The music you own, fully alive
Your collection deserves more.
Aro turns a folder of music into a private, intelligent listening system.
Hear every song in its original quality. Get mixes made from your own listening. Reach one library across your Macs. Keep complete copies where you choose—and take everything back out whenever you want.
Original qualityMade-for-you mixesPrivate by designNo subscription
Inside Aro
Not a folder of files. A living collection.
Home, albums, artists, listening history, collection health, metadata, connected devices, and serious playback live together in one native Mac app.
Your listening story belongs to your libraryOriginal signal44.1 kHz · 16-bit · Bit-perfect
01 / Made from your music
Aro listens to your listening.
Your favourites, play history, moods, and forgotten corners become a Home that changes with you—not a feed designed to keep you inside somebody else’s catalogue.
Your data makes your playlists.Your library stays private and under your control.
Made for youFrom your Aro
Deep Cuts
Recently Loved
Quiet Hours
02 / One private library
Every Aro makes your music more available.
Press play from another Mac and the song starts as it arrives. Keep recent listening, favourite albums, or a complete independently playable copy wherever you choose.
- Private, encrypted connections with no Aro cloud
- Fast read-ahead for playback, seeking, and the next song
- Complete copies stay playable when another device is offline
03 / Playback
Hear the file you chose. Not a substitute.
Aro plays your original format without a transcoded stand-in or hidden processing. Native sample rates follow the music whenever the audio path supports them.
- Bit-perfect, native-rate playback by default
- Optional measured loudness matching for mixed queues
- See the complete signal path to your output
04 / Collection intelligence
Aro does the archaeology. You enjoy the collection.
Point Aro at a folder. It watches for changes, identifies incomplete music by sound, restores useful details and artwork, and shows where duplicates or missing songs need attention.
- Canonical albums, artwork, genres, and mood signals
- Exact duplicates and alternate encodings surfaced clearly
- Your originals change only when you explicitly choose
05 / No lock-in
A library with an exit door.
Your collection never becomes dependent on Aro. Export the whole library into ordinary Artist and Album folders, in the original formats, with a manifest that records what came with you.
- Repeatable, resumable whole-library exports
- Existing songs are respected, never silently overwritten
- Recently removed music stays recoverable for export
More than a player
Built around the whole life of a collection.
From the first folder you add to the day you export everything, Aro keeps sound, history, metadata, storage, and private access working as one system.
Press Play Without Waiting
Music from a connected Aro starts as it arrives, with intelligent read-ahead keeping playback, seeking, and the next songs moving.
Your Listening Story
Follow total listening time, recent plays, a 30-day chart, listening streaks, and the songs and artists you return to most.
Know Every Recording
Identify unknown or incomplete music by how it sounds, then bring canonical titles, artists, albums, artwork, genres, and moods into Aro.
A Health Check for Music
Find exact duplicates, likely alternate encodings, moved songs, and missing music before collection clutter becomes a mystery.
Pair in Seconds
Connect another device with a QR code or a six-digit code, then approve the named device before it can enter the library.
See Aro at a Glance
An optional browser dashboard shows live listeners, connected devices, library shape, listening history, metadata coverage, source health, and host status.
Development preview
Download the macOS preview.
Bring your collection back to life with the early preview for macOS 26 and later. A standalone Aro can host the library from an always-on Linux computer or compatible NAS.
0.0.43macOS 26+Free preview
Choose your Mac
Apple Silicon covers M1 and every newer M-series Mac. Intel is for older Macs with an Intel processor.
Preview builds are ad-hoc signed rather than Apple-notarized. Only download Aro from this official repository.
Open the preview
Open Terminal in your Downloads folder, paste this block, and press Return. It verifies and installs Aro in your personal Applications folder.
ditto -x -k Aro-v*-macos-*.zip .
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine Aro.app
codesign --force --sign - --timestamp=none \
--identifier com.imjacobclark.aro.server \
Aro.app/Contents/MacOS/aro-server
codesign --force --deep --sign - --timestamp=none \
--preserve-metadata=identifier Aro.app
mkdir -p "$HOME/Applications"
ditto Aro.app "$HOME/Applications/Aro.app"
open "$HOME/Applications/Aro.app"
No account. No subscription. No Aro cloud.