Subster

Subster

Music timeline party game that plays songs from your own Subsonic library

Rouven Volkmann Online Media Player Party Game

Screenshots

Screenshot of Subster Screenshot of Subster Screenshot of Subster Screenshot of Subster

Description

Subster is a pass-and-play music party game for your own music collection. A mystery song plays blind — no title, no artist, no year. Your job: place it on your timeline by guessing whether it came out before or after the songs you already hold. Guess right and you keep the card. First to 10 cards wins. It works like the card game Hitster, but with no physical cards, no accounts, and no backend: the app talks directly to your Subsonic-compatible music server (Navidrome, Airsonic, Gonic, …). Features

  • Plays your music — connects to any Subsonic-compatible server
  • Save several servers and switch between them; each remembers its own library and playlist
  • Smart deck building: songs are ranked by real-world recognizability (Deezer popularity + a bundled canon of chart hits), so the deck feels fair instead of obscure
  • Original release years via MusicBrainz and Wikidata — a remaster from 2015 still counts as its original year
  • Tokens: skip a song, bet against another player's placement and steal the card, or earn a bonus for naming title and artist
  • Difficulty presets, year range and genre filters, clip length options
  • Keeps playing with the screen off (lock-screen media controls)
  • English and German UI
Privacy No accounts, no ads, no analytics. To rank songs and resolve years, only artist/title of library songs are sent to the public Deezer, MusicBrainz and Wikidata APIs — nothing about you or your server. The "Online metadata" setting has three levels: full, "No Deezer" (drops the only proprietary service but keeps MusicBrainz/Wikidata years), and offline, where only your own server is contacted. You need a Subsonic-compatible music server to play. Your server credentials never leave the device, and are stored as a salted token rather than the password itself — except for servers that only accept legacy authentication, where the app tells you that the password has to be kept.

What’s new (0.1.8)

• Much more accurate release years: a song is dated by its first official release, so a bootleg or promo pressing no longer makes a card years too old
• Servers that never expose MusicBrainz IDs — Nextcloud Music always — now use the album to identify the recording, fixing wrong years and missing songs
• A song whose year can't be established is left out rather than dealt with a wrong one
• Failed MusicBrainz requests are retried; a slow Wikidata lookup no longer holds up the deck

Anti-features

Properties of this app that are worth knowing about before installing.

  • NonFreeNet
  • TetheredNet

Versions

Version Date Size Requires Android Download
0.1.8 current
faef4b22240c87c6…
2026-08-05 3.3 MB API 22
0.1.6
db3c9d631c04341e…
2026-07-31 3.3 MB API 22

Permissions

What the app asks the system for. Android only grants sensitive access after you confirm it.

  • Internet accessSend and receive data over the internet.
  • Foreground serviceKeep running in the background, visible in the status bar.
  • FOREGROUND_SERVICE_MEDIA_PLAYBACK
  • subster.DYNAMIC_RECEIVER_NOT_EXPORTED_PERMISSION

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