WebDAV Music Player for iPhone and Mac: Stream Your NAS Library Without the Cloud

A WebDAV music player connects directly to your NAS or home server and streams your music files to your iPhone or Mac — no uploading your library to a third-party cloud, no monthly fee, and no re-encoding. If your collection lives on a Synology, TrueNAS, Nextcloud or any WebDAV-capable server, this is the cleanest way to carry thousands of albums in your pocket while the files stay on hardware you own.

Why stream over WebDAV instead of syncing?

A serious music library doesn't fit on a phone. Lossless rips run 20–40 MB per track, and a modest 500-album FLAC collection easily passes 150 GB. Syncing a subset means constantly managing what's on the device; uploading everything to a cloud locker means trusting a third party with your collection and usually paying forever.

WebDAV solves both problems. Your server exposes the library over HTTPS; the player browses it like a local folder, streams what you tap, and caches what you want offline. You keep one canonical library at home and listen from anywhere.

What actually matters in a WebDAV music player

Having tested this workflow extensively while building one, these are the capabilities that separate a usable player from a frustrating one:

• Format support beyond MP3. If you keep a NAS library, odds are it's FLAC or ALAC — and maybe APE, OGG or DSD. The player must decode these natively rather than choking or transcoding.
• Real metadata handling. Tags, embedded artwork and lyrics should be read from your files and organized into albums and artists — not a bare folder listing.
• Gapless playback. Live albums and classical recordings fall apart without it.
• Offline caching. Flights and subways happen. You should be able to pin albums for offline listening.
• A native app, not a web view. Battery life, background playback, AirPlay, lock-screen controls and Siri only work well in a real native app.

Setting it up (the short version)

1. Enable WebDAV on your server. On a Synology NAS, install the WebDAV Server package and enable HTTPS (port 5006 by default). On Nextcloud, WebDAV is already on — your files URL is the endpoint.
2. Add the server in your player. Enter the server URL, user name and password. A good player validates the connection and shows your folder tree immediately.
3. Browse and play. The player streams tracks on demand and reads tags and artwork as it goes. Pin anything you want available offline.

Where Trove fits

We're building Trove Player because we wanted exactly this workflow to feel first-class on both Apple platforms — and couldn't find one player that did it all. Trove is a native SwiftUI app for macOS and iOS that plays FLAC, ALAC, APE, DSD and a dozen other formats, streams directly from WebDAV and SMB shares, and adds the things collectors actually use: gapless playback, a 10-band EQ, and word-by-word synced lyrics. The core app is free, and Pro is a one-time purchase — never a subscription.

Trove is in active development. If you want a WebDAV music player that treats your NAS library as a first-class citizen on iPhone and Mac, join the waitlist on the homepage and we'll email you the moment it ships.

Frequently asked questions

Does streaming over WebDAV use a lot of data? A 16-bit FLAC streams at roughly 700–1000 kbps — about 0.4 GB per hour. On cellular, a player with offline caching lets you pre-download albums on WiFi instead.

Is WebDAV secure enough to expose to the internet? Over HTTPS with a strong password, WebDAV is as secure as any authenticated web service. Many users prefer to keep the server LAN-only and reach it through a VPN like Tailscale or WireGuard.

WebDAV or SMB — which should I use? SMB is fine on the local network; WebDAV works better across the internet because it's plain HTTPS. A player that supports both (as Trove does) lets you use SMB at home and WebDAV away.