Meringo

A music player for people who treat listening as a ritual, not a feed.

Built for FiiO M21 owners and Jellyfin/Subsonic self-hosters who want a player that refuses to lie about the signal path. If you primarily stream from Spotify, Tidal, or Qobuz, Meringo isn't for you — no native integration with commercial streaming, by design.

Meringo plays your high-fidelity local library alongside your Jellyfin or Subsonic server, with an audio engine that never touches the bits unless it has to. Every screen is built for slow listening. Every diagnostic tells you what your gear is actually doing.

THE BIT-PERFECT PATH

Direct-to-DAC routing on supported hardware, including full FiiO SDK integration on the M21. AAudio low-latency on phones with capable DACs. The Now Playing format strip tells you exactly what path your audio is taking — and lights an amber warning the moment AudioFlinger resamples or truncates the signal. Transient modifiers (ReplayGain, crossfade, concurrent audio) decorate the badge as suffixes — never as silent lies.

TWO LENSES — VAULT & CLOUD

Browse your on-device music files side-by-side with your Jellyfin or Subsonic collection. Cross-source twin detection — MBID, ISRC, and Chromaprint fingerprint — collapses the same recording across local and cloud into a single library entry. Cloud failures fall back to the Vault copy automatically; a Wi-Fi blip never stalls playback.

SONIC MATCH & SONIC RADIO

Tap the wave icon on Now Playing and Meringo finds tracks in your library that genuinely sound like the one playing — same harmonic shape, same rhythmic feel. Tap a match to seed Sonic Radio: an auto-extending five-track texture chain. Fingerprints compute silently during playback. No external recommender, no telemetry.

THE WORKBENCH

A 10-band parametric EQ in double-precision biquad math with TPDF dither at every integer-PCM output stage. Two preset slots (A and B) you can flip between mid-track to compare two calibrations against each other — or against the raw signal — without rebuilding either curve. Pink noise and sine sweep test signals route through your live EQ for headphone calibration. A headroom reserve pre-attenuates so boosts never clip. The Tuning Vault stores personal calibrations and ships a Community Profiles collection (AutoEQ-format import via file picker or clipboard paste).

ATMOSPHERES — MOOD BY SOUND

Library navigation by what tracks actually sound like, not by genre tags. Five mood classes — Lite Roast, Fruity, Medium Roast, Dark & Bold, Slow Drip — computed deterministically from Chromaprint fingerprints, technical metadata, and MusicBrainz signals. The same file always gets the same mood. Tempo cross-filter (Slow / Mid / Fast). No recommendation engine, no telemetry.

THE ACOUSTIC DNA

Every album surfaces its real codec, sample rate, bit depth, and source. No marketing labels. A three-tier Dynamic Range Index — Ultra, High, Standard — gives you the audiophile shortlist at a glance.

SMART & MOOD PLAYLISTS

Rule-based playlists continuously rebuilt from your library: Hi-Res Vault, Deep Cuts, plus custom rules combining source, codec, bitrate, year, genre, mood, and recency.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Tap any artist on Now Playing for a bio sourced from Wikipedia and MusicBrainz, with hero photo, life-span, and origin.

PRIVACY BY DEFAULT

Meringo is local-first. Music metadata, encrypted server credentials, preferences, and cached artwork stay on your device. Audio fingerprints — mathematical signatures, never recordings — are sent anonymously to AcoustID for MusicBrainz IDs (opt-in). MusicBrainz, the Cover Art Archive, and Wikipedia are queried for editorial enrichment. Optional ListenBrainz scrobbling and Sentry crash reporting are off by default, consent-prompted on first run. Nothing tracked, nothing sold, no account required.

Built in Erie County, NY · support@meringo.app · The Field Guide inside Settings is a chapter-book manual to the engine.