Cyberpunk Labs & Rogue Projects

Sep 19, 2026

Veilamp

A Winamp inspired audio player for the modern age

Veilamp

Your music. Your friends. Nobody in between.

Veilamp is a privacy-first desktop music player that plays your local library and streams it directly to trusted friends over a peer-to-peer network — no cloud, no accounts, no middleman. It takes the nostalgic spirit of Winamp and rebuilds it on a modern, audiophile-grade audio engine and a fully decentralized sharing layer.

I designed and built Veilamp end to end: the Rust audio and networking core, the cross-platform desktop app, a headless server edition, the marketing site, and the signed Linux package repositories behind it.

What it does

Plays your own files, properly. Point it at your folders and it scans tags and cover art into a local library you can search, sort, and organize into playlists. It does true gapless playback, resumes exactly where you left off, browses by album and artist, imports and exports M3U playlists, handles CUE-sheet album rips, and even plays and rips audio CDs. Lossless and lossy formats — FLAC, ALAC, WAV, MP3, AAC, Vorbis, and DSD — all play side by side, untouched.

Sounds the way the files do. Under the hood is a serious DSP chain: a bit-perfect, exclusive-mode output path that drives your DAC at each track's native rate (including native DSD / DoP), a 10-band and fully parametric EQ with AutoEQ import, convolution-based headphone and room correction, ReplayGain loudness leveling, crossfeed, crossfade, and dither — every stage bypassable and shown in a live signal-path readout.

Shares with friends, not with the internet. This is the part I'm proudest of. Veilamp's networking half runs on Veilid, an encrypted peer-to-peer network. Your identity is a cryptographic keypair — no email, no phone number, no account. You add a friend from a single pasted code, flip a Share toggle on a playlist, and they can stream those tracks directly from your machine over private routes. Everything else stays invisible. Access is gated by an explicit allowlist, streaming is progressive (it plays while the rest downloads ahead), and removing a friend promptly cuts off their access.

Does more than your library, too. Built-in internet radio and podcast directories let you discover and subscribe to stations and shows, all played through the same queue. Time-synced lyrics scroll alongside the track, and you can scrobble what you play to ListenBrainz or Last.fm.

Looks however you want. A neon-glass shell ships with multiple layouts (including an authentic Winamp Classic skin), swappable color palettes, seven beat-reactive visualizers with a fullscreen mode, a miniplayer, a sleep timer, global search, and a JavaScript plugin API for people who want to extend or re-skin it. Hardware media keys and the desktop's now-playing applet work out of the box.

Runs headless, too. A separate server edition ships as a hardened systemd service with its own user and config file, so you can run your whole library always-on from a NAS, home server, or VPS — with mDNS discovery on your LAN and Veilid failover when you're away from home.

Under the hood

Veilamp is a Rust workspace with a Tauri 2 + SvelteKit desktop shell:

  • veilamp-core — the UI-free library, player, and visualizer engine (SQLite storage, folder scanning, a rodio/Symphonia decode and DSP pipeline, and an FFT analyzer), unit-tested without any audio hardware.
  • veilamp-net — the Veilid half: a persistent VLD0 identity, friend codes, signed friends-only catalog and streaming requests, and a concurrent prefetch-window streamer that turns a latency-bound private route into smooth, seekable playback.
  • veilamp-server — the headless LAN/off-LAN server, packaged as a service.

It's cross-platform (Linux, macOS, and Windows, on both x86_64 and ARM64) and distributed through GPG-signed APT and DNF repositories I build and host myself, alongside AppImage, .dmg, .exe, and Arch packages.

See it / try it

Veilamp is in active development.