Helium Streamer 8.1.0.1867

Helium Streamer is a way to stream your own music collection the way Spotify streams theirs.

It runs on a Windows or Linux computer at home and serves your library to any web browser, with no cloud storage limits and no monthly fee.

Download Helium Streamer 8.1 - free, for Windows and Linux, with an optional Premium upgrade.

How it works

Helium Streamer is the streaming half of Helium Music Manager. It reads the same database, so your tags, ratings and playlists show up without uploading or syncing anything.

The server is light enough for a spare PC, a small Ubuntu box or a Raspberry Pi. Once it is running, you open your library in a browser on any device on your network.

It plays the formats a serious collection is made of: FLAC, MP3, AAC and M4A, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, WAV, AIFF, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, Musepack, WMA and DSD.

What you can do with it

• Browse your way. By artist, album, genre, year or your own custom tags.
• Let it pick. An auto-queue keeps playing from an album, artist, genre or smart playlist.
• See more about the music. Synced lyrics, artist bios and pictures are fetched automatically, and tracks are analysed for tempo.

Free or Premium

The free version gives one user the standard library views in a browser, with a simple built-in database. That is enough to listen to your collection from any computer in the house.

Premium, a one-off $24, adds the part most people want: streaming to the free iPhone and Android apps. It also adds separate profiles with their own playlists and Last.fm scrobbling, editing tags remotely, and support for bigger databases such as MySQL.

Premium also includes an AI assistant that answers questions about your library and builds playlists, using your own AI account.

Getting your library ready

Streaming is only as good as the tags behind it. Mp3tag is the quickest way to fix names and album art in bulk, and Helium Music Manager does the same from inside the library.

To turn a CD collection into lossless files first, the FLAC encoder and Helium Audio Converter both keep your tags intact.

Other ways to run your own music server

Jellyfin is completely free and handles films and TV as well as music. Plex is the most polished, with some features behind a paid Plex Pass.

Emby sits between the two. Helium Streamer is the better choice if music is all you care about and you already tag it in Helium.

If you only listen on one PC, a player such as MusicBee or foobar2000 is simpler.

More are in our Media Players section.

Quick questions

Download Helium Streamer 8.1 and put your collection in your pocket, or tell us how it went.