PlayGarba

Open-source garba music archive

Status: Live
Year: 2026
Stack: JavaScript · PWA · Open data
Disciplines: MusicSystems

PlayGarba player in a lamp-lit palace courtyard with dancers on either side. — Fig. 01The simple player, set in a palace courtyard. The player at 390 px.

PlayGarba player on a phone. — Fig. 01The simple player, set in a palace courtyard. The player at 390 px.

01 · Brief

Garba music is everywhere and nowhere: old cassettes, streaming releases, three-hour nonstop sets and live Navratri recordings, with titles spelled five ways and no track lists. PlayGarba puts it in one free place, catalogued from evidence.

songs catalogued: 1,700+
releases: 240+
venues you can walk around: 3
accounts, paywalls or ads: 0

A careful catalogue

Every song, release and live set is recorded from a source. If a date, a credit or a duration is unknown, it stays blank until a source fills it.

A garba night you can walk into

Immersive mode puts you on a garba ground at night: a lit garbo, rings of dancers, a band on stage, food stalls, and tonight’s real moon overhead. Walk with the arrow keys, ask the DJ for the next song, and the circle claps around you.

01Three venues with their own acoustics: an open ground, a covered stadium and a sheri between houses
02Where you stand changes what you see and what you hear
03Lighting follows the genre, from oil-lamp warmth for Traditional to neon for Fusion
04Your photos stay on your device

Free, and staying free

It is an installable app with no account and no paywall. The code is AGPL-3.0 and the data is CC BY-SA 4.0, so it can stay open.

An outdoor garba ground at night with a lit garbo, rings of dancers, stalls and the moon. — Fig. 02Immersive: the open ground.

The stage with singers and band under moving lights, the crowd in front. — Fig. 03The stage and the band.

The DJ’s table with the song list open on his laptop. — Fig. 04Ask the DJ for a song.

A garba in a lane between colourful houses, with a temple spire in lights. — Fig. 05The sheri, a society garba between the houses.

Status

Live at playgarba.com, and open to contributions: anyone can add a missing song.