Podcasts, audiobooks, internet radio, lectures and independent music, from the world's open archives. Free to listen. No account to make. Never an ad from us.
Android. In testing now — coming to Google Play.
Android first, in active development. Sign up below to hear when it launches.
Listening got expensive. The paid apps cost more every year, and the free ones make you the product — full-screen ads between tracks, countdowns you have to sit through, buttons you have to hunt for to close. We wanted an app that simply plays audio, and stops there.
It turns out there is an enormous amount of audio that is already free and legal to listen to. Libraries, universities, archives, broadcasters and independent artists have been publishing openly for decades. The problem was never supply. It was that nobody had put it all in one place with a decent player in front of it.
That is Oscilla: millions of recordings from the world's open catalogs, in one app, with nothing between you and the play button.
Tens of thousands of complete audiobooks read by volunteers, plus poetry and spoken-word collections — the classics, in full, free because the works themselves are in the public domain. Resume where you left off, download for offline, listen at your own pace.
An open, independent podcast directory — not one company's walled catalog. Shows are ranked by what people are actually listening to this week, and every episode streams from the publisher's own feed, exactly as any podcast app does.
Live stations from nearly every country on earth, from community broadcasters to national services. Filter by language so you hear the ones you can actually understand — or leave it open and go exploring.
Artist-distributed tracks, Creative Commons releases from netlabels, and a vast archive of live concert recordings from bands who explicitly allow taping and sharing. Hundreds of thousands of shows, free and legal.
University lecture recordings, conference talks and educational series — the kind of material that used to sit behind a campus login. Sorted alongside everything else, so learning is one tap from listening.
Classic old-time radio serials, news, meditation and sleep audio, religion and spirituality, and material in dozens of languages. New categories are added as we verify new archives.
Rain on a tent, a crowd in a stadium, a door in a hallway — hundreds of thousands of openly licensed recordings from Freesound and Wikimedia Commons, given their own shelf. For sound designers, teachers, and anyone who sleeps better to an hour of weather.
Follow a podcast and its new episodes appear at the top of Home, with the unread ones marked. Your subscriptions are yours: import them from any other podcast app as OPML, and export them the same way, whenever you like. Nothing is locked in.
Where a publisher provides one, read the episode as you listen: the line being spoken is highlighted, and tapping any line jumps the audio there. Built for Deaf and hard-of-hearing listeners first, and useful to everyone who has ever wanted to find "the bit about…".
Sharing sends people to the recording's own page at its archive or publisher — never to a bare audio file — with the licence and the creator named. The source gets the visit; Oscilla is mentioned last.
Free, and staying free. Everything you can do on one device costs nothing, and no advertising will ever be part of it.
Yours on every device, once. One payment, one account, and your library and your place in it follow you to every phone and tablet you own. Never a subscription.
Nothing between you and the recording. Oscilla plays each recording from the archive that keeps it. We hold no copies, and we add nothing to them.
Credit where it is owed. Every recording plays with its licence and its maker's name on the screen.
Some podcasts and stations carry their publishers' own sponsor messages inside the audio. Those are theirs, and no app can take them out.
Oscilla is free and carries no advertising, so it runs on donations. Anything you give goes to Lavish Leaf and keeps the work going.
Choose your preferred method — both go directly to Lavish Leaf. If you would rather give to the archives the app is built on, we will always tell you who they are: the credit is on every Now Playing screen.
If you make audio — music, a podcast, spoken word, field recordings, anything — and you would like it available in Oscilla, send us a link. We will review it and, if it fits, index it so listeners can find it.
Send a link, not a file. Oscilla never hosts audio, so your work stays exactly where you already put it — your own site, your podcast feed, Bandcamp, ccMixter, Audius, or anywhere else that serves the audio publicly. You keep ownership and you keep control: take it down at your end and it disappears from the app.
No host of your own? The Internet Archive will store your audio free and permanently, for anyone, and Oscilla already reads it. Upload there, then paste the link below.
To be clear about money: Oscilla pays nothing, because Oscilla earns nothing. There is no ad revenue to split, and no paid tier yet. What we can do is give your work an audience and link every listener straight to your own page — the one you host it on, where your donation or purchase link already lives — so anything a listener chooses to give goes to you in full.
Submissions are reviewed by hand, by one person, so please allow time. Because Oscilla reads the open catalogues directly, the fastest route in is often to publish on one of them: an Internet Archive upload, a ccMixter or Audius release, or a podcast feed listed in the Podcast Index appears in the app on its own, with no form needed.
Oscilla runs on donations and on the goodwill of the archives that make it possible. The catalogs behind the app — libraries, universities, volunteer directories and nonprofit archives — are the real work. If you have something to give, give it to them first; we will always tell you who they are.
One thing will ever carry a price: the account that carries your library to every device you own. One payment, once. Never a subscription, and never required.
Contact & Newsletter
Questions about Oscilla, a source you think we should carry, or a takedown request — reach us here.
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