Hallucinate

Version 0.9.9.6 · October 17, 2026

A fast desktop music player for the music you own.

Soft, liquid and lit by your album covers. Instant search, gapless playback, visualizers that move with the music, and every listen remembered. Entirely yours: no account, no cloud, no ads.

Download for free All platforms

Linux · Windows · macOS  ·  free and open source (MIT)

Hallucinate logo: a vinyl record melting into a dreamy purple sky

Everything your library deserves

Built for people with a folder full of music they love, from a few albums to a quarter of a million songs.

A look of its own

Frosted glass over colours that drift from the album that's playing, a floating player, and a seek bar drawn from each song's own waveform. Eighteen themes, any accent colour, or a theme of your own.

Now Playing, full screen

The cover, or the record sliding out of its sleeve, over Liquid, Aurora, Nebula, Halo and Waves visualizers that move with the music in the cover's colours.

Browse like a record shelf

Album and artist pages with liner notes, a colour wall that sorts every cover round the colour wheel, a timeline by decade and year, and your own folders.

Every listen remembered

A searchable history by day with a year-long heatmap and streaks, a recap of every week, month and year, and what you played on this day in past years.

Gapless and honest

True gapless playback (CUE sheet albums too), ReplayGain measured where tags are missing, headphone correction from AutoEQ and crossfeed, and a signal path readout that tells you when the sound is untouched.

Stations, podcasts, smart playlists

Internet radio and podcasts when you want them (off until you switch them on), similar songs from your own library when the queue runs out, and playlists that build themselves from rules. Coming from another player? Your play counts, ratings and playlists come with you.

Looks after your library

Instant search across a quarter of a million songs, Ctrl+K for anything, Ctrl/Shift+click to act on many songs at once, and a health check that finds missing covers, tags and duplicates, with a fix next to each. Album tags can come from MusicBrainz in one search.

Private by design

Your library, playlists and listening history stay on your computer, and there's no telemetry. Scrobbling to Last.fm or ListenBrainz and Discord are strictly opt-in, and offline mode turns off every internet connection with one switch. Back it all up to one file and restore it anywhere.

Take a look

Every screenshot here is rendered straight from the app.

The home screen cycling through the Hallucinate, Dark, Light, Catppuccin Mocha and Nord themes
Switch themes live, no restart needed.
Now Playing in vinyl mode over the Liquid visualizer
Vinyl mode
Home: a random album, a listening heatmap and library facts
Home is about your library
Now Playing: a large album cover over an aurora visualizer tinted by the cover's colours
Now Playing
An album page with the cover, liner notes and tracks
Album pages with liner notes
An album's right-click menu with play, queue, playlist, edit, remove and trash
Right-click any album
The Edit album dialog with tags and cover
Edit tags and covers
Album covers ordered round the colour wheel
The colour wall
Albums by decade and year on a timeline
The timeline
The listening history grouped by day with a year-long heatmap
Every listen, by day
The Nebula visualizer filling the page
Visualizers in your cover's colours
The library health page with a score and checks
Library health, with fixes
The command palette matching pages, commands and music
Ctrl+K for everything
The queue panel filled with similar songs by radio mode
Radio mode keeps the queue going
The smart playlist rule editor with a live preview
Smart playlist rules
An artist page with listening facts and most played songs
Artist pages
A month of listening summed up: minutes, top artists and songs
Your month, summed up
Several songs selected with the selection bar's actions
Act on many songs at once
The folder view with artist folders
Your own folders
Home in the Trans Pride theme
Pride themes
Saved internet radio stations
Internet radio, if you want it
Podcasts with Up next, Continue listening and new episodes
Podcasts, with Up next
A podcast's page with its episodes and show settings
A show's page
The Halo visualizer: a glowing ring that swells with the music
The Halo visualizer
Settings in searchable sections
Searchable settings

Download Hallucinate 0.9.9.6

Free forever. Pick your platform.

Windows

Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Media keys and the system media overlay work out of the box.

Download installer

Not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may warn: choose More info → Run anyway. A portable zip is also available.

macOS

A native app for Apple silicon Macs (M1 and newer).

Download for Mac

Unzip and move Hallucinate to Applications. It isn't notarized yet, so if macOS blocks it the first time, allow it under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.

Other options: install with pip · all releases and checksums · source code

What's new in 0.9.9.6

Fixed

  • Saving genres for a few hundred albums ("Find all online") seemed not to work. Every song was copied whole to write its tag, so it took a very long time, in the background with nothing to show for it. Meanwhile the library rescanned over and over, and finding again turned up the same albums. Now: - When the new tags fit in the room a file keeps for them (the usual case), only that room is rewritten, with no copy. A file that has to grow is still written in a copy that then replaces it. - Library health shows "Saving genres to your files: 34 of 221 albums", with Stop, and the count of albums without a genre goes down as it goes. Find all waits until the saving is done. - One album that can't be written no longer stops the rest. - Hallucinate's own tag saves no longer set off a library rescan.
  • ReplayGain measuring gives a song longer before counting it as unreadable, so a busy disk doesn't make songs fail.

Full changelog