The Tunes server started as a way to stream my music library from a Raspberry Pi. It’s accumulated features since then. Two recent additions changed how I interact with it day-to-day: accent-insensitive full-text search across the entire library, and lyrics, both embedded from audio files and fetched from LRClib.

The search problem

Searching a music library is harder than it sounds. You want “bjork” to match “Björk”. You want “cafe” to match “Café”. You want “creme” to match “Crème Brûlée” in an album title. And you want it fast enough that results appear as you type.

iTunes Match worked great for years: you uploaded your library, Apple matched what it could, and you had access to everything from any device. But Apple is clearly moving everyone toward Apple Music, and iTunes Match has been slowly rotting. The writing was on the wall.

I didn’t want to subscribe to Apple Music. I wanted to keep my library, my ratings, my play counts, my playlists, all the metadata accumulated over 20 years. So I built my own streaming setup: a Go backend that serves the library over HTTP, and SwiftUI apps that play it on iOS, macOS, and tvOS.