Intro¶

Shiva is, technically speaking, a RESTful API to your music collection. It indexes your music and exposes an API with the metadata of your files so you can then perform queries on it and organize it as you wish.

On a higher level, however, Shiva aims to be a free (as in freedom and beer) alternative to popular music services. It was born with the goal of giving back the control over their music and privacy to the users, protecting them from the industry’s obsession with control.

It’s not intended to compete directly with online music services, but to be an alternative that you can install and modify to your needs. You will own the music in your server. Nobody but you (or whoever you give permission) will be able to delete files or modify the files’ metadata to correct it when it’s wrong. And of course, it will all be available to any device with Internet connection.

You will also have a clean, RESTful API to your music without restrictions. You can grant access to your friends and let them use the service or, if they have their own Shiva instances, let both servers talk to each other and share the music transparently.

To sum up, Shiva is a distributed social network for sharing music.