One server, every room, any screen.
Yamsap has three moving parts and the rest follows from them. Nothing here needs configuring by hand, but it helps to know the shape of the thing before you install it.
Three moving parts.
One server
The computer running yamsap. It reads your music folder, works out what every record is, and sends the audio out. Everything yamsap knows lives here, and it only has to be awake when you want music.
Any remote
A browser on any machine, or the app on your iPhone. Remotes show the library and press the buttons. They hold nothing, so opening yamsap somewhere new costs nothing.
One zone per speaker
Every speaker, computer, phone and browser is a zone with its own queue. Send a record to one, or group the house and let the rooms play together.
The server is the only piece that has to be running. Turn every phone and laptop in the house off and the record in the kitchen keeps playing, because the kitchen speaker is being fed by the server and not by the phone that started it.
That does not mean a machine that never sleeps. A laptop you open when you feel like listening is a perfectly good server. Leaving something on all day matters only if you want the house served while nobody is at the keyboard, or want to reach your library from somewhere else.
What happens when you first run it.
The first scan of a large library takes a while. Everything after it is quiet and incremental.
- 01
You point it at a folder
Whatever you already have. Yamsap opens it read-only and reads every file it finds, in place, without moving or renaming a thing.
- 02
It works out what the records are
Your tags come first. Where they are thin, yamsap matches the release against public music databases and fills in the artwork, the credits, the label and the release date, in its own database rather than in your files.
- 03
It finds the speakers
Speakers on the network turn up on their own, and every browser that opens the library offers itself as somewhere to play. Enable the ones you want and they become zones.
- 04
It listens, overnight
Once the library is settled, yamsap starts working through the audio itself so it can build mixes and radio out of what your records actually sound like.
Zones, and what a zone actually is.
A zone is one place music can come out. It owns its own queue, its own position and its own volume, and it keeps them across a restart of the server or a reboot of the speaker.
That is why you can leave a record half finished in the kitchen, start something else in the office, and come back to the kitchen the next morning to find it exactly where you left it. Audio leaves the server at the file’s own sample rate, so nothing is quietly resampled to make the network’s life easier.
- Outputs
- Speakers, desktops, phones, browsers
- Queues
- One per zone, kept across restarts
- Rates
- Native, up to 24 bit
- Grouping
- Whole house, in sync
When you leave the house.
Turn on remote access and your server takes an address of its own on the internet. The same library opens at the office, at a friend’s place, on hotel wifi, and music plays on the device in your hand rather than the speakers back home.
The iPhone app carries the same thing into CarPlay, with recently played and recently added sitting on the home screen as artwork. Remote access is off until you switch it on.
Hear when yamsap is ready
Yamsap is $6.99 a month, or $5.99 paid yearly, after a 14 day trial. Builds for macOS, Linux and iOS are close. Join the waitlist and you’ll hear when yours is ready.
Check availability and join the waitlist