A DJ-style VFX daemon for Philips Hue. Runs on a QNAP NAS, a PC, a Mac or a Pi.
Play music anywhere in the house. The box listens, finds the beat, and drives your Hue lights like a small lighting desk: strobe on the drop, lights joining one by one through a build-up, colour moving with the music.
No subscriptions. No cloud. Nothing extra to switch on. You need smart Hue bulbs, a machine you already own, and fire.
Download from forum.qnap.net.pl
- Reads the tempo and keeps a beat grid, so effects land on the beat, not near it
- Counts bars and follows the phrasing
- Detects a build-up: lights join one at a time, then all fire on the drop
- Beat-locked strobe with its own rate, duty, colour and blackout
- 155 colour palettes, or colours taken from the music itself
- A live light wall showing the exact frames sent to the bridge
Five ways. Turn on as many as you like: one drives the lights at a time, and another takes over a couple of seconds after it goes quiet.
| How it finds you | What it needs | |
|---|---|---|
| Sender | You point it at the box | A Winamp, foobar2000 or AIMP plug-in, or Sound Capture |
| Sendspin | Music Assistant discovers the box | Nothing. It appears as a player |
| Snapcast | You give it the server address | A snapserver on the network |
| Squeezebox | The box finds the server by broadcast | Any Logitech Media Server or Music Assistant |
| DLNA | Anything looking for a speaker finds it | A phone, a hi-fi app, Music Assistant |
The decoder ships inside the package, so this is what works out of the box with no settings to change.
| Codec | Sender | Sendspin | Snapcast | Squeezebox | DLNA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PCM / WAV | yes | — | yes | yes | yes |
| FLAC | — | — | yes | yes | yes |
| MP3 | — | — | — | yes | yes |
| AAC (ADTS) | — | — | — | yes | yes |
| AAC / ALAC in MP4 | — | — | — | no | yes |
| Ogg Vorbis | — | — | yes | yes | yes |
| Opus | — | — | no | yes | yes |
| WMA | — | — | — | yes | yes |
| AC3 | — | — | — | yes | yes |
Sendspin has no column because it sends no audio: Music Assistant analyses the sound and sends the box the result. A dash means the protocol never carries that format.
MP4 over Squeezebox: no. An MP4 keeps its index at the end of the file, so it cannot be read from a one-way stream by anything. Over DLNA it works, because there the box fetches the URL itself and can seek.
Opus over Snapcast: no. Snapcast sends raw Opus packets with no container. Its FLAC chunks join into a valid FLAC stream and its Ogg chunks carry their own pages, but raw Opus would have to be re-framed first. Use flac, ogg or pcm.
Both are reported in the panel in those words, so nobody has to guess.
| QNAP NAS | QuTS hero 6.0 or QTS 6.0, any platform |
| Windows | 10 or 11, installs as a service with a tray icon |
| macOS | 12 or newer, launchd agent with a menu-bar icon |
| Linux | Ubuntu 24.04, Debian, Raspberry Pi OS: systemd user service |
| Lights | A Hue bridge with an Entertainment area |
Everything is on the releases page.
| You have | Download | Then |
|---|---|---|
| QNAP NAS | TuneThatHue_x.y.z.qpkg |
App Center -> Install Manually |
| Windows 10/11 | TuneThatHue-daemon-x.y.z-setup.exe |
run it |
| Linux, Raspberry Pi | TuneThatHue-x.y.z-unix.tar.gz |
unpack, run install/linux/install.sh |
| macOS 12+ | TuneThatHue-x.y.z-unix.tar.gz |
unpack, run install/macos/install.sh |
| Docker | docker pull silasmariusz/tunethathue |
see below |
On every platform it installs as a service that starts by itself and keeps running: a
Windows service, a launchd agent, a systemd user unit, a QNAP package with a watchdog.
The panel is then on http://127.0.0.1:8080 (http://<nas>/TuneThatHue/ on a NAS),
and tunethathue status works from a terminal.
Tested on Ubuntu 24.04 and Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) on a Pi 4B.
tar xzf TuneThatHue-0.9.0-unix.tar.gz
cd TuneThatHue-0.9.0
./install/linux/install.shThat is the whole thing. No sudo except for two packages the tray icon needs, and
nothing is written outside your own account. It will:
- Find a Python 3.14, and fetch a portable one if the system has none. Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu 24.04 both ship an older Python, so this normally downloads one - about 30 MB, into the install directory, touching nothing system-wide. It has to be 3.14: the effects engine is carried byte-for-byte from Music Assistant and uses syntax older versions cannot parse.
- Make a virtual environment and install what the daemon imports.
- Find a decoder. It uses the bundled
ffmpegif the archive has one for your architecture, otherwise the system's. If you have neither,sudo apt install ffmpegfirst - without it only uncompressed audio plays, which rules out most of what a Snapcast or DLNA sender will send you. - Install a systemd user service and enable lingering, so it starts at boot and keeps running after you log out.
- Install a tray icon unless you pass
--no-tray.
Afterwards:
tunethathue status # is it running, and what is it hearing
tunethathue stop | start | restart
tunethathue panel # open the browser panel
tunethathue codecs # check every decoder the inputs need
journalctl --user -u tunethathue -f # the log
./install/linux/install.sh --remove # take it off againA headless Pi needs nothing else - the panel is on http://<pi>:8080 from any
machine on the network. Pass --no-tray and skip the two desktop packages.
32-bit Raspberry Pi OS: the tempo will not lock. NumPy publishes no build for 32-bit
ARM on Python 3.14, and the beat tracker needs it. Everything else works - the panel, the
inputs, pairing, colour - but the lights will not follow the beat. Use the 64-bit image
(uname -m should say aarch64), or run the container instead.
docker run -d --name tunethathue --network host \
-v tunethathue:/config silasmariusz/tunethathue:latest--network host is required. Bridge mode does not work, and it fails in the way most
likely to waste an evening: the container starts, the panel opens, and then nothing ever
finds it — which reads as a broken program rather than a network setting. Three of the
four inputs are discovered by multicast or broadcast (mDNS for Sendspin, SSDP for DLNA, a
UDP broadcast for Squeezebox) and none of that crosses a Docker bridge. Publishing ports
does not help, because the discovery never reaches the container to begin with. Start it
on a bridge anyway and it says so in its own log.
If you want it isolated with an address of its own, use a macvlan network — that puts it
on the LAN properly, so multicast works:
docker network create -d macvlan --subnet=192.168.1.0/24 \
--gateway=192.168.1.1 -o parent=eth0 lan
docker run -d --name tunethathue --network lan --ip 192.168.1.50 \
-v tunethathue:/config silasmariusz/tunethathue:latestamd64 and arm64 only, for the NumPy reason above.
- Sound Capture — sends whatever is playing on the computer. Any player. Can also capture one chosen app, a second sound card, or Stereo Mix
- Winamp — a DSP plug-in, straight from the player
- foobar2000 — the same, for foobar 2.x
- AIMP — loads the Winamp plug-in: copy
dsp_tunethathue.dllinto AIMP'sPluginsfolder. 32-bit AIMP only; on 64-bit use Sound Capture
All of them send the same thing to the box on UDP 6980.
The effects engine is the one from Music Assistant's hue_entertainment provider,
copied in byte for byte. TuneThatHue adds what a standalone box needs (beat tracking, a
panel, pairing, packaging) and leaves the effects alone, so an effect tuned here behaves
the same in Music Assistant and the other way round.
That makes it useful in both directions: it is a workbench for building and debugging VFX effects for Music Assistant. Restart takes a second, the lights are in the room, and the file copies straight back.
Light travels faster than sound. Open the panel on the machine that captures the audio, start the metronome, and raise the light delay until the flash lands on the click.
.qpkg:qnap/README-BUILD.md- The bundled decoder:
qnap/build_ffmpeg.sh - Windows senders and daemon installer:
build-windows.ps1,installers/prepare-windows.ps1
Apache-2.0. See NOTICE and
THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md. The package carries an LGPL build of
FFmpeg for decoding.
Uses the Philips Hue Entertainment API. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Signify / Philips Hue, Native Instruments, Winamp, foobar2000 or AIMP.
TuneThatHue © 2025–2026 Silas Mariusz Grzybacz · devspark.pl published: forum.qnap.net.pl · qnap app repo: myqnap.org