Support & FAQ. Support & FAQ.

LOUD plays music files from a folder on your device. That is the whole model, and it means one honest question comes before everything else: how do the files get there? This page answers that first, then the rest of the app.

Getting your music onto the phone

The shape is always the same, whatever route you take:

• 1. Put your music files in a folder on the device — subfolders are fine, LOUD reads the whole tree.
• 2. Open LOUD, go to THE DIALS (the badge on Now Playing) and tap PICK FOLDER.
• 3. That's it. LOUD reads the tags and the cover art out of the files themselves. You only pick the folder once — new files you add later are found automatically.

The nicest route: LocalSend, over your own Wi-Fi

LocalSend is a free, open-source app that works like AirDrop between anything — Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iPhone and iPad. It sends files directly over your own Wi-Fi network: no cable, no account, no cloud in the middle. If you like why LOUD exists, you will like why LocalSend exists.

• Install LocalSend on your computer and on your phone (it is on every store, free).
• Open it on both, select your music folder or files on the computer, and send. The two devices find each other on the network by themselves.
• On Android: received files land in a folder you can choose in LocalSend's settings. Point LOUD at it.
• On iPhone / iPad: received files are visible in the Files app. Move them into one folder under On My iPhone, then pick that folder in LOUD.

By cable, to Android

• From Windows: plug the phone in, choose File transfer on the phone's USB notification, and it appears in Explorer like a drive. Copy your music folder over — the Music folder is the conventional place, but any folder works.
• From macOS: a Mac needs a helper for Android's file-transfer protocol. OpenMTP is free, open-source and the best of them; Google's own Android File Transfer also works. Plug in, choose File transfer on the phone, copy the folder.
• From Linux: plug in, choose File transfer, and your file manager mounts the phone directly — MTP support is built into GNOME, KDE and friends. Copy the folder.

Copying from a Mac leaves hidden housekeeping files behind (._Track.mp3, .DS_Store). LOUD ignores them, so you do not have to clean up after Finder.

To iPhone and iPad

LOUD has its own folder on the phone — it appears as On My iPhone → LOUD in the Files app, and in Finder or iTunes when the phone is plugged in. Anything you put there, LOUD can play:

• By cable, from a Mac: plug in, open the phone in Finder, go to the Files tab, and drag your music folder onto LOUD.
• By cable, from Windows: the same via iTunes → your phone → File Sharing → LOUD.
• LocalSend (above) from any computer: receive on the phone, then move the files into On My iPhone → LOUD with the Files app.
• From a Mac: AirDrop. Share from Finder, choose Save to Files, pick the LOUD folder.

Then open LOUD → THE DIALS → PICK FOLDER and choose the LOUD folder itself (or any other folder you used — anywhere in Files works). One note for the cautious: music in LOUD's folder stays out of device backups, like everything else the app touches — your computer's copy is the keeper.

What files does it play?

MP3 and FLAC are first-class: tags, album art, year, genre — read out of the files themselves, by LOUD's own reader. Other common formats (M4A/AAC, OGG, Opus, WAV) play on Android; iPhone and iPad play what the system decodes, which covers MP3, FLAC, M4A/AAC and WAV but not OGG or Opus.

A track shows the wrong artist, or none

LOUD shows what is actually written inside your files — and files in the wild are often half-tagged. Open the track on Now Playing and tap the ⓘ button: THE TAGS shows every field in the file and where each value came from — the tag, the old ID3v1 trailer, or the file name. If a field is missing there, it is missing in the file.

Fix the file with any tag editor (Kid3 and MusicBrainz Picard are free and excellent), copy it back, and LOUD picks up the change.

I moved my music and LOUD can't find it

If tracks say FILE NOT FOUND, the folder LOUD was pointed at no longer holds the files. Go to THE DIALS and pick the new folder — or hit RESCAN if the files are back in the old place.

Playlists — the posters

Playlists in LOUD are posters: make one on the POSTERS screen, name it, and add anything — single tracks, whole albums, artists, genres, even another poster. The + ADD TRACKS picker has a tab for each.

On Android, posters export and import as M3U8 — the plain-text playlist format VLC, foobar2000 and most players read. The file uses paths relative to your music folder, so it survives a new phone, a reinstall, and being read by something that is not LOUD. Export lives on the POSTERS screen. (iPhone and iPad: not yet — it is on the list.)

The queue

UP NEXT (swipe up from Now Playing) shows exactly what will play, in order — honestly, including shuffle. + ADD TRACKS appends anything to the end; EDIT reorders, removes, or clears the rest. Adding the same track twice is allowed on purpose: a queue is a plan, and "play it again after" is a thing people mean.

The EQ and the spectrum

The five-band EQ lives behind THE DIALS — real filters in the audio path, with presets, not a decoration. The 8-bit spectrum opens by tapping the little bars on the album sleeve: twelve columns of chunky cells that jump to the music, measured from the audio actually playing. Neither needs any permission.

Finding things in a big library

Tracks, albums, artists and genres all file under yellow letter squares — tap JUMP TO and hit a letter to leap there. The library reads whole folders, subfolders included, up to 2,000 tracks.

The home-screen widget (Android)

Long-press your home screen → Widgets → LOUD. It scales from a one-row bar (play, next, what's playing) up to a half-screen card with the cover and the queue. iPhone and iPad don't have it yet.

New phone? It starts empty, and that is deliberate

LOUD keeps itself out of every backup channel — cloud backup and phone-to-phone transfer both — because your library is nobody's business, including ours. So a new phone starts blank: copy your music over (see the top of this page), pick the folder, and export your posters as M3U8 from the old phone to carry them across.

Permissions, and the one it does not have

The Android app asks for exactly three permissions, all of them about playing audio in the background — and it does not hold the network permission at all, so the process cannot open a socket. Nothing is collected and nothing is transmitted. The precise version of that promise is the privacy policy; the reason behind it is the Why.

Known gaps in the beta

• iPhone / iPad: playlist export and import are not built yet, and there is no widget.
• No search yet — the letter squares are the fast route for now.
• Crossfade and gapless playback are not built yet.

Something else?

Write to loud@grunt.be — bug reports from real libraries are the most useful thing you can send. If a track looks wrong, a screenshot of its THE TAGS sheet says more than a paragraph.