Feature Friday is back. Last week we went deep on the sound engine — the part that makes your music sound right. This week we’re on the part that gives Veilamp its name and its whole reason for being: sharing that music with your friends, privately.

Here’s the promise, right there on the tin: your music, your friends, nobody in between. Let’s talk about what that actually means.

The idea

You’ve got a library. Your friend has a library. You both have great taste (obviously). The normal way to share any of it is to hand it over to some company’s servers — upload it, stream it, hope they behave. We didn’t want that.

So Veilamp streams your library straight to the friends you trust, device to device, over the Veilid peer-to-peer network. It’s encrypted end to end. There’s no central server holding your music, no account, no email, no phone number, nobody logging what you listen to. Your library never leaves your machine except to go to a friend you’ve personally let in.

Adding a friend is one paste

Your identity in Veilamp isn’t an email address or a username — it’s a stable cryptographic keypair that lives on your device. To add a friend, you swap friend codes: one string you paste in, and you’re connected. No sign-up, no “find friends from your contacts,” no handing an address book to anyone.

It’s mutual by design — you add each other, and from then on you can see each other’s shared music.

You decide what’s shared — down to the playlist

Nothing is public by default. Sharing in Veilamp is organized around playlists: flip a Share toggle on any playlist and the friends you’ve added can browse it. Want to open up everything? There’s an All Tracks smart playlist you can share in a single click. Everything you don’t share stays private.

So you can hand your buddy your carefully-built “Late Night” playlist without giving them the rest of your library — or share the whole thing. Your call, per playlist, any time.

Friends-only, and we mean it

This is the part we care about most. Every single browse and every stream request is checked against your allowlist of friends before one byte leaves your machine. It’s not a setting buried in a menu or a “private” flag we promise to honor — it’s the gate the whole sharing system is built behind. If someone isn’t on your list, they don’t get a catalog, they don’t get a track, they get nothing.

What it feels like to listen

Click a friend’s track and it just plays. Under the hood there’s some nice engineering making that feel instant: Veilamp prebuffers a head start, then plays while the rest of the track downloads ahead of you over several private routes at once, so you’re not sitting there waiting for a progress bar. (If you’re curious why that takes real work over a privacy network, it comes down to latency — but you’ll never notice it.)

A few touches that make it feel social instead of mechanical:

  • Friend presence — see which friends are reachable right now, and get a quiet “someone’s listening” nudge when a friend is streaming from your library.
  • Offline cache — once you’ve streamed a track all the way through, it’s cached locally, so playing it again skips the network entirely.

You stay in control

Trust can change, so letting someone go is easy and immediate. Remove a friend and Veilamp rotates your private route, so the path they had to you stops resolving promptly — on top of the allowlist already turning them away. And because any system that serves data to the outside needs a seatbelt, there’s anti-replay protection and per-friend rate limiting guarding your node against abuse.

Why we built it this way

Sharing music with the people you love is one of the oldest, best parts of being into music — the mixtape, the burned CD, the “you have to hear this.” Somewhere along the way that turned into “send them a link to a service that both of you pay, that tracks both of you.” Veilamp’s whole bet is that you can have the former without the latter: direct, private, friends-only, with the music staying yours.

No servers to trust. No account to delete. Just you, your friends, and the music.

That’s this week’s Feature Friday. Next week we’ll pop open another part of the app — and if there’s a corner you want the tour of, tell us.

Until then — happy listening, together.