Your library, wherever you are.
One app for the podcasts, audiobooks, ebooks and music you already own — playing from the servers you already run.
Four libraries
One app, four ways to listen and read
Each section has its own tab bar, its own settings and its own player — because a podcast, a forty-hour audiobook, an EPUB and an album are not the same thing, and pretending otherwise compromises all four.
Podcasts
Subscribe, auto-download, skip intros, queue up next. Episodes archive themselves once you're done with them.
Audiobooks
Whole-book downloads across many files, chapter navigation, bookmarks, and a position that survives everything.
Ebooks
EPUB and PDF with fonts, themes, table of contents and bookmarks. Reading position syncs back to your server.
Music
Your Plex music library with playlists, favourites, synced lyrics, volume normalisation and a real queue.
A look around
Every screen, in the dark
Tap any screen to see it full size. Arrow keys and swipe move between them.
Everything else
The parts you only notice when they're missing
CarPlay
Podcasts and audiobooks on the dashboard, with your covers and your queue.
Widgets
Small, medium and large. Chapter, elapsed time, speed and what's up next.
Siri Shortcuts
Resume, skip, mark played — by voice or from an automation.
Offline downloads
Wi-Fi-only if you like, with automatic tidying once you've finished.
Chapters
Tap to seek, tick marks on the scrubber, and skip buttons that know where they are.
Skip intro and outro
Per podcast, so the one with the ninety-second cold open behaves itself.
Trim silence
And volume boost, for the recordings that need help.
Handoff
Start on the phone, carry on where you left off, and the first device pauses.
Stats
Listening and reading time across all four sections in one place.
Light and dark
Follows the system, or pick one.
Sleep timer
Minutes, or to the end of the chapter.
Unified search
One search across podcasts, audiobooks, ebooks and music at once.
Crossfade
Up to twelve seconds between tracks — and never within an album, so mixes stay as they were mastered.
Browse by folder
Artists, albums, or the folder tree exactly as it sits on your server.
Compilations done right
Every track on a Various Artists album names its own performer, with a tap through to them.
More on Now Playing
Other episodes of the show, or the artist's most-played tracks, without leaving the player.
Synced lyrics
Scrolling in time, from the open LRCLIB database. Tap a line to jump there.
Playlists both ways
Real Plex playlists you can reorder and delete, and rule-based smart playlists for podcasts.
How it works
Your servers. Your library. No account here.
Castaway Media is a client, not a service. It connects to an Audiobookshelf server for podcasts, audiobooks and ebooks, and to Plex for music — both of which you run yourself.
Nothing is collected
No analytics, no tracking, no advertising identifiers. There is no Castaway Media account, because there is no Castaway Media server.
Credentials stay on device
Server addresses and tokens live in the iOS Keychain. They are sent to your servers and nowhere else.
You bring the content
The app ships with nothing. Everything you see in it is what's already on hardware you control.