Your music, your space

ECHO is in Early Access. Base Edition is enough for everyday listening, including your library, playlists, lyrics, regular Workshop skins, EQ, ReplayGain, headphone correction and ECHO SRC. Pro is optional for advanced processing, PCM-to-SDM, Connect / ECHO Link, Laboratory and desktop mascots.

About This Software

Your music, your own little world

ECHO is a desktop player built around your local music. Deep customization is its defining feature, so there can be a little to learn. If you get stuck, feel free to ask our community! Just remember: we do not provide a music streaming service.

From playing a favorite album to choosing themes and lyric scenes or adjusting the sound for your headphones and speakers, ECHO brings these experiences into one music space. Simply press play, or explore and make ECHO your own.

ECHO is still in Early Access

Features, interface, performance and device compatibility are still being refined. You may encounter bugs or unfinished experiences. We will keep improving ECHO through updates and use your feedback to guide development. Thank you for supporting us during Early Access. Suggestions are always welcome in our community.

We warmly encourage you to join our community!

Library organization, musical connections and local discovery

From a single album to years of collecting, browse by track, album, artist, genre or folder, and explore the connections within your collection.

• Find your next track in your collection: Local recommendations use musical relationships and listening history to suggest related tracks and rediscover old favorites you have not played in a while.

• Organize your library in detail: Adjust album and artist assignments, merge artist aliases, group different editions of an album, and review duplicates and quality issues.

• Bring your formats together: Play FLAC, WAV, MP3, AAC, ALAC, OGG, Opus and APE, along with CUE tracks and DSD files.

Scanning and automatic analysis only read original media. Results stay in the library or cache; writing tags or embedding artwork and lyrics requires an explicit action from you.

Give every song its own visual stage

Customize the lyrics page so text and effects accompany your music. Expand it further through the Workshop.

• Different lyric stages: Explore panoramic, blended-cover and record-player layouts, with animated backgrounds such as particle formations, particle seas, flip-tile walls and cover ridges.

• Lyrics that look the way you want: Customize both desktop lyrics and the lyrics page, choosing the appearance yourself.

• Bring lyrics to your stream: Use lyrics in an OBS browser source for your own livestreams and recordings.

Keep music and controls within reach

• Global quick search: Open a separate small window with a shortcut, search tracks, artists or albums, browse the queue and playlists, and choose with the arrow keys and Enter.

• Controls for your setup: Use the mini player, desktop lyrics, system media controls (SMTC / MPRIS) and the Windows taskbar player. The command palette also offers quick queue management, volume adjustment and a sleep timer.

• Wallpaper Engine support: Load your Wallpaper Engine library to customize ECHO's video wallpaper, or bring ECHO lyrics onto your desktop.

• UltraLight playback: Unload the main interface while keeping background playback, tray controls and shortcuts. Quick search works without reopening the full interface.

• Game mode: Automatically switch ECHO to a lighter mode while playing other Steam games to reduce memory use. Optional automatic volume adjustment can also change ECHO's volume when another game is detected.

Workshop: shape ECHO your way

Change colors and layouts, or give lyrics and music a new stage. Subscribe to, enable and combine Steam Workshop creations, or start making your own.

• Themes and full skins: Change colors, fonts and controls; full skins can also rearrange pages and playback controls.

• Lyric scenes and visualizers: Choose different lyric layouts, backgrounds and music visuals, combining creations that support independent use.

• Functional plugins: Expand what you can do through commands, tool panels and actions. Plugins declare permissions, and you decide whether to enable and authorize them.

• From using to creating: An in-app creation workspace, public Workshop SDK, templates, documentation, local previews and validation tools help you make your first creation.

Enable subscribed items in ECHO to use them; disable them or return to the built-in appearance whenever you like. Regular themes, skins, lyric scenes and visualizers do not require Pro. Creations using Pro capabilities still require the corresponding entitlement. See each third-party item's description for its functionality and compatibility.

Inside the player: the technology behind the experience

ECHO separates its library service, native audio pipeline and interface, giving library management, audio processing and presentation their own roles as your collection and listening setup grow.

• C# library service + C++ native audio engine: Echo Core manages library data and scanning. Native Audio Host handles decoding, PCM, DSP, output and the playback clock. The interface provides controls and presentation.

• Large libraries, loaded on demand: Library data stays in SQLite, with lists loaded by page rather than putting every track and cover into the interface at once. UltraLight can unload the main interface for lighter background playback.

• Skins can rebuild the interface: Workshop creators can reorganize pages and playback controls, bringing lyric scenes, visualizers and functional panels into the player.

To explore sound further, read about SRC, PCM-to-SDM conversion, convolution correction and connections between devices. The edition differences are explained below.

Community Edition and Steam Edition

Community Edition is permanently free and open source under AGPL v3, with fewer updates and a more basic interface. It suits free use, source-code study and hands-on tinkering.

Steam Edition is the commercial version we focus on developing and maintaining. In practice, it can feel like a different application.

Its interface, library and audio foundations, performance work, immersive lyrics and extension ecosystem have grown far beyond Community Edition. Workshop supports full skins, lyric scenes, visualizers and functional plugins, alongside achievements, listening statistics, friend presence and cloud sync for selected settings.

The two editions develop independently, with different features and update schedules and a very large gap in the overall experience. Community Edition does not represent the Steam experience.

ECHO Base Edition and Pro

The differences are focused. If your budget is limited, we do not recommend buying ECHO Pro.

Here is a brief overview of Pro's features:

• Laboratory: Try new features and the developer's experimental ideas. It is a laboratory, so expect a little of everything!

• ECHO SDM: A distinctive ECHO feature: convert ordinary music to DSD with different configurations, from DSD64 to DSD512. Your DAC must support DSD audio.

  Base Edition still includes ECHO SRC upsampling, for example from 44.1 / 48 kHz to as high as 352.8 kHz. Your DAC must support the selected rate and WASAPI Exclusive / ASIO.

• Desktop mascot: Keep our mascot 天音诗织 on your desktop. A character-care system is planned for a future update.

• ECHO Connect:

  • Share your library over the local network with ECHO Android and connect Linux, macOS and other Windows devices.

  • Stream to compatible network audio players, or use your phone for DLNA casting.

  • Link smart-home devices through ECHO MQTT (Beta).

  • Connect ECHO to HQPlayer.

• FIR and room correction: Use convolution and filter packages for multiple sample rates and channels, together with DSP Rack, channel tools and listening profiles to organize your processing chain.

ECHO Pro is intended for more specialized setups. Choosing Base Edition does not mean losing a large part of the player. Decide according to your needs and budget.

Still growing, and always happy to hear from you

ECHO remains in Early Access. Features, compatibility and the overall experience will continue to improve, and bugs may occur. Thank you for helping ECHO grow.

If you have a problem or need help, join our QQ group: 391957364. Tell us what happened; you do not need to diagnose it first. We will work through it together.

Bring your own music

ECHO is a local music player and includes neither songs nor a music subscription. Steam Edition has no built-in third-party music-platform search, login, extraction or online playback, and no built-in music-video search or playback. Pro does not unlock those services. Remote libraries and device connections require your own music source, server or compatible equipment.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Generative AI was used to assist with localization and some written text, and to create selected artwork for official Steam Workshop content, including the abstract fallback cover in PULSE INDEX. ECHO does not generate content with AI during use or connect to external AI services during use.