Stellody

Stellar and melody, run together.

Free for Windows, macOS and Linux

The records you never knew
you were missing.

Stellody plays the collection already on your computer, then works out what is not in it: albums by your artists that you never picked up, plus artists you have never heard who sit close to the ones you love.

All of it read off your own shelves rather than a taste profile built by somebody else. It is free, there is nothing to sign up for and it never changes a single one of your files.

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Stellody in its dark appearance, showing the collection as a grid of album sleeves in four rows. Tinlicker's Cold Enough For Snow is picked out and opened in a pane beneath the grid: its cover, its title and its year above an album rating with no stars set, then its thirteen tracks laid out in two columns, each with its rate and depth, its play count where it has one, a row of rating stars and a length. Nothing To Lose (feat. Circa Waves), the third track and the one playing, is marked on its row in the pane; the foot of the window reads Playing: Nothing To Lose (feat. Circa Waves), Tinlicker at its right. At its left is the sentence the last discovery search ended with: it found 6436 albums and 2238 artists the library does not hold, 25 names were not recognised and 21 matched more than one artist. The menu bar reads File, Edit, View, Sound, Control and Help. The play controls sit in the middle of the tray along the top, with the three discovery bars at rest to the right of them, labelled Looking up, Checking series and Checking styles. Then comes the discovery button and beside it the button for the artists that search could not answer for, wearing a red badge reading 46; a rule then separates them from the appearance toggle and Help, which end the tray. The waveform of the playing track runs along the bottom with a line marking how far it has reached; beside it the time reads 1:18 of 4:18, then what the sound device took: shared, 44.1 kHz, 32 bit. The strip below starts with the donate button, then rescan and repair, the two view buttons and the button choosing the visualiser's style. The visualiser sits in the middle of the strip, drawn as its dot matrix. Volume and mute, then the output device, exclusive output and the equalizer, then shuffle and repeat end the strip at the right.

Click a cover to open the album underneath it. The rest of your collection stays exactly where it was.

What it finds

What your collection
is missing.

Tick the genres worth looking in. Stellody reads the artists on your shelves, asks two public music catalogues what else they released and shows you the records you do not hold, along with artists close to the ones you do.

Your own collection asks the question, so the answer is not somebody else's idea of what you should like. There is no profile, no listening history and no account.

Free, on your own machine

The search runs on your computer and costs nothing: no sign-up, no key and no limit on how often you ask.

The catalogues are named

MusicBrainz for what an artist released; ListenBrainz for which artists resemble another. What goes out is artist names from the genres you ticked, plus a few of your titles where a name is shared or a series is followed. Never your files; nothing about you.

From any years you like

Leave the years empty for everything; else ask for music from after a year, before one or between two. Your whole collection still teaches the search; the years only limit what it offers back.

It says who it could not answer for

Names the catalogue could not answer, holds nobody under or cannot tell apart are counted. A red count on the button beside discovery opens them, so a partial answer never reads as a complete one.

Then to a shop, if you want one

Tick albums and choose one of eight shops, a list you can edit: your browser opens that shop's own search for each. Copy puts them on the clipboard instead. No affiliation, no referral and nothing taken from a sale.

Keep a selection you like

Pressing Find on a new selection offers to keep its genres, Include boxes and years as a named taste profile. The Taste profiles button puts any of them back in one choice; both genre filters share the same list.

The What the last discovery run found window, opened across a wide screen. A line at the top says the search looked in 15 genres and lists them; the next says the answer is filtered to Dance, EDM, Electronic, Ambient, UK Garage, House, Deep House, Progressive House, Tech House, Techno & Electro and Techno. Under it a key names the three kinds of row: an artist or a series you hold, drawn in blue, with albums from it you do not hold underneath; a similar artist you hold nothing by, drawn in amber, which fetches its albums when opened; every other line, which is an album title. A strip reads Open an amber artist to fetch its albums. The answer is dealt into three columns: Agents Of Time with 13 albums and 7 similar artists, then Alan Walker with 19 albums and 3 similar artists; Agoria with 27 albums and 8 similar artists; Aim with 11 albums and 5 similar artists, then Air with 30 albums and 2 similar artists. Similar artists such as Woo York, Bonobo and Booka Shade are listed in amber. Every album has a tick box; most carry the year they first came out beside the title, while a few the catalogue gives no year for carry none; two of Agents Of Time's albums are ticked. One row runs under the columns: Close at the left; Previous and Next with the words Page 3 of 63 between them in the middle; Filter, Copy and Find in shops at the right.

What one search found, a page at a time. Blue is an artist or a series you hold; amber is an artist you do not.

How the search works

Your collection, sorted out

Real libraries
are messy.

A collection gathered over years is never tidy. Stellody shows one album wherever there ought to be one, which is also what makes the missing records question answerable: a box set counted as four records looks like three gaps that are not there.

An album saved as one long file plays as its separate songs.
A box set spread over several folders comes back together as one record.
A bonus disc with no number in its name still lands in the right place.
Compilations keep every artist who played on them.
A bonus video shipped with the album plays as a track like any other.
Where a label is simply wrong, say what it should have been; your files stay untouched.

Everything it does

Why it can be trusted with your files

A player broke a library.
This one cannot.

Another player once quietly rewrote the titles, artists and album names inside a real collection, damaging 33 albums.

Stellody opens your files to read them, never to change them. Where it finds something wrong it tells you and leaves the file as it was.

Your music files are only ever read, never edited or moved.
Nothing is written into your music folder at all, not even a hidden cache.
Muddled track names are described to you, so you decide what to do.
Corrections Stellody works out can be kept or taken back, without a file being touched.
Your ratings, play counts, corrections and settings back up to one zip and restore from it.
This is built into the program itself rather than left to good intentions.

Why it works this way

Your privacy

Nothing about you
ever leaves this program.

No account, no profile and no record of what you listen to. Your music plays with the internet switched off. Five small things reach out at all, each only when you ask or to check for a new version; all five are written out in full.

Read exactly what leaves your computer

Worth knowing before you download

What it does not do.

It does not play every format

FLAC, MP3, Ogg, Opus, WAV, AIFF, M4A, WMA, WavPack and AAC are read. Monkey's Audio, Musepack, DSD, TAK, TrueAudio, CAF and M4B audiobooks are not, so check before you download. Such a file is named in the health report, as is one whose details cannot be read.

Windows, macOS and Linux

A setup program on Windows, a signed disk image on macOS and a Flatpak on Linux. By default the sound goes through the system mixer, which converts it, so it is not bit perfect. Exclusive output bypasses the mixer on Windows and macOS; Linux does not offer it.

Free, with one quiet ask

No price, no adverts and no subscription. One donate button sits at the left end of the bottom strip, ruled off from the controls beside it; its tooltip offers to buy the author a drink.

Stellody is written by one person, so that button is how the work gets paid for. There is no dialog, no reminder and no nagging; nothing changes if you never press it. Pressing it hands an address to your web browser.

It is a player, nothing more

Stellody does not stream, does not copy your CDs, does not sync to your phone and will not tidy up your files by rewriting them. It plays what you already have.