Aura is a modern, offline-first music player for people who want a beautiful local library experience without the weight of a full streaming app. It focuses on clean UI, album-art-driven visuals, synced lyrics, queue control, waveform seeking, and a compact 9:16 player layout that can expand into a full queue view when needed.
Aura is designed around a two-panel desktop layout:
- Player panel — a focused 9:16 music player with rotating album art, lyrics overlay, waveform, controls, volume, and equalizer.
- Queue panel — a searchable, reorderable queue with library actions and current-track status.
- Collapsible mode — the queue can collapse so Aura becomes a compact single-panel player.
The app reads local audio files, extracts metadata and album art, builds a persistent library, caches covers and lyrics in the app data folder, and keeps the actual music files untouched.
- Add individual audio files.
- Add full folders recursively.
- Drag and drop files or folders directly onto the app.
- Rescan saved library sources.
- Manage saved folders and loose files from the built-in Library modal.
- Clear Aura's saved library sources without deleting real music files.
- Deduplicates songs using metadata-aware scoring.
- Caches scanned metadata so startup stays faster after the first scan.
- Play, pause, previous, and next controls.
- Shuffle mode.
- Repeat off, repeat all, and repeat one.
- Clickable waveform seeking.
- Drag seekbar scrubbing.
- Volume slider with mute/unmute icon.
- Automatic skip attempt when an audio file fails to load.
- Search the queue by title, artist, album, or path.
- Click any track to play it.
- Remove individual tracks from the queue.
- Clear the whole queue.
- Drag tracks to reorder.
- “Play next” action for quickly moving a song after the current track.
- Current-track visual indicator with mini equalizer animation.
- Queue collapse/expand button that resizes the Electron window.
- Frameless transparent Electron window.
- Custom titlebar and window controls.
- Compact 9:16 player panel.
- Expandable side-by-side queue panel.
- Rotating disc-style album cover while playing.
- Album-art glow and dynamic visual treatment.
- Smooth transitions and polished interaction states.
- App footer with copyright text.
- Uses
music-metadatato read common tags. - Reads title, artist, album, duration, year, genre, track number, disc number, bitrate, and sample rate where available.
- Extracts embedded album art.
- Supports sidecar cover images named after the audio file.
- Crops and stores covers as optimized 512 × 512 JPEG files in the user data folder.
- Searches lyrics using LRCLIB.
- Supports synced LRC lyrics when available.
- Falls back to plain lyrics and estimates line timing.
- Shows previous, current, and next lyric lines over the album-art area.
- Caches lyrics permanently in the app data folder.
- Avoids endless lookups by stopping after four attempts.
- Double-click the cover area to refresh lyrics for the current song.
- Built-in 5-band Web Audio equalizer.
- Bands: Sub, Bass, Mid, Presence, and Treble.
- Toggle EQ on/off.
- Reset all bands.
- Drag vertical sliders to adjust gain.
- Double-click a band to reset that band.
- Media Session API metadata support.
- Windows/media-key style actions for play/pause, next, and previous.
- Secure preload bridge using Electron
contextBridge. - Uses app data storage instead of writing generated library/cache files into the install directory.
Aura scans and accepts the following extensions:
.mp3, .flac, .wav, .ogg, .m4a, .aac, .opus, .wma, .aiff, .aif, .mp4, .m4b
Sidecar cover images can use:
.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .webp, .bmp
For sidecar covers, use the same base filename as the audio file, for example:
song-name.mp3
song-name.jpg
Aura also checks nearby cover folders such as covers/, cover/, and artwork/ using the same base filename.
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
Space |
Play / pause |
← |
Seek backward 5 seconds |
→ |
Seek forward 5 seconds |
Alt + ← |
Previous track |
Alt + → |
Next track |
↑ |
Volume up |
↓ |
Volume down |
S |
Toggle shuffle |
R |
Cycle repeat mode |
Esc |
Close Library modal |
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Desktop shell | Electron |
| Runtime | Node.js |
| UI | HTML, CSS, JavaScript |
| Audio playback | HTMLAudioElement |
| Waveform | Web Audio API / decoded audio data |
| Equalizer | Web Audio API BiquadFilterNode |
| Metadata | music-metadata |
| Packaging | electron-builder |
| Lyrics provider | LRCLIB |
Aura is distributed as a ready-to-install desktop app through GitHub Releases.
- Go to the latest Release on this repository.
- Download the Windows installer, usually named something like
Aura Music Player Setup.exe. - Run the installer and open Aura.
- Click Files to select songs, or Folder to select your music folder.
- Done. Aura scans your music, builds the queue, and remembers your selected library sources for next time.
You can add songs in three ways:
Click Files and select one or more audio files.
Click Folder and select one or more folders. Aura will scan audio files inside those folders recursively.
Drop audio files or folders anywhere on the app window.
Aura saves selected folders and loose files as library sources. On the next launch, it loads the saved library again.
Open Library from the queue panel to manage:
- saved folders,
- manually added loose files,
- scanned songs.
Removing a folder or file from the Library modal only removes it from Aura's saved sources. It does not delete your actual files from disk.
aura-music-player/
├── assets/
│ ├── AURA-logo-icon-HQ.png
│ └── icon.ico
├── src/
│ ├── index.html # App layout and UI structure
│ ├── renderer.js # Playback, queue, lyrics, EQ, library UI
│ └── styles.css # Current app styling and animations
├── main.js # Electron main process, scanning, cache, IPC
├── preload.js # Secure renderer bridge
├── package.json # Scripts, dependencies, build config
└── README.md
Aura stores generated data inside Electron's userData directory, not inside the project folder or installation directory.
Generated data includes:
data/
├── library.json # Saved folders, loose files, scanned songs
├── covers/ # Optimized cached cover images
└── lyrics/ # Cached lyrics responses
This keeps the installed app cleaner and safer, especially after packaging.
- Lyrics require internet access because Aura searches LRCLIB.
- Playback itself is local once songs are added.
- The app does not delete or modify your original music files.
- If metadata is missing, Aura falls back to filename-based title and artist guessing.
- First scan can take longer for large libraries because metadata and cover art need to be extracted.
Kaveesha Nethmal
© 2026 Kaveesha Nethmal. All rights reserved.