Play is a music player that reads straight from a folder on your own hard drive. Point it at your collection and it builds a playlist with artist names, titles, years and album artwork already in place. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored.
Click Select Folder and choose the top of your music collection. Play walks through every artist and album directory beneath it, gathers up each MP3 it finds, and loads the lot into one playlist.
Play, pause, stop, skip forward and back, drag the seek bar, set the volume. Tracks advance on their own and loop back to the start at the end of the list. Click any row to jump straight to it.
Title, artist and year are read from the ID3 tags embedded in each file rather than guessed from the filename, and cover art stored inside the MP3 is shown as it is. Untagged files fall back to their filename, so nothing disappears from the list.
Where a track has no embedded image, Play looks the recording up against MusicBrainz and pulls the sleeve from the Cover Art Archive. Anything that already carries its own artwork makes no external request at all.
Play reads your folder directly through the browser and streams the audio from disk into the page. There is no upload step, no server-side processing and no copy of your library held anywhere. Your files never move.
The folder permission is kept on this device by the browser itself, which is what lets your library reopen automatically on your next visit. Clearing site data forgets it, and revoking the permission stops Play reading anything.
Play Pro works the same way. When it identifies a track by sound, the fingerprint is worked out in your browser and only that fingerprint and the track length are sent for matching — never the audio itself.
No sign-up, no email address, no subscription, no library size limit and no adverts between tracks. Play runs as a web page, so there is nothing to install and nothing to keep up to date.
Play Pro is the same player with a tagger built in. It looks up every track in a folder, works out what it actually is, and writes the correct artist, title, album, year and cover art back into the MP3 itself — so the fix travels with the file into any player you use afterwards.
It was built for exactly the mess a Google Takeout export leaves behind: tracks called Track 07 (1).mp3, compilations with no artist, and the same song three times over.
Open Play ProTag Folder scans the whole collection. Tracks with a usable name are searched on MusicBrainz; anything it can't place is identified by its sound through AcoustID, the same fingerprinting used by professional taggers. A song called untitled.mp3 still comes back with a name.
Matches are checked against the track length and artist before they're trusted. Every file lands in one of three piles: confident and ready to write, worth a second look, or no match and left alone.
Review Near-Misses steps through the uncertain ones one at a time and plays each track while you decide. Pick the right version, skip it, or type the details in yourself — hand-entered tracks can still fetch their cover art.
Fix Tags does the same for the song that's playing right now, showing what's in the file beside what will be written. Artwork already in a file is kept, and a downloadable run log records every scan and write.
Writing replaces the MP3 on disk, so try it on a copy of your library first until you trust it.
Duplicates compares the audio inside each file rather than the whole file, so it catches copies that differ only in their tags or artwork, as well as the (1), (2) and copy leftovers. Certain matches are separated from maybes, and the maybes stay put until you check them.
Heard something you don't want? Remove it from the row or the player. An Untagged view lists every file still missing an artist or title, with a live count as you work through them.
Nothing is ever deleted. Duplicates go to a _duplicates folder and removed tracks to _removed, both inside your music folder, with an Undo — drag them back if Play got it wrong.
One click fills the screen with the current track's cover, sliding into place with the title and artist beneath. It follows the music: a new track brings a new cover, and pausing pauses it.
Alongside it sits an artist panel with a photo, a short biography, where and when they formed or were born, genres, labels, instruments and band members past and present — drawn from Wikipedia and Wikidata, and only looked up while the view is open.
Playing, searching, favourites, duplicates and cover art view are all free in Play Pro. Credits are only used when a song is looked up, one credit per song, and a song that's already been checked is never charged again.
Try it without an account on the first 20% of a folder, up to 25 songs. Sign in with just your email — a link or code, no password — and new accounts get 100 songs free. After that, buy a pack. Credits never expire.
One-off payments through Stripe, no subscription. Available to UK buyers at launch.
Play needs the browser's folder access permission, which currently means Chrome, Edge, Brave or another Chromium browser on the desktop. Safari and Firefox do not support it yet, so the folder picker will not open there.
MP3 files with standard ID3 tags work best. Tracks with no tags still play — they just show the filename instead of an artist and title.
Play Pro also asks for permission to write to the folder when you save tags or move files. Say no and it simply plays.
Years ago I ripped my entire CD collection to MP3 and tagged every track properly — artist, album, year, artwork, the lot. A great deal of it was early '90s dance compilations. All of it went up to Google's music locker on the assumption that I now had a clean, permanent, cloud-hosted library.
Then Google closed the service and moved everything across to YouTube Music, where listening to compilations I had bought and uploaded myself meant sitting through adverts I could not skip. That rather defeated the point of owning the music.
So I pulled the whole archive back down with Google Takeout, put it on a local drive, and built this player to sit on top of it. Local files, original tags, original artwork, no adverts.
If your own collection is still sitting in YouTube Music, you can pull it back down and play it locally.
Nothing to install, nothing to register for, and nothing leaves your machine.