Melody Review: Self-Hosted Music Cloud That Rescues Greyed-Out Songs

Listening to music online has gotten weirdly complicated in recent years. Licensing deals shift around, and suddenly half your favorite playlist is greyed out. Switching platforms doesn’t really solve it — the licensing on the other side is usually different. My old workaround was downloading songs manually and re-uploading them to NetEase Cloud’s personal music storage, but that doesn’t scale once you have hundreds of greyed-out tracks.

Then I found Melody. 3.7k stars, written in JavaScript, the author calls it “my music sprite” — a fitting name. After using it for a while, here’s my honest take.

What problem does it solve

In one sentence: it automatically pulls music from various platforms and uploads it to your own cloud storage.

Specifically:

• Songs in your playlist suddenly go grey and unplayable
• You want to save the BGM from a Bilibili video
• Found a great track on Douyin/TikTok and want to extract the audio
• Want to batch-download your NetEase playlists locally
• Want to upload local music to NetEase Cloud storage for cross-device sync

Melody puts all of this into one web interface, and it can run on schedules so you don’t have to babysit it.

Core features

Multi-platform search Supported platforms: NetEase, QQ Music, Migu, Kugou, Bilibili, Douyin, and others. Type a song name, or paste a video URL — it searches across these platforms and picks the best-quality version to download.

I tried pasting a Bilibili video link and it pulled out the audio track, converted it to MP3 or FLAC. Pretty useful if you’re into original songs or covers from Bilibili creators.

Auto-upload to cloud storage Downloaded files don’t just sit locally — they can auto-upload to NetEase Cloud’s personal music storage. This is honestly Melody’s most valuable feature: songs in your NetEase personal cloud aren’t subject to licensing changes. Even if the original gets pulled, your copy keeps playing.

The killer feature: one-click song “un-greying” The author calls it “一键解灰” (one-click un-grey) — an experimental feature. Give it a greyed-out NetEase song and it automatically finds a playable version from another platform, downloads it, uploads to your cloud, and auto-matches the metadata — so lyrics, comments, and album art still display correctly in the NetEase app.

I tested a bunch of greyed-out songs and the success rate was around 70-80%, mostly depending on whether other platforms have the same version. Sometimes auto-matching picks the wrong song (different artist, same name), but you can manually search and match those.

Scheduled tasks Set it to periodically scan your NetEase playlists, download new songs, upload to cloud. Or do the reverse — sync cloud songs to local on a schedule. Your music library stays current without any manual intervention.

PWA support PWA mode means it works like a native app on your phone — but you need HTTPS deployment for that. I didn’t bother since public deployment has licensing implications. Personal use is fine.

Real-world usage

Scenario 1: Rescuing a greyed-out playlist I had hundreds of songs saved on NetEase from 10 years ago, and about half were greyed out by now. Ran Melody’s batch un-grey overnight and got back roughly 200 songs. Honestly kind of a moving experience seeing old favorites work again.

Scenario 2: Bilibili audio extraction Found a cover or original song on Bilibili I liked, just paste the link into Melody, MP3 ready in seconds. Way better than those sketchy online extraction sites with their weird ads.

Scenario 3: Cross-device sync Home PC downloads new music, auto-uploads to NetEase Cloud, mobile NetEase app plays it instantly. Basically using NetEase Cloud as a personal music cloud.

Quick start

# Recommended: Docker deployment
docker run -d -p 5566:5566 \
  -v /your/data:/app/data \
  --name melody \
  foamzou/melody:latest

# Access at http://127.0.0.1:5566
# Default melody key: melody
# Configure accounts in backend/.profile/accounts.json

# Source deployment needs Node.js + FFmpeg
git clone https://github.com/foamzou/melody
cd melody
npm run init
npm run app

First time you’ll need to configure a NetEase account (if you want cloud-related features). Use a secondary account, not your main one.

The good and the bad

What I loved:

• Perfectly solves the greyed-out song problem — worth the setup time for this alone
• Multi-platform search covers basically all mainstream Chinese music sources
• Docker deployment is dead simple, 5 minutes and you’re done
• Fully open-source Apache-2.0, zero commercial restrictions
• Author still actively maintaining it, issue responses are decent
• PWA support makes mobile experience usable

What frustrated me:

• No official demo — author explicitly states “personal learning use only” so you have to self-host
• Un-greying isn’t 100% — some niche tracks just can’t be found elsewhere
• Auto-matching occasionally picks the wrong song, manual review needed
• Account config has a small learning curve for non-technical users
• Operates in licensing grey areas, be careful with public deployment

Compared to alternatives

Tool	Pros	Cons	Best for
Melody	Multi-platform, un-grey, cloud integration	Setup needed, grey area legally	Users with NAS/server who love their playlists
NetEase Music Desktop	Official, stable, social features	License-restricted, no un-greying	Casual users
YouTube Music + Premium	Rich catalog, international	Paid, limited China access	International users
Navidrome	Self-hosted streaming, audiophile-grade	Needs local music library	Collectors with their own files

If you’re a casual listener, NetEase + premium membership is enough. But if you’re like me with a bunch of greyed-out “old friends” you want back, or you frequently extract audio from various platforms, Melody is genuinely a gem.

Bottom line

Melody isn’t groundbreaking technologically — it’s basically a wrapper around various platform APIs plus a cloud upload pipeline. But it solves a very specific problem: in a fragmented licensing era, how do regular users keep the music they love.

3.7k stars suggests plenty of people have this need. The author keeps it non-commercial — it’s purely a personal project.

For users with self-hosting capability who lean heavily on NetEase Cloud, Melody is pretty much essential. Deploy it once, and those greyed-out songs in your playlist might just come back. That feeling is honestly kind of cool.

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About the Author

Liudingyu is a full-stack developer and heavy GitHub user. With 900+ starred repos over the past 3 years, this site only covers tools I’ve actually used or deeply researched.

📧 Found a great tool to recommend? Email [email protected]