job monitoring and console commands help operators inspect scans, failures and worker availability. The operator guide connects the system explanation to configuration, monitoring, upgrades and recovery.
Start with the operator manual. Its reading path explains the components and data stores before installation, then connects routine tasks to monitoring, maintenance and recovery. If you are ready to install, the source-installation guide walks through configuration and TLS, shared storage, image builds, database initialization, OAuth keys, the first administrator account, the frontend build, worker deployment and a first library scan.
Bånder is a pre-release project. The current setup builds from source and uses a development-oriented Docker Compose stack. Starting Compose alone does not provide a complete instance: background processing requires the separately admitted worker pair explained in Background Work.
A disposable source-installation check verified frontend loading, administrator login, worker startup and a sample music scan through ingestion and browser catalog display. The scanned track played to completion as original FLAC and transcoded Opus; byte-range requests also passed. The roadmap checkpoint records the evidence, environment adaptations and verification limits. Other media categories have incomplete browser workflows; they should not be assumed to offer the same coverage as music and movies.
The backend uses PHP, Symfony and Swoole; the web client uses React and TypeScript. The HTTP API connects the web interface to library management, catalog queries, playback and account services.
For local development, complete the one-time DNS and certificate setup in the
development environment guide,
then use make dev-up, make dev-down, make dev-status, make preview-up and
make preview-down. The persistent baander.test instance follows remote master;
a preview runs the current worktree with separate writable state. Host runtime
qualification remains pending; the guide records the prerequisites and known blockers.
Start with the developer guide for the architecture and API references, then use the development environment guide and frontend guide for working on the code. The testing guide names the current runners and runtime checks, and the CI guide explains how Forgejo and GitHub run the same workflows. Follow the contribution instructions for project conventions and the contribution workflow.
Baander's first-party code is licensed under Apache-2.0, with package-specific exceptions and third-party notices. Copyright (C) 2025–2026 Martin Juul Christiansen and contributors.