What is Librarian Mobile?

Librarian Mobile — also known as TT Anywhere — is a built-in feature of Librarian Desktop that lets you connect to your station's library from a web browser. The browser becomes a remote control: you can browse songs, filter, edit metadata, drop EOM / Cue / Ramp markers, even hear short audio excerpts, all without being at the station Mac.

It's the same library, the same fields, the same actions you'd take in Librarian Desktop — just delivered through a phone, tablet, or laptop browser. The work you do remotely writes straight back into the station's library.tsv exactly as if you'd done it in person, and AutoCast picks up the changes the moment they're saved.

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Librarian Mobile is not a separate app you install. It's a server that runs inside Librarian Desktop on the station Mac, and a web client that any modern browser can open. There's nothing to download to your phone.

When You'd Use It

The most common scenarios:

Voice-tracking from home. A host produces a voice track in AirStaff Studio while away from the studio, then connects to Librarian Mobile to check the file landed in the library and to audition the segue.
Music director auditioning between gigs. Pull up the library on a phone, filter the unrated new arrivals, drop EOM markers on the ones that need them, and move on.
Quick metadata fixes. Listener calls in to ask about a song that just played; you can pull up the library on your laptop wherever you are, fix the artist spelling, save, and the change is live.
Anyone who'd rather not be sitting at the studio Mac. If your station Mac is in a closet and you'd rather work from your office or living room, Librarian Mobile is for you.

How It Works

Librarian Desktop runs a small WebSocket server on port 7331 while it's open. When a browser client connects, Librarian asks for a PIN. After authentication, the client receives the same library data Librarian Desktop is showing — categories, the current filter, the song list, the TSV header, your custom attributes — and from then on the two stay in sync. Edits made in the browser show up in Librarian Desktop within a few seconds, and edits made in Librarian Desktop broadcast out to any connected browser clients.

Audio excerpts are generated on the fly. When you select a song in the browser, Librarian uses FFmpeg locally on the station Mac to encode a short MP3 clip of the relevant region (around the EOM, around the Cue, etc.) and streams it to the browser as a binary frame. The full audio file never leaves the station — only the short excerpt does, which keeps both bandwidth and licensing concerns small.

⚠️

Librarian Desktop must be running at the station for Librarian Mobile to work. If Librarian is closed, the server is unreachable and no browser clients can connect. Most stations leave Librarian open on the studio Mac at all times — that's the intended setup. If you've enabled SteadyCast™ folder monitoring (see By Folder), Librarian will already prompt you before quitting; the same dependency applies here.

What You Can Do From a Browser

The mobile client mirrors the desktop's working surface:

Browse the library. The same Station Folder categories appear in the browser. Tap one to see its songs.
Filter. Search across all fields, or by a specific field, just like the filter rows in Librarian Desktop.
View song details. Tap a song to see its complete metadata and any custom fields you've added.
Hear an excerpt. Each selected song streams a short audio excerpt so you can hear the relevant moment without downloading the whole file.
Drop EOM, Cue, and Ramp markers. The browser exposes the same one-button workflow as the Transitions tab — listen, tap to mark.
Edit metadata. Change Artist, Title, any of the editable fields. Changes save back to the library immediately.
Add new attribute columns. Need a new custom field? Add it from the browser; it appears for every song in the library and in every other connected client.
Refresh. Force a re-read of the library file when needed.

Turning It On

Librarian Mobile is enabled by default. Two settings live in {StationFolder}/Misc/System/Settings/library.json:

Setting	Default	What it does
`remoteEnabled`	`true`	When true, Librarian starts the remote server every time it launches. Set to `false` to disable Librarian Mobile entirely.
`remotePIN`	`"1234"`	The PIN browser clients must enter to authenticate. Change this — leaving it as `1234` on a network anyone can reach is asking for trouble.

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To change the PIN, quit Librarian, edit library.json in any text editor, save, and relaunch. The new PIN takes effect on the next launch. Pick something at least four digits long that isn't your birth year, your address, or 1234.

Connecting From a Browser

Find the station Mac's IP address on your local network — you can see it in System Settings › Network (look for something like 192.168.1.42). Then point any browser at that address with :7331 appended:

http://192.168.1.42:7331

The browser prompts for the PIN; enter it and the library appears. Bookmark the URL on your phone and you've got one-tap access to the station's library from anywhere on your home or studio network.

Connecting From Outside the Studio Network

By default Librarian Mobile only accepts connections from devices on the same local network as the station Mac. To reach it from outside (a coffee shop, a hotel, your house when the station is somewhere else), you'll need one of:

A VPN — easiest for most stations. Connect to your studio's VPN from your phone, then use the local IP just like you'd use it on-site.
A peer-to-peer network like Tailscale or ZeroTier — installs on the studio Mac and your remote device, and makes them act as if they're on the same LAN even when they aren't. Free for small setups.
Router port forwarding — exposes port 7331 to the open internet. Workable, but only if you're confident in your PIN, your router's firewall, and the security implications. Most stations should not do this without a clear reason.

A Note on Security

The PIN is the only line of defense between a connected client and full edit access to your library. Treat it like the password it is:

Don't leave it set to 1234.
Don't reuse a PIN you use for anything else important.
If you suspect someone unauthorized has it, change it immediately and relaunch Librarian.

Connections are not encrypted with TLS in this version — if you're worried about the PIN crossing an untrusted network, use a VPN or one of the peer-to-peer options above rather than direct port forwarding.

Multiple Clients

Several browsers can be connected at the same time. Librarian broadcasts edits made by one client to all the others, so two operators on different devices won't trample each other's changes — each will see the other's saves appear in real time. The desktop client and any browser clients are all peers; whichever one made the most recent change wins.

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The Import tab and its sub-tabs are the one set of features Librarian Mobile does not surface. Importing files necessarily means files arriving on the studio Mac's filesystem, and that's a job for the desktop. Use Librarian Mobile for everything after the files are in the library — editing, filtering, transitions, and metadata cleanup.