A native Android music client that speaks Soulseek itself and browses YouTube Music. Stream from YouTube Music or find a lossless copy on the peer network, keep a library of both, and play it — with the P2P protocol running on the phone. No server, no VPS, no self-hosting.
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Download the APK from Releases and open it on your phone. Android will ask you to allow installing from that source the first time.
Searching and streaming need no account at all. You only need a Soulseek username to search the peer network, and Sonora registers an unknown one on first sign-in. Requires Android 8.0 (API 26) or newer.
Two sources, and it is clear which is which. YouTube Music is the catalogue and the thing you play from: search it, open albums and artists, browse its own shelves. The Soulseek network is where lossless files are: a track's "get me a lossless copy" searches peers and nothing else, because that answer has to be a real file on somebody's disk and a YouTube row is not one.
The protocol runs on the device. Sonora speaks Soulseek itself — login, search, peer connections, transfers, uploads — in Kotlin, inside a foreground service. There is no relay and no companion process; the app is the client.
The filesystem is the library. Downloads go to a folder you choose, so the files are yours and survive uninstalling the app. Anything that is only streamed is kept with its own details, so a playlist entry, a like or a line of listening history can still be drawn, played and shown — which is what stops a liked song from failing to appear in Liked Songs.
- Search — top result, then artists, albums and songs from YouTube Music, with a toggle to look at the peer network on its own for something lossless. Relevance-ranked, with size, bitrate, peer and free-slot signals; sort by best match, fastest, free slot or quality.
- Streaming — YouTube Music audio straight to the player, read in bounded ranges and verified past the first megabyte before it is handed over, so a track cannot start and then die a minute in.
- Downloads — a sequential queue with live progress, cancel-remaining, and a notification that says what is actually happening.
- Library — tracks, albums, artists and playlists, plus the music already on your device if you want it included. A playlist's cover is a grid of the covers of the tracks in it.
- Playback — Media3, with a mini player, a full player, a queue you can reorder by dragging, shuffle, repeat, and a real media notification with the cover and transport controls.
- Lyrics — time-synced, with the sung part swept across the line, the surrounding lines falling away, and a tap to browse them instead of following.
- Infinite autoplay — the queue does not run out; when it gets near the end it tops itself up from the artist you are listening to, and keeps going.
- Spotify import — paste a playlist link, see what matched and what did not before anything is added, and get the tracks as streams rather than as downloads.
- Resharing — the folder you download to is shared back, with browsing and uploads working.
- Saved login — optional, and encrypted with a key held in the Android Keystore.
You need JDK 21 and the Android SDK with platform 37. Android Studio's bundled JDK is fine:
export JAVA_HOME="$HOME/development/android-studio/jbr"
./gradlew :app:assembleDebug # debug APK
./gradlew :app:testDebugUnitTest # unit tests — no device or emulator needed
./gradlew :app:assembleRelease # release APKA release build is signed from keystore.properties at the repository root, which is deliberately
not committed:
storeFile=sonora-release.jks
storePassword=…
keyAlias=sonora
keyPassword=…Without that file the release build still runs and produces an unsigned APK. See toolchain for the version pairing and the four traps that produced it.
AGPL-3.0. See LICENSE.
This is a file-sharing client, not a content host. You are responsible for what you download and share.