The music you bought is still yours.
Kanora is the shelf it deserves.
A native hi-fi library companion for Mac, iPad, and iPhone — built for people who rip CDs, record vinyl, and curate folders with intent. No subscriptions. No algorithms. No catalog that can disappear overnight.
Studio-grade care, native from the first listen.
Every feature is built around one idea: you already own this music. Kanora's job is to honour what's on your drives — capturing it cleanly, cataloguing it honestly, and playing it back without compromise.
Capture with care
Bit-perfect CD ripping with MusicBrainz and Cover Art Archive lookup. Every disc lands where you put it — folder structure untouched, filenames respected.
Metadata you can trust
Track, album, and bulk editors with live previews and artwork that honours the original pressing. No silent re-tagging. No cloud overwrites.
Analog to AirPlay
Route a turntable or preamp through Kanora and out to any AirPlay speaker in the house. Still dialing in latency.
DLNA revival
Bringing classic DLNA and AllPlay speakers back into rotation, so hardware you already own keeps earning its place on the shelf.
Vinyl & cassette recording
Capture a pressing or a tape straight into your library, fully tagged, filtered, and sitting beside your CD imports. Every take preserved.
Ownership by default
No telemetry. No subscriptions. No vendor lock-in. Your music, your metadata, your notes — local, or in your own iCloud. Never mine.
Sixty seconds in the actual app.
The library at rest, a rip in progress, a metadata edit, music routing to AirPlay. No tour narration — just Kanora doing what it does.
Recording brief
A highlight reel rather than a walkthrough. Show the library browsing naturally, a rip running in the background, a quick metadata correction, and music routing out to AirPlay. Nothing guided or explained — the app should look confident and unhurried. Shoot in 2x or with Focusee's zoom tracking so the interface reads cleanly on a small screen.
Streaming sold us convenience and quietly took the record back.
Every year, thousands of albums disappear from streaming catalogs. Playlists turn grey. Metadata gets overwritten. An algorithm decides what counts as “yours.”
Kanora is built on the opposite premise: access is not ownership, and rental is not permanence.
Your files stay yours.
Kanora never moves a file unless you ask. Your folder structure, filenames, and drive layout are the source of truth. We read around them, not over them.
Metadata is craft, not convenience.
Credits, pressings, liner notes, personnel — the things collectors care about. Edit tags in bulk with live previews, or leave an album exactly as its producer intended.
The playback chain belongs to you.
Local, external, iCloud, lossless — filter by truth. Route to AirPlay, to a DLNA speaker, or through an analog input. No opaque re-encoding. No DSP you didn't ask for.
One honest purchase. Forever.
No subscription. No tiered features. No ad tier. You pay once for software that respects you and the work of the musicians on your shelf.
“A library is a promise a collector makes to their future self. Kanora is software that keeps that promise — quietly, precisely, and for as long as the drives spin.”
— Ben Reed · Building Kanora, Alone (Mostly)
Notes from the workbench.
Build logs, field notes, quiet essays on collecting and sound.
All dispatches →Host/Client Library Architecture Complete: Phases 1-3 Shipped
Three major implementation phases completed: iOS discovers Mac hosts, REST API serves library data, and clients browse remotely with transparent streaming. Full end-to-end host/client workflow now functional.
Designing Host/Client Architecture: Bringing iTunes Home Sharing to Kanora
Planning a distributed library system where macOS hosts your music collection and iOS devices browse, stream, and download remotely—no subscription required, all on your home network.
Twixmas Progress: iOS Polish, Artist Editing, and Quiet Momentum
A calm end-of-year push focused on iOS polish, artist editing, and artwork reliability—shipping real progress without interrupting Christmas or family time.
Follow the build. Own the result.
Early access opens later this year. In the meantime, dispatches from the workbench — what's shipping, what's still in the lab, and what's on the way. Roughly monthly. No tracking. Unsubscribe any time.