Five is currently abandoned having served its purpose as a successful proof of concept and later fully developed by many other companies including Google and Amazon.

Five allows you to access your entire home music library from your Android powered phone. The system is currently functional, with active development preparing for a full-featured beta release soon.

If you're excited by this idea, please contact any of the team members to help out!

How it works

Five uses a client/server model where the server portion is hosted on a user's PC, collecting meta data information about music files stored there. The client portion runs on an Android-powered handset and connects to the server via the Internet. The client synchronizes meta data information about all music files organized by the server, but defers downloading the actual files themselves until the song is chosen for playback. At that time, the song is both played as a stream and simultaneously stored to the phone's storage card. Subsequent attempts to play this song will be served by local storage without the need to contact the server again.

Many careful tweaks and optimizations are in place to ensure that this experience works seamlessly and does not get in the way of the user. For instance, the cache size is automatically managed for the user to never fill the storage card completely. Songs that you haven't listened to in a while will automatically be deleted or truncated when the storage card is becoming full. The sync process includes only meta data information and is implemented with merge logic so that only the data that has actually changed between syncs is downloaded.

Overall, the design has been optimized to use the network as little as possible and to do so in such a way that doesn't "block" or pause the user interface. So, there's no waiting for a list of songs in an album to display when you click it: the meta data is already locally available to the phone.

Project Status

Alpha quality. There are numerous known bugs. The rewritten server currently lacks some user-friendliness basics like UPnP support and smooth desktop integration (like autostart options). The music player itself is missing robust playlist management, but is otherwise extremely capable.

Screenshots

Server setup on Linux:

Android client:

If you're curious about some of the music shown in these screenshots, check out my last.fm profile page to see more of what I like.