Your library. Your network. Your control.
Play your own music on Sonos, IKEA Symfonisk, and Google Cast / Chromecast speakers — from your Mac, with no cloud, no account, and no subscription.
You have a folder of mp3s. You have a Sonos (or IKEA Symfonisk, which is
Sonos inside) speaker. Getting the first to play on the second should be
easy, and somehow every app that promises it is broken, paywalled, or both.
This is a tiny, dependency-free app that fixes that — pure Python standard
library, and you can even run it as one downloadable file (draai.pyz). It
runs on your Mac, finds your speakers on your Wi-Fi, and streams your files to
them directly — bit-perfect, at whatever quality your files are (320 kbps
mp3s, lossless FLAC, all of it).
It speaks to Sonos / IKEA Symfonisk and to Google Cast / Chromecast devices, side by side — including a Chromecast Audio, which takes hi-res FLAC (up to 96 kHz / 24-bit). Both show up together under Rooms. (Sonos and Cast can't play in sync with each other, but each plays perfectly on its own.)
No Sonos account. No internet needed. Nothing leaves your home network.
(A demo library with generated artwork — click any shot to open it full size.)
Calm and consistent: one fixed teal accent, album-art thumbnails on every row,
and folder/artist groups you can collapse. It follows your macOS light/dark
setting — one click to override. The full-screen now-playing view (the ⛶ icon)
takes its colours from the album art and spins into a vinyl deck; press A for
twin VU meters or S for a spectrum analyzer — both modeled from the track's
audio analysis, never a fake signal.
 Home · dark theme |
 Home · light theme |
 Full-screen now playing · coloured by the art |
 Vinyl deck · your artwork as the label |
 Amplifier · twin VU meters ( A) |
 Spectrum · analyzer ( S) |
 Library · grouped by folder |
 Queue · drag to reorder, play next |
Control it from your phone — a QR code in the sidebar opens a slim remote on any phone on your Wi-Fi: what's playing, transport, the queue (reorder, remove, play next), and browse-and-add from your whole library.
 Now playing |
 Browse & add |
 The queue |
This project was born on an ordinary evening with a folder of mp3s, an IKEA Symfonisk speaker, and the reasonable assumption that connecting the two would be simple. It wasn't. Every existing route turned out to be a workaround wearing a product's clothes:
The official way. The Sonos app can play a "Music Library" — if you set up SMB file sharing on your Mac, get the permissions right, let it index your collection, and re-index when it changes. A network-drive ritual from another era, for playing a file that's sitting right there.
The App Store apps. A parade of third-party players that are broken, abandoned, paywalled behind subscriptions, or quietly upload your music to their cloud so they can stream it back to you. None of them just played the folder.
The mirroring apps. These capture your Mac's entire audio output and re-stream it with a delay — every notification ding included, seeking broken, quality reduced. A screwdriver used as a hammer.
The media servers. Plex, Jellyfin, Logitech Media Server — genuinely good software that answers a different question. Standing up a media server with libraries, users, and transcoders to play mp3s on the speaker three meters away is a lot of ceremony for a small wish.
The absurd part: Sonos speakers natively do exactly what's needed. You hand them the address of an audio file on your network, and they play it — that capability has been sitting in every unit all along. DRAAI is just the missing polite conversation with your speaker: a small engine that serves your files and asks the speaker to play them. No accounts, no indexing, no cloud, no subscription. The way it arguably should have worked out of the box.
-
Click the green Code button → Download ZIP, and unpack it (or
git clone https://github.com/itsmesaskovic/draai.git). -
Open Terminal (press Cmd+Space, type "Terminal", press Enter).
-
Go into the folder and start it:
cd ~/Downloads/draai-main # or wherever you unpacked it python3 -m draaiPrefer a single file? Download
draai.pyzfrom the latest release and just runpython3 draai.pyzfrom anywhere — no unzipping, still no install and no dependencies.
- The Terminal prints a short banner and keeps running — that's the engine; leave it open. Your browser opens the control panel at http://localhost:8765.
- Your speakers appear under Rooms within a few seconds — Sonos / Symfonisk and any Google Cast / Chromecast devices, side by side (first time on a new network can take a moment — there's a Rescan button).
- Under Library, click ＋ Add folder… and pick your music folder. Your songs appear instantly; albums with embedded artwork get covers.
- Click a song and it plays on the speaker. Click the ⛶ icon in the player bar for the full-screen now-playing view — that view takes on the album's colors, and the record icon at its top switches to the vinyl deck.
Two things may happen on first run, both normal and both one-time:
- If your Mac has never used Python, macOS offers to install its developer tools. Click Install and wait a few minutes, then run the command again.
- macOS asks whether Python may accept incoming network connections. Click Allow — that's how the speakers fetch the music from your Mac.
Keep the Terminal window open while music plays (your Mac is the music server). Press Ctrl+C in that window to quit.
You don't need a GitHub account for any of this — the green Code button → Download ZIP works for everyone. And if the steps above feel foreign, copy the block below and paste it into your AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot — any of them). It will guide you through setup one step at a time:
I want to set up DRAAI, a free open-source app that plays my own music
files on my Sonos / IKEA Symfonisk speakers, from this page:
https://github.com/itsmesaskovic/draai
I'm on a Mac and not very technical. Please walk me through it ONE step
at a time, waiting for me to confirm each step worked before the next.
The steps: (1) download the ZIP from the GitHub page (green "Code"
button, no account needed) and unzip it; (2) open Terminal, cd into the
unzipped folder (usually ~/Downloads/draai-main) and run:
python3 -m draai
(3) if macOS offers to install "command line developer tools", I should
accept and wait, then run the command again; (4) if macOS asks whether
Python may accept incoming network connections, I click Allow; (5) a
control panel opens in my browser — help me pick my speaker under Rooms
and add my music folder under Library; (6) if no speakers appear, check
I'm on the same Wi-Fi as the speakers, press Rescan, or add the speaker
by its IP address (shown in the Sonos app under Settings > System >
About My System); (7) only if I want extras: "brew install ffmpeg"
enables the waveform visuals, and "python3 -m draai --install-autostart" makes it start automatically at login.
If anything fails, ask me to paste the exact Terminal output and help me
fix it before moving on.
- Finds Sonos / Symfonisk speakers automatically (or add one by IP address)
- Also plays to Google Cast / Chromecast devices — auto-discovered on the same Wi-Fi, with hi-res FLAC (up to 96 kHz / 24-bit) to a Chromecast Audio
- A queue you can actually manage: drag to reorder, Play next, add whole albums or folders, multi-select songs (Cmd/Shift-click, or the Select button)
- Playlists saved as plain
.m3ufiles in your music folder — no database, no cloud, readable by any player - Light & dark theme — follows macOS automatically, one click to override
- Songs view can group by folder or artist, sort by title/artist/date added; folder headers show the full path on hover and open in Finder
- Long sets resume where you left off, even after restarting
- Full-screen visualizers: a cinematic now-playing view, twin VU meters
(press
A) and a spectrum analyzer (pressS) — modeled from the track's audio analysis, never a fake signal - Vinyl deck view: a spinning record with your artwork as the label
- Media keys: play/pause from your keyboard, artwork in macOS now-playing
- Library from one or many folders — add them with a built-in folder picker, no path-typing needed
- Library with search, real metadata from your files' tags, embedded album art
- Play, pause, skip, seek bar, shuffle, volume
- Queue: add songs, jump around, remove, clear
- Multi-room: group speakers to play in sync, per-room volume
- Real speaker EQ (bass / treble / loudness on the speaker itself)
- Sleep timer
- Phone remote: a QR code in the sidebar opens a slim remote on any phone on your Wi-Fi — control playback, manage the queue, and browse and add from your whole library
- Supports mp3, m4a/aac, flac, wav, aiff, ogg — streamed untouched, so lossless files play lossless
Some features use ffmpeg. Install it once with Homebrew:
brew install ffmpeg
This enables the waveform / audio-analysis visuals. Without it, the app works fine — those visuals simply stay off.
To have DRAAI always running in the background — no Terminal window:
python3 -m draai --install-autostart
Then just open http://localhost:8765 whenever you want music.
Undo anytime with --uninstall-autostart.
yt-dlp is a separate, widely used
open-source media downloader. This project does not include, bundle, or
download it — but if you have installed it yourself
(brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg), the app shows an import box: paste a link,
and yt-dlp saves the audio — with title, artist and cover art embedded —
into an Imported subfolder of your first library folder
(e.g. ~/Music/Imported/). The library rescans automatically.
Use this only for content you have the right to download: your own uploads, Creative Commons-licensed material, public-domain recordings, and content whose owner permits it. Downloading may otherwise violate a website's terms of service and/or copyright law in your country. The authors of this project do not endorse or encourage downloading copyrighted content, and how you use your own yt-dlp installation is your responsibility alone.
The player is two parts: an engine (the draai package, run with python3 -m draai or the single-file draai.pyz) and an interface. A basic interface is
built in, but DRAAI ships the full interface (player_ui.html) — a far
nicer one, with a synced visualizer, a full-screen mode, and guest access —
bundled inside the package. To tweak it live, drop your own player_ui.html
in the folder you run DRAAI from and it overrides the built-in one.
Want to build your own? The engine exposes a simple JSON API (/api/...) —
see the source — so anyone can design a front end without touching the
engine.
DRAAI's privacy isn't a promise you have to trust — it's a property you can check. The whole app is small and dependency-free by design, so "nothing leaves your home network" is something the code demonstrates rather than something a policy asserts:
- No cloud, no account, no telemetry — there is no analytics, no update check, and no crash reporting anywhere in it.
- No third-party code — the engine is pure Python standard library, with no pip dependencies, ever. There's no supply chain that could read your library and send it somewhere.
- The interface loads nothing from the internet — no CDN, no web fonts, no external scripts. It works with the internet unplugged, so there's nothing to track you with.
- Every connection stays on your LAN — the engine only ever talks to your speakers, on your own network. The one exception is the optional yt-dlp import, which uses your yt-dlp on a URL you paste.
Two automated tests enforce the two rules most easily broken by a future change — "no pip dependency" and "the UI never phones home" — so a regression fails the build instead of shipping.
Honest about the boundary: within your network DRAAI has no authentication — anyone on your Wi-Fi can control playback and browse your library (that's what makes the phone remote one-tap). Run it on a network you trust, like home Wi-Fi, not open public Wi-Fi. The full picture — the egress inventory, threat model, and how to verify it yourself — is in docs/technical/security-and-privacy.md, and vulnerability reporting is in SECURITY.md.
The engine is the draai/ package — pure Python standard library, no pip
dependencies, ever. Keep the import graph clean (state/constants are
leaves; server/__main__ are the roots) and run python3 build.py to
bundle it — package plus web UI — into the single distributable draai.pyz.
The test suite needs no speakers, network, or ffmpeg:
python3 tests/test_draai.py
- "No speakers found" — Your Mac must be on the same Wi-Fi network as the speakers. Some routers block device discovery between devices; use add by IP address (find speaker IPs in the Sonos app under Settings → System → About My System).
- My Chromecast doesn't appear — Cast devices are found by mDNS on your local network. Make sure the Chromecast is on the same Wi-Fi, and that your router/firewall isn't blocking multicast (the same "AP isolation" setting that hides Sonos). Press Rescan; discovery can take a few seconds.
- A track won't play on a Chromecast — Chromecast plays FLAC, WAV, MP3 and AAC, but not AIFF or ALAC. Those files still play fine on Sonos.
- Music stops when I close the laptop — The speakers stream from your Mac, so the app must be running while music plays.
- The song plays but shows no title/art — That file has no embedded tags or artwork. Tag your files with any tagging tool and rescan.
- Something else — Open an issue in this repository.
This is an unofficial, independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Sonos Inc., Inter IKEA Systems B.V., Google LLC, or YouTube. All trademarks belong to their respective owners. The software controls speakers you own, on your own network, using their local network interface, and is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind — see LICENSE.
MIT — free to use, copy, modify, and share.