AOR
AudiO Rediscovery — a music collection stewardship application for people who own their music.
All-genre and album-first. AOR is for a library you built yourself: ripped, bought, downloaded, accumulated over decades, and probably a mess. It rips, repairs, organizes and grades that library, and then carries it to your phone over your own network.
Status: in development. No release date announced.
The shape of it
Read this before buying the phone app
The phone app is a view of a desktop library, not a player on its own. It has nothing to play until AOR on your computer sends it something. If you do not run the free desktop application, the phone app is not useful to you.
AOR is two applications. The desktop application is the real one — where you import, organize, repair and curate. The player carries the library and your playlists with you, and is deliberately read-only apart from making playlists.
That split is on purpose. Curation wants a keyboard, a large screen, and the ability to see a thousand things at once. Listening does not.
What it does
Import without the guesswork
Rip CDs or add music you already own. AOR identifies discs, stages new arrivals beside the library so you can check them before they land, and can re-rip an album over its predecessor while keeping its history.
Metadata that is right, or honestly blank
Album and track editing, bulk edits across a selection, and tag write-back to your actual files. AOR will not guess an identity to fill a gap. If it cannot tell, it says so and names the one thing that stopped it.
A health score you can act on
Six measured factors — artwork coverage, metadata completeness, audio quality, duplicates, album completeness, tag consistency. Findings go to a review queue you work through at your own pace, and anything you have already judged stays dismissed.
Gap analysis
Which albums your collection is missing, and where to buy them. No affiliate links, and the buy link cannot influence what the analysis reports.
Relationships between songs
Lineage, covers, medleys, song links, artist renames — the connections a flat list of tags cannot hold.
Sync over your own network
Pair by QR code, transcode to whatever the device wants, and take the library with you. Device tokens, pinned TLS, LAN-only. Playlists you make on the phone come back to the desktop.
Designed in two colours
Ink and paper. No gradients, no accent palette, no decorative colour anywhere in the interface — the album artwork is the only colour on the screen, which is how it should be in an application about music you chose.
Platforms
Desktop — Windows is the primary platform and where development happens. macOS runs and is in testing. Linux is planned.
Player — iOS and Android, including a full Android Auto surface with browse, search and voice. CarPlay is planned.
Plays what you actually have
Gapless playback, and Ogg Vorbis on iOS — which iOS does not support natively, and most music players there will not touch. If your library is FLAC and Vorbis because you ripped it yourself and cared how, it plays.
How syncing works
The desktop and the player talk directly to each other over your local network. Pairing is a one-time code, the connection is TLS pinned to your own library key, and the server refuses anything that is not on the LAN. There is no server in the middle, no account to create, and no copy of your library anywhere but on your own devices. Nothing passes through Freeholder Forge, because there is nothing of ours for it to pass through.
What it does not do
- No account, no sign-in, no email address required.
- No cloud storage, and no uploading of your files.
- No analytics, telemetry, or usage tracking.
- No subscription. The desktop application is free; the player is a one-time purchase.
- No streaming catalogue. AOR plays the music you already have.
Pricing
The desktop application is free, and it is required. The mobile player is a one-time purchase through the App Store and Google Play, and only works with it. Upgrades are free. If a future version ever carries a separate charge, the version you bought keeps working with the desktop application for as long as you want to use it.