Hi r/plexamp,

Some of you may have seen my posts relating to r/Liner previously. We are again looking to bring on more testers as the app approaches its full release. Today, I want to introduce you all to Pulse, our track analysis engine that drives many of Liners features.

Pulse uses a number of data points in each track to build information about how each track sounds and feels. We use this data to give our users the ability to build blends and mixes to help them discover their own music library in new and interesting ways. This is entirely our own system, it does not run on the Plex Sonic Analysis framework, or require any aspect of it to run. With Pulse you can create:

• Blends - artist and album blends that mix in genuinely similar-sounding material, not "more songs by artists a service thinks are related"
• Feeling recipes - ask the app for "Loving", "Pumped", "Calm", "Wistful", and it builds a queue from your library that actually matches. Not moods, but how music FEELS. 
• Time-of-day shelves - the homepage shifts through the day. Sunday morning looks different from Friday night.

All of it works the same whether your library lives on a Plex server, a Subsonic-compatible one or on Jellyfin. If you are currently a Plex user, and decide to switch to one of the other server systems, your Pulse matches are truly system agnostic, and travel with you. Switching is as simple as logging out of one, and logging in to the other!

Where the data comes from

There's a shared pool of pre-analysed tracks. When you add music to Liner, your tracks get checked against it. Matches arrive instantly. The pool continues to grow daily. Today we sit at a pool of 1.2m tracks. 

What I need from testers

Use the app. Tell me when something's broken or when matches feel wrong. Diagnostic submission is built in. No usage tracking otherwise.

How to join

DM me with your Apple ID email address and I'll add you to the TestFlight team. Liner is currently iOS, MacOS and iPadOS only at the moment. 

Hi r/jellyfin.

I build Liner, a music-first iOS, macOS and iPadOS app for self-hosted music libraries. Plex and Subsonic have been supported for a while. Native Jellyfin support landed in the latest build and I'm looking for testers to put it through real-world setups.

A bit of context. Liner is not another generic media player. It's built specifically for music listening and discovery, wrapped in an editorial design that seeks to add meaningful improvements to listening to your curated library.

Some highlights

• A design that strikes an editorial tone, with discovery at its heart. Liner has been designed with an interface that reads more like a music publication than a simple media player, but with instant playback at your fingertips. This is not just surface treatment, Liner IS a player, a player with depth. 
• Discovery tools that work with your library, not against it. 'Sounds Like' on every album. Throwbacks. Recipe of the Day. Pulse-driven Blends from any artist, album or track. Mood-led Recipes that change with the time of day ('For this morning', 'For this afternoon', 'For tonight').
• CarPlay support with a proper musical UI rather than a list of folders.
• Pulse, the audio analysis engine that powers the feeling-led discovery. More on that below.
• Internet Radio, at your fingertips
• Explore your library folders, right from within the app
• Plus so much more

Pulse

Pulse is our music analysis engine. The job is simple to describe but interesting to do: take any song and work out what it actually sounds like.

Pulse listens to a section of each track and measures a handful of qualities. Some are technical (tempo, key) and some are more impressionistic. Can you dance to it? Is the voice prominent, or buried in the mix? Is it acoustic or electronic? Does it build, plateau, or fade? Is it bright and uplifting, or heavy and sad? These readings, taken together, produce a multi-dimensional fingerprint for the song.

That fingerprint goes onto what we call the musical matrix. Think of it as a vast space where every song has a position, with similar-sounding tracks ending up near each other and very different ones far apart. A late Coltrane piece sits far from a recent Olivia Rodrigo single, but it sits close to other jazz from his era.

We then layer additional knowledge on top of the matrix. We know roughly where particular moods live. The region populated by Tracy Chapman and Phoebe Bridgers feels a certain way, and that's different from the region around Calvin Harris and Robyn. We've placed hand-chosen exemplar tracks across the matrix to give Liner an anchor for each mood within each genre: a few songs marking 'this is what Happy Hip-Hop sounds like', a few more for 'late-night Pumped', a few more for 'morning Loving'.

That whole picture, made up of song positions, mood regions and exemplars, powers everything else in Liner. The Blends find tracks that sit near a starting point in the matrix. The Recipes pull from particular mood regions. The 'Sounds Like' section on each album works the same way, finding nearest neighbours from your library.

You can check out our little subreddit, r/Liner - this is where our updates go.

What I need from testers

The Jellyfin integration is feature-complete in code but lightly tested in the wild. I want 30 to 50 people across genuinely different setups to install it and use it normally for a week or so:

• Music-only Jellyfin libraries
• Mixed-media libraries where you select a music sub-section
• Non-default configurations: reverse proxy, custom port, HTTPS with a self-signed cert, remote access via a domain

If you're interested in trying Liner, drop me a DM with your Apple ID Email address, and I’ll add you to the TestFlight team. Thank you in advance for your assistance :)

Hi r/jellyfin.

I build Liner, a music-first iOS, macOS and iPadOS app for self-hosted music libraries. Plex and Subsonic have been supported for a while. Native Jellyfin support landed in the latest build and I'm looking for testers to put it through real-world setups.

A bit of context. Liner is not another generic media player. It's built specifically for music listening and discovery, wrapped in an editorial design that seeks to add meaningful improvements to listening to your curated library.

Some highlights

• A design that strikes an editorial tone, with discovery at its heart. Liner has been designed with an interface that reads more like a music publication than a simple media player, but with instant playback at your fingertips. This is not just surface treatment, Liner IS a player, a player with depth. 
• Discovery tools that work with your library, not against it. 'Sounds Like' on every album. Throwbacks. Recipe of the Day. Pulse-driven Blends from any artist, album or track. Mood-led Recipes that change with the time of day ('For this morning', 'For this afternoon', 'For tonight').
• CarPlay support with a proper musical UI rather than a list of folders.
• Pulse, the audio analysis engine that powers the feeling-led discovery. More on that below.
• Internet Radio, at your fingertips
• Explore your library folders, right from within the app
• Plus so much more

Pulse

Pulse is our music analysis engine. The job is simple to describe but interesting to do: take any song and work out what it actually sounds like.

Pulse listens to a section of each track and measures a handful of qualities. Some are technical (tempo, key) and some are more impressionistic. Can you dance to it? Is the voice prominent, or buried in the mix? Is it acoustic or electronic? Does it build, plateau, or fade? Is it bright and uplifting, or heavy and sad? These readings, taken together, produce a multi-dimensional fingerprint for the song.

That fingerprint goes onto what we call the musical matrix. Think of it as a vast space where every song has a position, with similar-sounding tracks ending up near each other and very different ones far apart. A late Coltrane piece sits far from a recent Olivia Rodrigo single, but it sits close to other jazz from his era.

We then layer additional knowledge on top of the matrix. We know roughly where particular moods live. The region populated by Tracy Chapman and Phoebe Bridgers feels a certain way, and that's different from the region around Calvin Harris and Robyn. We've placed hand-chosen exemplar tracks across the matrix to give Liner an anchor for each mood within each genre: a few songs marking 'this is what Happy Hip-Hop sounds like', a few more for 'late-night Pumped', a few more for 'morning Loving'.

That whole picture, made up of song positions, mood regions and exemplars, powers everything else in Liner. The Blends find tracks that sit near a starting point in the matrix. The Recipes pull from particular mood regions. The 'Sounds Like' section on each album works the same way, finding nearest neighbours from your library.

You can check out our little subreddit, r/Liner - this is where our updates go.

What I need from testers

The Jellyfin integration is feature-complete in code but lightly tested in the wild. I want 30 to 50 people across genuinely different setups to install it and use it normally for a week or so:

• Music-only Jellyfin libraries
• Mixed-media libraries where you select a music sub-section
• Non-default configurations: reverse proxy, custom port, HTTPS with a self-signed cert, remote access via a domain

If you're interested in trying Liner, drop me a DM with your Apple ID Email address, and I’ll add you to the TestFlight team. Thank you in advance for your assistance :)

Hey r/plexamp. Some of you have seen Liner posts here before. For everyone new, quick intro:

Liner is an iOS, MacOS and iPadOS music app for Self Hosters — Currently built to support Plex and Subsonic and Apple Music (others actively being integrated), same UI, same library, source-agnostic. It started Plex-only about a year ago, has been growing slowly via TestFlight, and is heading for App Store launch in the coming weeks.

(check out our little sub r/Liner)

What makes it different:

• Pulse — a recommendation engine that fingerprints your library. Real data, from real music to generate playlists that actually **feel** right. So far, we have a public pool of over 27k songs pre-fingerprinted to start users off.
• Editorial design — magazine-inspired rather than streaming-app-shaped. Your library should feel curated. Liner helps you find the things you love, and unearths your music in new and interesting ways to help you truly enjoy it.
• Same app across servers. Plex, Subsonic, Apple Music. CarPlay everywhere.

Design refresh — V2 "Editorial"

The biggest change since the last update is a top-to-bottom redesign. The home screen, artist pages, album views, Now Playing — all rebuilt around a single design language.

What's next

App Store launch in the coming weeks. iPad polish + native Jellyfin support after.

Try it

We are looking for a few more testers to come on board and give Liner a run. We would love you to join us on this journey. If you are a iOS / MacOS / iPadOS user, drop me a message with your AppleID email address and I will add you to the TestFlight team!