docsGetting started
When you have both
requires Solomorph+ or the 30-day trial
Requires Solomorph+ or the 30-day trial
This page only matters once local files are on — see Music on this phone first if you haven’t turned that on yet.
Why this page exists at all
The in-app tour has twelve steps and none of them mention this. Step 7, “Sources,” is the closest it gets, and it’s generic. This page and the last one are the only place any of this is explained.
The union, not a third source
With Solomorph+ or the trial, every server you’ve connected is browsed as one library, search included. The phone isn’t something you switch to alongside that; it rides with the servers as one more source, always present. A listener with 1,000 local tracks and a server holding 3,000 different ones sees 4,000 songs, not one set or the other.
One record, one entry
A record you own in both places is listed once, not twice. The match is on artist and album, normalized for case, punctuation, and a leading “The” — tracks also match on title, with a 5-second tolerance on duration.
The matching is deliberately biased toward not matching. Matching too loosely would hide music you own, silently and unrecoverably; matching too tightly just shows a record twice, which is untidy but obvious. So a near-miss is left alone — you may occasionally see the same album listed separately from your phone and your server. That’s the safe failure, on purpose.
Which copy you actually get
Neither copy wins outright — they split the job. The server keeps the library entry: it’s the fuller record, with the metadata and artwork the server has already gathered for it. The phone’s file wins playback, because it needs no network. A local file is treated as exactly what it is: a download you already have.
The phone's copy always wins playback — even a worse one
There’s no comparison of bitrate or quality behind this. If the same record lives on your phone at a lower quality than your server’s copy, the phone still plays — silently, with nothing flagging that a better version exists elsewhere. That’s the real cost of treating local files as downloads you already have. The on-device mark on that row is what makes it legible; it doesn’t mean “the best version,” it means “this one needs no network.”
The same artist, listed twice sometimes
Dedup happens at the album level, not the artist level. If an artist has some albums only on your phone and others only on your server, that artist can still appear twice in your artist list.
This isn’t an oversight — merging those two rows into one before merging the discographies behind them is exactly the kind of mistake the matching system exists to prevent: a merged artist row has to open a discography spanning both sources, and today opening an artist only ever asks one. Doing that safely means unioning the albums first and merging the row second, and that second half hasn’t shipped yet.
The on-device mark means one thing
Whether a track arrived because you tapped download or because it was already sitting on your phone, it gets the same mark: this plays without the network. One rule, one meaning — not two marks that could someday disagree with each other.