Beautiful, local, free
 waveform music player.

Playhead is a free, open-source, waveform-based music player for your local music library. It’s built for people who still keep real music files, organize folders, edit metadata, and want a cleaner way to listen.

No. Playhead plays the music files on your computer. If you want, you can connect SoundCloud to play your SoundCloud likes, playlists and feed next to your library, but that’s optional.

No. No signups, no accounts, no cloud profile. Open the app, import your music folders, and start listening.

Yes. Your library lives on your machine, not in the cloud. Only the optional Last.fm and SoundCloud integrations need an internet connection.

MP3, FLAC, WAV, AIFF, M4A, AAC, OGG and Opus. You can choose which formats Playhead imports in Settings.

macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux (AppImage and .deb). Mac builds are signed and notarized. Windows and Linux builds aren’t signed yet, so your system may ask you to confirm before opening them.

Yes. Folder mode lets you browse and filter tracks by the folders you imported, including nested subfolders. Perfect if your collection is already organized your own way.

Yes. Library mode organizes your music into tracks, artists and albums, with playlists, tags and loved tracks alongside.

Yes. Edit titles, artists, albums, genres, years, track and disc numbers, composers, BPM, comments and artwork, written back to your files where the format supports it.

Yes. Playhead estimates BPM for tracks that don’t have it and can detect each track’s key, shown in Camelot notation (like 8A) for harmonic mixing. Both appear as sortable columns.

Playlists built from rules, like “genre contains house and BPM between 120 and 128”. They update on their own as your library changes.

Yes. It reads lyrics embedded in your files or from a matching .lrc file. Timed lyrics follow playback and you can click a line to jump to it. Lyrics stay local; Playhead doesn’t fetch them online.

Waveforms make music feel more visual and usable. You can see the structure of a track, jump around faster, loop a section, drop markers, and understand the energy of a song at a glance.

Kind of. Playhead isn’t trying to replace DJ software with decks and mixing. It’s for DJs, collectors and producers who want a fast way to dig through, preview and prep local tracks: BPM and key, loops, markers, smart playlists, duplicate finding, and rekordbox, Traktor and Serato playlist import.

Yes. Import M3U and M3U8 playlists, rekordbox XML, Traktor NML collections and Serato crates. You can also export playlists as M3U, M3U8, rekordbox XML or Traktor NML.

Playhead checks for new releases and downloads them in the background. When an update is ready you’ll see an Update button, and the release notes show after it installs.

Yes. Playhead is open source and MIT licensed. The code is on GitHub.

Yes. Playhead is free to download and use, with no ads and no paid tiers.

Not yet. Playhead is in beta and under active development, with frequent releases. Expect rough edges and fast improvements.

Playhead has no accounts, no ads and no cloud library. It includes optional anonymous usage analytics that you can turn off in Settings. Last.fm and SoundCloud only receive data if you connect them.

Yes. Contributions, issues, ideas, bug reports and design feedback are welcome on GitHub. Many recent features started as GitHub issues.