1-bit bridge

At some point I realised the app was only half of the story. The bridge is the other half, and the two complement each other.

The bridge is a small server you run at home, next to your music, on a Mac, a Windows PC, a Linux box or a Raspberry Pi. It serves your library to 1-bit over HTTPS.

The app can also read an SMB share directly, but SMB is a decades-old file-sharing protocol meant for the local network. The bridge was made for the app. It indexes the library up front, so the first sync takes seconds rather than minutes, and you can reach it from outside the house over Tailscale or WireGuard.

It sends the files as they are, with no transcoding, so what the app plays is the same bit-exact audio it would get from a share. It can make upscaled copies if you ask it to, but that’s off by default and the originals stay as they were.

Since version 0.2.2 it can also be a player. Plug a USB DAC into the Linux box that runs it and the bridge plays your library to that DAC, while 1-bit on your iPhone picks the music. The audio goes from the bridge’s disk to the DAC and never through the phone. For now it plays PCM. DSD comes in a later version.

It’s free to run, and the source is public on GitHub under the FSL-1.1-MIT licence, which turns each release into plain MIT two years after it ships. Setup takes about ten minutes, and everything you need is on the bridge’s own page on 1-bit.app.