Local Library

Local Library

QBZ can scan and play your local music files alongside Qobuz streaming content, all from the same interface. The Local Library section in the sidebar surfaces four browsing tabs — Albums, Artists, Folders and Tracks — each tuned for a different way of looking at the same underlying catalog.

You don't need a Qobuz account to use it. QBZ runs in a guest, local-only mode until you sign in, so you can point it at your music folders and use it as a standalone local player with no login and no internet connection.

Adding Music Folders

1. Go to Settings > Local Library
2. Click Add Folder
3. Select the directory containing your music files
4. QBZ will scan and index the folder

You can add multiple folders. QBZ watches for changes and re-scans automatically.

Browsing Your Library

The Local Library view exposes four tabs over the same indexed content, shown as underline tabs with a live count badge on each.

Tab	What it shows	Best for
Tracks	Every indexed track in a flat list	Hunting a song by title across the whole library
Folders	Albums grouped by their on-disk parent directory (Flat) or the full filesystem hierarchy (Tree)	Browsing the way your collection is organised on disk; opening ad-hoc folders
Albums	Every album, grouped by album metadata regardless of where the files live	A clean discography view independent of folder layout
Artists	Every artist, with their albums and track counts	Discography-by-artist browsing

Tracks

Full track listing with search, filters, multi-select, sort, alphabetical jumpnav, and the standard track row affordances (play, queue actions, edit tags, etc.). This view is source-of-truth flat: it doesn't try to group anything.

Folders

The Folders tab groups albums by their parent directory on disk, not by their metadata. If you have two albums tagged with the same name in different folders, Folders shows them as two distinct entries — one per folder. If your collection is organised by artist or by year on disk, Folders mirrors that organisation faithfully.

Folders has two display modes you can toggle from the inline Flat / Tree switch above the tabs:

• Flat — one card per album-folder, alphabetised, with the same card grid as the Albums tab.
• Tree — a resizable filesystem rail on the left and the selected folder's contents on the right. Useful when your collection is nested deeply (e.g. Genre / Artist / Album) or when you want to play "everything under this directory" recursively.

In Tree mode you can collapse-all, search folder names, multi-select via checkboxes, and trigger bulk actions (queue, add to playlist, etc.) on the selection.

Open content without adding to library

Sometimes you want to play a folder without committing it to your library — a downloaded album you haven't decided to keep, an external drive plugged in for a single listen, a friend's USB stick. The Open Folder button in the Folders > Tree toolbar lets you point QBZ at any directory on disk and play it directly:

1. Switch to Folders > Tree
2. Click the Open Folder button in the tree toolbar
3. Pick the directory in the system file picker
4. The right pane shows the folder's albums with cover art, disc structure and per-track quality badges

Nothing is written to your library database. The session lives in memory and stays on screen between app launches as long as the directory and files remain accessible. It clears when you:

• Press the Clear session broom icon on the pane header
• Open a different ad-hoc folder (replaces the current one)
• Navigate to another tree folder or library album
• Lose access to the underlying directory or files (e.g. unmounted drive)

Some library-bound actions don't apply to this mode and are surfaced as disabled rather than removed: Add to favourites, Add to playlist and Track info stay visible but inert. Playback, queue, casting and bit-perfect output work exactly as for indexed library tracks. CUE-sheet single-file albums are supported (FLAC / MP3 / M4A / ALAC / WAV / AIFF only — APE and raw BIN aren't decoded by QBZ's player).

Albums

The Albums tab groups by album metadata (album + album_artist tags), independent of folder layout. Two copies of the same album in different folders collapse to one Albums entry. Use this when you want a clean, normalised view of "what albums do I own", regardless of how they're stored.

The differences vs. Folders matter when:

• The same album exists in multiple folders (e.g. a CD rip and a high-res redownload) — Folders shows both, Albums shows one.
• Tracks of one album are split across folders for any reason — Folders sees fragments, Albums sees the unified album.
• You changed your folder organisation but not your tags — Folders reorganises with you, Albums stays put.

Album identity: by metadata or by folder

The Albums tab has its own Albums by switch (in the tab toolbar, and mirrored in Settings > Local Library > Albums view) that decides what counts as "one album":

• Albums by metadata (default) — groups by the album + album artist tags. A compilation with mixed track artists renders as one card, and multi-disc boxes merge into a single album.
• Albums by folder — treats each album-folder on disk as one album, closer to what the Folders tab shows.

The choice is persisted per user and applies live with no rescan. The scanner reads album / Album Artist / date across all of a file's tags (primary first), so repeatedly-retagged files whose album name only lives in a secondary tag no longer fall back to a folder-name album with the wrong year or land in Various Artists.

The Albums tab also has a Group by control (No grouping / Group by letter / Group by artist) and a grid/list toggle for how the cards are laid out — separate from the album-identity switch above.

Artists

Artist listing with album and track counts. Selecting an artist opens their albums; track-level actions and queue affordances mirror the rest of the library.

Search and Filters

The search bar in the Local Library view filters by track title, artist name and album name. Additional filters narrow by quality, format and source — local files, Qobuz offline cache entries, and Plex-backed library items (when those integrations are enabled) each appear as separate filter facets.

CUE Sheets

QBZ supports CUE sheet parsing for albums stored as a single audio file with a .cue file describing the track layout.

• Place the .cue file alongside the audio file
• QBZ splits it into individual virtual tracks automatically
• Each track appears as its own row in the library

CUE virtual tracks all share the underlying audio file at playback time, with seek offsets handled internally so per-track times display correctly.

Multi-Disc Albums

QBZ automatically groups multi-disc albums based on disc number metadata. Albums with multiple discs display disc separators in the track listing.

Tag Editor

QBZ includes a built-in tag editor for local files:

1. Right-click a local track and select Edit Tags
2. Modify the metadata fields
3. Save your changes

Sidecar storage: Tag edits are stored in a sidecar database rather than modifying your original files. Your source files are never touched. If you prefer to write the tags back to the audio file itself, the editor offers a direct-write mode. Direct-write is the only persistence mode available for ad-hoc folders opened via Open Folder, since those have no sidecar database row.

Supported Formats

The scanner indexes these extensions:

Format	Extensions	Notes
FLAC	.flac	Lossless, up to 192 kHz / 24-bit
ALAC / AAC	.m4a	Apple Lossless and AAC in an MP4 container
WAV	.wav	Uncompressed PCM
AIFF	.aiff, .aif	Apple uncompressed format
MP3	.mp3	MPEG Layer 3
DSD	.dsf, .dff	Direct Stream Digital — DSD64 / 128 / 256 (see Audio Configuration for the Convert / DoP / Native playback modes)
APE	.ape	Monkey's Audio — recognised and indexed, but not currently decodable by QBZ's player

DSD files are handled by the in-house qbz-dsd demuxers and carry a DSD64/128/256 quality badge; SACD-style 5.1 rips are stereo-downmixed on playback in Convert mode. APE files are catalogued so the rest of your library stays complete, but they won't play until a decoder lands.

QBZ reads metadata using the lofty library: ID3v2 (MP3), Vorbis Comments (FLAC), RIFF INFO (WAV) and MP4/M4A atoms (ALAC/AAC), plus ID3 tags and artwork for DSF/DFF. Title, artist, album, album artist, track number, disc number, genre, year, embedded artwork, duration, sample rate and bit depth are all extracted at scan time.

Playback

Local files play through the same audio pipeline as Qobuz streams:

• Same audio backend (PipeWire, ALSA, ALSA Direct, PulseAudio)
• Same bit-perfect capabilities
• Same sample rate switching
• Same gapless playback
• Same queue, shuffle, and repeat controls

You can mix local files and Qobuz streams in the same queue. Local albums and tracks can also be added to Mixtapes and Collections — Mixtapes hold albums, tracks and playlists; Collections are album shelves, so only albums are valid Collection items.