Everything audio all in one place! From music, podcasts, audiobooks, internet radio, lectures, sound effects, speeches, historical recordings, and more all from the world's open archives! Free to listen. No accounts. No ads from us.
Online StoreSymphonymph is free and carries no advertising, so it runs on donations. Anything you give goes to Lavish Leaf and stays with the division of choice at checkout to keep the work going.
No PayPal account needed, you can give with a debit or credit card. 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.
Donations support the work directly and are not tax-deductible.
Listening got expensive. The paid apps cost more every year, and the free ones make you the product with 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.
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!
That is Symphonymph: 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. Sixteen Oxford lecture series, Yale and Berkeley course recordings, the Royal Institution, the Royal Institute of Philosophy, the London School of Economics, the Smithsonian, the New York Public Library and the UK National Archives, alongside the CDC and NASA. Sorted beside everything else, so learning is one tap from listening.
Classic old-time radio serials, news, meditation and sleep audio, and material in dozens of languages. Religion and spirituality carries scripture read aloud in full, the Bible and the Qur'an from four narrators, alongside sermons, dharma talks and hymns, with a chip for each faith and a setting to hide any of them. New categories are added as we verify new archives.
Public-domain film, and you can watch it rather than only hear it. NASA mission footage, the Prelinger Archives of advertising and educational shorts, Universal's newsreels from 1929 to 1967, US government films, and the classic feature pools: film noir, silent film, science fiction and horror, comedy, and early animation. Every collection is either public domain by statute or filtered to open licenses before it is listed, and each film streams from the archive that holds it. Watch full screen, in a floating window while you carry on browsing, in picture-in-picture over your other apps, or send it to a TV. The page is a door rather than a chart: type a title into its own search box and it asks every video catalog, including a 236,000-title open film pool too big to put on a shelf.
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 license and the creator named. The source gets the visit; Symphonymph is mentioned last. Open at the source does the same for you: one tap from Now Playing opens that page in your own browser, so the archive that pays to host the recording gets the visit and you can read the notes, see the license and find their donate link.
Background playback that survives locking the phone and swiping the app away. Lock-screen and notification controls, with the pair of buttons beside play chosen by you. Bluetooth and headset buttons. A visible queue you can reorder, shuffle and re-deal, with a shuffle that can keep dealing a new order for ever and a repeat that can count ("three more times, then carry on"). Playback speed, remembered per show or per book. Skip silence. A graphic equalizer with as many bands as your phone's own audio engine offers, and a loudness boost for quiet archive recordings. A Chapters list on long recordings: open it and jump straight to chapter nine of a thirteen-hour book, with every chapter's start and end shown in the book's own clock. And where a recording is a film, the same player will watch it: full screen, or in a small floating window while you carry on browsing the app, or in a window over your other apps entirely. Listen instead is always one tap away, and it keeps your place either way.
Android Auto, so your library is browsable from the car. Google Cast to a speaker or TV, with the queue handed over: a film goes to the TV as a film, with the picture on the television and the controls, the lock screen and the car all driving it from where you are. Roku televisions are found too, which matters because a Roku does not speak Google Cast at all: the app sends the film straight to the set and says plainly that the television has taken over. A Quick Settings tile for play and pause without unlocking, and a home-screen widget showing what is playing with play, next and previous. Your own music files, too: “On this device” plays what is already on the phone, and never moves or deletes a file. If you run your own music server at home, Navidrome, Airsonic, Gonic, Ampache or Jellyfin, Symphonymph plays your library straight from it: Your music server is a page of its own in the menu, browsable and searchable like any archive, and the address and password stay on the phone and are left out of any backup file.
Search every catalog at once, with filters that combine: podcasts and comedy, audiobooks and history. Or search inside one topic without leaving it: every page has its own search box, and it asks that page's catalogs only. Type a catalog's name into it and you get that catalog, with a line saying so and a way back to searching for the words. Speak instead of typing. Paste a podcast address and follow it directly. “More like this” from anything playing, and everything else by the same artist. Recent searches, kept on the device. Where a podcast publishes a transcript, read it while you listen and tap any line to jump there. Start radio from anything and the queue keeps filling with more like it. A daily mix, built on the phone from what you have actually listened to: no server, no profile, and nothing about your listening leaves the device.
Every recording remembers where you stopped. Named bookmarks for the passages you want to find again. Playlists, collections, a Liked list, full listening history, and a running total of how long you have actually listened. Back the whole library up to a file and restore it, on this phone or the next one. Mark an episode as played, or unplayed, and a Hide played switch keeps the list to what you have not heard. Pick up where you left off on Home holds the last forty recordings you were part way through, counted as recordings rather than as plays, so an afternoon of dipping into things cannot push out the book you are half way through. Clear this list empties the shelf without forgetting a single place: play any of them again and it carries on where you stopped.
Popular, New and All time are three different questions, and most archives can only answer some of them. Each catalog says which it really ranks by: the Internet Archive keeps a monthly count, a lifetime download count and an upload date; a podcast chart is a chart of right now, not of all time; a sensor array in a forest has no counts at all. So a Top list puts the archives that actually counted first, every source still contributes, and nothing is dressed up as a ranking that is not one.
No account is needed to press play. No analytics, no tracking, no crash reporter, no advertising identifier. Nothing about your listening leaves the phone. Import your subscriptions from any other podcast app as OPML, and export them the same way whenever you like. Share a playlist as a link or a file and only the list travels, never the audio: the phone that opens it plays each recording from the archive that holds it, and looks in its own catalogs for anything it cannot reach.
Hide anything a publisher marked explicit. Limit what you are offered to the languages you read. Inside Religion & spirituality, choose which faiths appear at all and drag your own to the front. A sleep timer that can stop after a set time or at the end of what is playing. Hide any recording, show, artist or whole catalog you never want offered again, and unhide it just as easily. A Kids and family section draws only on catalogs made for children.
Download anything whose license allows it and play it with no signal at all. Downloads resume after a dropped connection. Follow a show and new episodes can download themselves, on Wi-Fi only if you prefer. A data saver asks for smaller streams where a catalog offers them. Tell it to download only overnight, or between hours you choose, and it fills the phone while you are asleep: anything you tap Download on still starts straight away.
Drag the menu into the order you want. Choose which shelves appear on Home, and in what order. Hide whole categories you never open. Nine accent colors, light or dark or follow the system, and the app icon on your home screen changes color with it. Group your playlists into folders, which appear in the menu as folders you can open and close. The app itself speaks English, Spanish, French, German or Portuguese: the whole app, not a handful of labels, down to the empty states, the explanations and the lock-screen buttons. That is separate from which languages you want to be offered recordings in, because somebody may read English and want Polish audiobooks.
Free, and staying free. Access to all open sources will always be free. The world's audio is yours to listen to.
Nothing between you and the recordings. Symphonymph plays each recording from the archive that stores it. We hold no copies, and we add nothing to them, including ads.
Credit where it is owed. Every recording plays with its license and its maker's name on the screen. Share your discovery with the world!
Some podcasts and stations carry their publishers' own sponsor messages inside the audio. Those are theirs, and no app can take them out.
Keeping it free. Symphonymph runs on donations and on the goodwill of the archives that make it possible. The catalogs behind the app, the libraries, universities, volunteer directories and nonprofit archives, are the real work. If you have something to give, we will always tell you who they are.
If you make audio, whether music, a podcast, spoken word or field recordings, and you would like it available in Symphonymph, 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. Symphonymph 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 Symphonymph already reads it. Upload there, or one of the other sources we access!
Symphonymph pays nothing, because Symphonymph 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, so please allow time. Because Symphonymph reads the open catalogs 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.
Contact & Newsletter
Questions about Symphonymph, a source you think we should carry, or a takedown request: reach us here.
Be the first to know when Symphonymph launches on Android, plus news from across Lavish Leaf.
Android · version 3.0.0 · built
Symphonymph 3.0.0Symphonymph Alpha 3.0.0
Updating? Open the new file and install it over the one you have: your library, playlists and places stay. Settings > About shows your version and when it was built.
iPhone version coming to the App Store soon.