A modular, user-sovereign engine for cultivating, curating, and circulating personal digital media collections — without surrendering ownership to any central platform.

Voltaic transforms the concept of a media library from a passive storage bucket into an active, intelligent ecosystem. Think of it less as a filing cabinet and more as a personal botanical garden for your digital artifacts: music, film, literature, podcasts, and ephemeral web content are all planted, tended, and harvested according to your rules. Every item is a seed; Voltaic is the soil, the water, and the sunlight.

The modern media landscape is fractured. Your music lives in one silo, your books in another, your films behind a half-dozen subscription paywalls. Voltaic offers a different philosophy: aggregate before you automate.

Built on the principle that every piece of media you legally possess should be under your direct stewardship, Voltaic provides a unified ingestion pipeline. You point it at a source — a downloaded album, a personal scan of a rare zine, a self-recorded podcast — and Voltaic absorbs, enriches, and indexes the item. The result is a single, searchable, self-hosted expanse of everything you own.

This is not a cloud service. This is a digital homestead. Voltaic runs on your hardware, behind your firewall, under your complete governance.

Voltaic is distributed as a single, self-contained binary with no external runtime dependencies beyond a modern operating system (Linux, macOS, Windows). The initial setup involves three stages: downloading the engine, pointing it at a storage directory, and running the first ingestion pass.

1. Choose a Root Volume — Select a directory or dedicated drive where Voltaic will maintain its database and index. We recommend a minimum of 20 GB for optimal performance, though the engine scales gracefully down to 512 MB for tiny collections.
2. Seed Your First Media — Drag-and-drop a folder of audio files, a PDF collection, or a video series into the designated ingest directory. Voltaic will automatically detect the media type and begin processing.
3. Access the Dashboard — Open your browser to the address displayed after launch (defaults to localhost:8080). The responsive UI adapts to desktop, tablet, and mobile viewports.

The engine requires no registration, no account, and no telemetry. Your library remains entirely yours.

Voltaic’s core differentiator is its curation engine — a rule-based system that helps you surface meaningful connections across your media without machine learning dependency or cloud calls.

You define “viewlets”: saved search filters that automatically populate a dynamic feed. Examples:

• “Show me all audio books I added in the last 30 days that I haven’t started.”
• “Find documentary films published between 2010 and 2020 with a runtime over 90 minutes.”
• “List every comic book from the ‘Silver Age’ tag where the file size exceeds 50 MB.”

These viewlets can be shared with other users on the same instance or exported as portable rule files (JSON) for import into a different Voltaic installation.

Voltaic employs a modular monolith pattern. The core runtime handles indexing, storage, and authentication. Plugins are loaded at startup from a designated plugins/ directory. Each plugin is a standalone executable or script that communicates with the core via a local Unix socket or Windows named pipe.

+-------------------+       +------------------+
|   Web Dashboard   | <--> |   Core Runtime   |
| (React, localized)|       | (Go, 5 MB binary)|
+-------------------+       +------------------+
          |                          |
          |   Unix Socket / Pipe     |
          v                          v
+-------------------+       +------------------+
|   Plugin Bridge   |       |   Storage Layer  |
| (Deno/Python/Rust)|       | (SQLite + FUSE)  |
+-------------------+       +------------------+

This separation means you can inspect, modify, or replace any layer without breaking the whole. If you prefer a different dashboard frontend — say, a terminal interface — you can write one against the same core API.

Voltaic is designed with the assumption that your data should never leave your network unless you explicitly approve it.

• All HTTP traffic to the dashboard is encrypted via a self-signed TLS certificate (configurable for Let’s Encrypt with custom domain).
• User passwords are hashed using Argon2id.
• Media files are never re-encoded or otherwise modified during ingestion; only metadata is written to the database.
• Plugin execution is sandboxed: plugins have no access to the filesystem beyond a designated plugin_scratch/ directory unless you grant broader permissions manually.
• Telemetry: zero. The binary includes no tracking, no analytics, no phone-home calls.

The Plugin Bridge System allows anyone with basic scripting skills to add functionality. A few community-developed examples:

To write a plugin, create an executable that accepts JSON on stdin and writes JSON to stdout. The full plugin API specification is available in the repository documents.

The dashboard interface is fully localized, and date/number formatting adapts to the user’s locale. Adding a new language requires only a JSON file of translation strings. Community contributions are welcome and credited in the interface.

Currently supported locales: en, es, zh, de, fr, pt, ar, hi, ja, ru, it, ko.

Voltaic is released under the MIT License. You are free to use, modify, distribute, and sublicense the software for any purpose — personal, academic, or commercial — provided you retain the original copyright notice.

Voltaic is a tool for organizing and managing media files that you lawfully possess. The developers do not condone the ingestion, storage, or distribution of copyrighted material without proper authorization. Users are solely responsible for ensuring that their use of Voltaic complies with applicable copyright laws and terms of service for any third-party content.

The software is provided “as is,” without warranty of any kind, express or implied. In no event shall the authors be liable for any claim, damages, or other liability arising from the use of the software.

Contributions are welcome in the form of code, documentation, translations, or plugin development. Please review the CONTRIBUTING.md file before submitting a pull request.

• Peer-to-peer library sync without a central server.
• Hardware transcoding support for real-time streaming to mobile devices.
• Natural language query interface (text-based search via grammar parser, not LLM).
• Embedded metadata extraction for rare and non-standard file formats (e.g., multimedia files from 1990s CD-ROMs).
• Community plugin marketplace with curated safety reviews.

Voltaic: cultivate your collection, command your content.