notfrankgraves/borealis

Borealis is a streaming audio system for Raspberry Pi that combines internet radio, YouTube and podcast streaming, and a local music library into a single application with a web interface. You control it from any browser on the same network, making it suitable for a small music player on a shelf or a headless audio server in another room. At its core, Borealis uses VLC for playback and yt-dlp to extract audio from YouTube, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Mixcloud, and over a thousand other sites. You can paste a URL to stream it immediately, search YouTube from the web interface, or add RSS podcast feeds and resume episodes from where you left off. A local library scans a music folder and connected USB drives, organized by artist and album. Beyond basic playback, the app includes a 10-band equalizer with presets, a play queue that works across all sources, named playlists, bookmarks, crossfade between tracks, playback speed control from half to double speed, a sleep timer, and stream recording to MP3 via ffmpeg. Bluetooth is supported through BlueZ and PipeWire, so you can route audio to wireless speakers or headphones. If you use a Pimoroni Pirate Audio HAT on a Pi Zero 2W, you get a small 240 by 240 pixel color display and four physical buttons for navigation without a browser. The display shows now-playing information, an EQ visualizer, and menus for browsing radio, the library, and queues. Without the HAT, the web interface provides the same features, with a sidebar layout on desktop and a tabbed layout on mobile. Installation covers three paths: with the HAT on a Pi, headless on a Pi without the HAT, and headless on any Linux machine. Each has a script that sets up the required system packages and a systemd service so the app starts automatically on boot.