Free Music Player for Your Own Files, No Upload

Every player wants two things

Nearly every music player on a phone wants the same two things: your subscription, and your attention for something else. The banner for the trial you already used. The row of tiles after the last track. The three recommendations that are not in your library.

There is a different kind, the one that plays the files already sitting on your disk and does nothing else. Music Player Ufumbuzi is one of those. There is no account, no catalogue and no advertising, and nothing you give it ever leaves the device.

This is what that actually means, and what the player does with the time it is not spending on asking you for money.

Your music is never uploaded

The app reads your audio files in the browser and keeps them in the browser's own database on the device. There is no server in the middle of that sentence.

The consequences are worth spelling out, because they run both ways. The library does not follow you to a second device, and clearing your browsing data erases it. But because the music was never coming from a network to begin with, the player keeps working with the connection off. Most "online" players cannot offer that, because for them the music is the network.

You can also add files whenever you like, delete individual tracks, or clear the whole list with one button.

The equalizer is the part that matters

Five bands: 60 Hz, 230 Hz, 910 Hz, 3.6 kHz and 14 kHz. Each one on its own slider, with presets for flat, rock, pop, electronic, classical and jazz.

These are real filters. Each band is a peaking biquad filter sitting in the audio path, so the sound changes when you move a slider. It is not a label printed next to a knob that goes nowhere.

Moving any slider switches the preset to custom instead of quietly overriding what you had picked. That is a small decision, and it is the difference between a control that respects what you set and one that throws it away.

Rock lifts the low end and the top and pulls the middle back. Jazz does close to the opposite. Classical nudges both ends up and leaves the middle alone. The presets are starting points, not a menu you are stuck with.

Loudness differences are the real problem

Put an album recorded properly next to a set of songs someone recorded on a phone across three years, in three rooms, and the second one jumps. You reach for the volume, and then you reach for it again two tracks later.

That is what the volume normaliser is for. It is a single compressor on the audio signal, not a volume slider that raises everything and clips the peaks on the way out.

Measured on a set with deliberately mismatched levels, the gap between the quietest passage and the loudest was 43 times before normalising and 24 times after. Not flat. But the album stops fighting you.

Fades that respect the speed

Each track fades in at the start and fades out at the end, so nothing begins or stops abruptly.

The detail that took the most care is invisible until you use it at a speed other than 1x. Most players drive the fade from a timer, which means that at half speed the fade lands late, and at double speed it cuts off before the track has really finished. This one hangs off the playhead instead, so it lasts the same wall-clock seconds whatever the speed.

Playback speed, for the recordings that need it

From 0.5x to 2x on a single slider. It is the kind of control that sounds like a luxury until you meet the recorded interview that was spoken far too slowly, or the audiobook that runs away from you.

It is also the honest way to learn a song: hear it slower than it was written, find where you are dropping the rhythm, and speed it back up.

A visualiser that reads the audio

The bars move because something is playing, not because time is passing. The visualiser reads the real signal through the Web Audio analyser.

This sounds like a detail and it is not. A visualiser driven by a timer looks perfectly fine in a screenshot and feels dead in the hand, because it never reacts to anything. It keeps waving through a passage where the music has stopped, and it goes flat exactly when the room gets quiet, which is backwards.

The cover art does some work

On import the app reads the tags inside your files: title, artist and the embedded cover art. The playlist shows what is written in the music instead of a column of filenames. Files with no tags fall back to the filename.

Then the cover gets used. The dominant colour is sampled from the image itself and put behind the player as a blurred, tinted background that changes track by track. On a cover that is mostly grey or white it stays out of the way rather than guessing, and the effect switches off above 1.6x speed, where the pulsing would read as noise instead of texture.

Organising a library you actually own

Sort by date added, title, artist or duration, and reverse any of them. Titles and artists are compared the way your language sorts words, not by raw character order, so accented names land where you expect. In a plain character sort, "Álvarez" comes before "Zapata", which is not where anybody would look for it.

Duplicate tracks can be removed by name, artist and length together. The same song saved at two bitrates goes away; two different songs that happen to run 3:42 stay. The track you are playing is kept.

Search the playlist by name, delete tracks one at a time, or clear everything.

The small things

Skip back ten seconds or forward ten seconds without hunting through a progress bar. That is the difference between missing a line and repeating it.

Shuffle that re-rolls until it lands somewhere other than where you just were, so a short playlist does not get stuck on the same track.

A sleep timer from 15 to 60 minutes. It counts down on the playhead rather than on a separate timer, fades the volume out over the last few seconds instead of cutting it, and lets go of the screen wake lock so the phone can actually sleep.

And the lock screen: play, pause, skip, previous, next and stop, through Media Session, with the cover of the current track showing next to the title.

What it does not do

There is no streaming service. No Spotify, no Deezer, no radio. It plays local files, which is the whole point and also the limitation.

There is no crossfade between tracks and no gapless playback. Earlier versions showed controls for both. Those controls did nothing behind them, and they have been removed rather than left sitting there pretending.

No recorder, no lyrics, no tagging editor, no multi-device sync. The library does not travel to another device, and clearing your browsing data erases it.

Getting it

Music Player Ufumbuzi is free, needs no account, keeps working with the connection off once it has loaded, and installs from the browser as an app. Open it, choose your music, and the files become a playlist.