Today, we are announcing Radiccio, a new music player app for Macintosh computers.

My name is David Deller (a.k.a. “dmd”) and Radiccio is published by my new company, Crispy Crunchy Computerware LLC.

An elegant player, for a more civilized age

These days, we have more options for listening to music than ever before. But the experience of listening to music has become filled with distractions, and it often feels like we are being funneled towards algorithmic feeds in service of “engagement” rather than truly connecting with the music we love.

I wanted to go back to a simpler time. I wanted a music app that gives me easy access to my music – organized the way I want – and provides a comfortable, peaceful environment to listen to it. I wanted an app that provides an abundance of useful tools, but doesn’t insist upon using them a certain way. I wanted an app that could help me remember the joy of collecting and listening to digital music.

Radiccio is that app, and I have been working on it full-time for more than a year. Now I am ready to share it with you. I hope you will love it.

The Mac music player of your dreams

Radiccio supports playing music from multiple types of sources, including files on your Mac, Apple Music, Plex, and Jellyfin. It includes features both new and familiar, including Librarian, pins, favorites, auto skip, journal, and more.

You can use Radiccio with one “On My Mac” source and an Apple Music source for free, with no time limit. If you want to add additional sources, we offer a paid subscription called Radiccio Plus!, and a free trial is available for eligible customers.

Read on for details.

Files on your Mac

For me, much of the joy of music is in collecting, and I think there is still no better way to collect digital music than by keeping your own files – especially when you’re supporting the musicians whose music you love, by purchasing music downloads from their preferred storefront.

So, a collection of audio files was the starting point for Radiccio, and it is the area which I have focused on the most.

Radiccio refers to this as an “On My Mac” source. First, add a source of this type, then point it at the folder where your audio files are. That’s it! You’re now ready to listen.

Radiccio provides a Finder-like file browser UI for navigating through subfolders, and picking files to listen to.

We support common DRM-free formats including MP3, AAC, FLAC, Opus, etc. More details in our user guide.

Librarian

Of course, if you have a substantial music collection, you probably want some additional tools for searching and browsing. That’s where Librarian comes in.

Librarian works with “On My Mac” sources. After you click the checkbox to enable Librarian, Radiccio starts scanning the files in your folder. It creates a database in a file which it saves next to your audio files, in the same folder. Librarian will scan your audio files again later, at regular intervals (which you can specify or disable in settings).

With Librarian, you now have more ways to search and browse your collection: artists, albums, songs, and playlists.

Librarian also adds an “overview” tab where Radiccio tries to surface music that may be interesting to you, such as recently added and recently played items. No complicated algorithms, just garden-variety sorting and filtering.

Librarian is optional, because I wanted to provide two kinds of experiences: a simple and basic experience, as well as a more advanced and feature-rich experience. In particular, I thought some people might not want or need the scanning that Librarian requires. So, Radiccio gives you this choice: You can enable or disable Librarian at any point; no data is ever lost.

This is also important to me: Your files are yours. Your data is yours. Radiccio doesn’t modify your audio files. The Librarian data file also belongs to you; that’s why I put it out in the open, where you can easily find it. Your computer, and the apps on it, should work for you, and do what you want (not the other way around). That starts with being transparent about everything, as much as possible.

A music collection is a very personal and precious thing, and when a person is considering giving an app access to it, I feel that requires a significant amount of trust. I tried to made Radiccio something that could be worthy of your trust. But I also wanted to make it so that you don’t need to trust Radiccio. I designed Radiccio to be the opposite of lock-in; I want you to feel like you can leave at any time. Because when I’m considering a new app, one of the first questions I ask myself is, “how much of a pain is this going to be if I want to leave?” And the answer should be “none”. If you decide to stay, it should only be because you want to. That’s how I’ll know I’ve done a good job.

Pins, favorites, auto skip, and journal

A long-time struggle for me is quickly getting to the music I want. I often have a dozen or so albums and artists that are “in the rotation”. Many apps have a “recently played” section that can help with this, but I often want to have more manual control over how and when things get added or removed to it.

This is where pins come in. You can pin any album or artist. Pinned items will always appear at the top of the list, unless or until you choose to unpin them. They can also appear in the “overview” tab, if you have configured it to do so.

Favorites are a separate, but related concept. Pins are not intended to express an opinion, but favorites are. As in other apps, you can favorite (and unfavorite) songs, albums, and artists.

Radiccio takes favorites a step further: favorites can now be used for quickly selecting songs to add to the playback queue. What if you only want to listen to your favorite songs on an album? Now you can.

How about your favorite albums from a given artist? Or your favorite songs from all albums of that artist? Done and done.

But what if… you have a really great album you love, filled almost entirely with absolute bangers, but one song in particular that just drags the whole thing down and you don’t want to hear ever again? We’ve got that covered too, with auto skip. You can set a song or an album to auto skip, and from then on, it will never get added to the queue… unless you specifically choose it. (Feelings about music can be a fickle thing.)

Speaking of feelings, when I use music apps, I often find myself wishing for a way to record my thoughts. When I come back to a piece of music some time later, often I find that I have forgotten which songs I liked the most and the least. A traditional way to do this is with star ratings, but I have often found this lacking: What do the stars mean, exactly? What exactly was I thinking when I gave that song 3 stars? What if I was having a bad day – would that have affected my rating?

The five-star scale has only been used in critical analysis for the past few decades. While it was occasionally applied to film criticism as early as the 1950s, the five-star scale wasn't used to rate hotels until 1979, and it wasn't widely used to rate books until Amazon introduced user reviews.

The five-star scale doesn't really exist for humans; it exists for data aggregation systems, which is why it did not become standard until the internet era.

For Radiccio, I wanted something similar, but different – a little more human – and so I designed the journal system.

Journal gives you two ways to express yourself: “enjoyment” and “made me feel”.

Besides the pre-written responses, each category also allows you to type a custom response (and for mood, you can pick a custom emoji). There is also a “notes” field where you can type anything you want. All fields are optional, so you can respond however it makes sense to you.

Journal also saves all of your past entries, so you can look back on how your thoughts have changed over time.

Journal is the most experimental part of Radiccio. I hope people will find it useful, as I have, but I suspect it may not be to everyone’s taste. As with any feature, but in particular with this one, I plan to continue to work on it and evolve it over time. I hope you’ll tell me what you think about it!

Radiccio supports multiple types of sources (as we’ll get to shortly), but the preceding features were designed for “On My Mac” sources with Librarian enabled. Other types of sources have different feature sets.

Apple Music

As much as I love collecting music, discovering new music is also important to me. And I don’t like having to juggle multiple different music apps and UIs. So, it was always a goal to support a streaming service in Radiccio in some way.

If you use Apple Music, you can connect it to Radiccio by adding an Apple Music source. This gives you access to much of what Apple Music has to offer, namely: the catalog, your library, and radio stations.

This means you can search the entire Apple Music service via the catalog, and even add albums and playlists to your library when you find something you like. You can also browse your personal Apple Music library and listen to your personally-crafted collection that way. And if you want, you can sit back and let Apple’s DJs and algorithms choose what’s playing next with Apple Music radio stations.

I have done my best to provide the best Apple Music experience I think I can. However, it was quite a challenge. In fact, Apple Music was the most difficult part of building Radiccio, by far. There were several times that I thought the Apple Music experience in Radiccio could not reach my personal standard of software quality, and I seriously considered shipping Radiccio without it. In the end, I was mostly able to make it work, but not without some significant limitations.

I don’t say this by means of making excuses, but rather to set expectations accordingly. Many features that are otherwise available in Radiccio are missing when using an Apple Music source. I have documented these in our user guide.

I think it is a great thing that it is possible for third-party developers like me to build an Apple Music experience in our apps. However, it is important to understand that the MusicKit API that Apple provides to us is missing a significant amount of features and functionality that are otherwise available in Apple’s official app. (For example, it apparently didn’t occur to anyone at Apple that the user might want to… change the volume? FB18130031, to my Apple friends.) Unless or until this changes, it is unlikely that third-parties like us will ever be able to offer an equivalent experience in our apps. In the meantime, I will do the best I can.

Because of these limitations, I didn’t feel right making this a paid feature. Apple Music support in Radiccio, as it exists today, is therefore free. (However, if you want to access catalog and radio, you will need a paid Apple Music subscription, which is offered by Apple, not by us.)

I had a vision for the experience I wanted to provide with Apple Music, and ultimately I was not able to achieve that vision. I would still love to do it, if things change for the better.

Plex

Since long before I started working on Radiccio, I’ve kept my main music collection on my personal Plex Media Server. Plex allows me to access my personal home server from anywhere inside or outside my home. So, it seemed natural that Plex should also be a part of Radiccio.

When you add a Plex source in Radiccio, you can browse and listen to your music libraries with a similar and familiar experience as you would have with any other source. Not all features are equivalent, but we try to provide as much as we can based on what Plex has to offer. For example, you’ll see the familiar options for searching and browsing your Plex libraries by artist, album, song, playlist, and folder. We also provide the “overview” tab with several configurable options.

Plex sources in Radiccio require Radiccio Plus!, which is explained further on.

Jellyfin

Friends and colleagues have been telling me for years about Jellyfin, which is a free and open-source media server similar to Plex. I’ll admit that I had not given Jellyfin a try before I started working on Radiccio; but after building Plex integration, Jellyfin seemed like a logical next step. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised! Jellyfin offers a similar feature set as Plex, and I found it easy and fun to work with. If you’re looking for a media server, I would definitely recommend it!

So, once again, when you add a Jellyfin source in Radiccio, you can search and browse by artist, album, song, playlist, and folder, as well as the “overview” tab with several configurable options.

Jellyfin sources in Radiccio require Radiccio Plus!, which I will explain next.

Radiccio Plus!

Working on this app has been my dream, but the way to make it a reality was to make it a business. So let’s talk business.

You can add your first “On My Mac” source for free (including Librarian, if you wish). Also, Apple Music is no additional charge from us.

Radiccio Plus! is our paid offering, which gives you the ability to add as many “On My Mac” sources as you want, as well as Plex and Jellyfin sources.

We aren’t announcing any future plans today, but it’s safe to say that if or when we add more features to Radiccio, they will likely become a part of the Plus! offering.

In the United States, our initial pricing is as follows:

[Edit: Please see our home page for current pricing.]

My goals with this were to create a pricing structure that would be simple and easy to understand; while at the same time, providing a path to building a sustainable business, which would allow me to continue working on Radiccio for the long term. I have loved building this app, and I hope you will enjoy using it.

I know that some people won’t be able to subscribe or purchase Radiccio Plus!, which is why it was also important to me to try to include as much as I could in the free version, without any time limit. I want Radiccio to be the easy and obvious choice for anyone who is looking for a music player app for their Mac.

A note about Tahoe and Liquid Glass

Radiccio is compatible with both macOS 15 Sequoia and macOS 26 Tahoe.

Tahoe brings a new and significantly different visual design, called Liquid Glass. I started working on Radiccio in 2024, long before these changes were announced. At this point in time, I am still thinking about the best way to handle Tahoe’s design changes; as a result, initially, Radiccio will retain the macOS Sequoia visual design, whether you are running macOS 15 Sequoia or macOS 26 Tahoe.

For those who intend to continue running Sequoia: Please rest assured that, regardless of any changes that might be made to Radiccio for Tahoe, Radiccio will continue to have the same Sequoia visual design as long as you are running it on macOS 15 Sequoia.

For those who are interested in Liquid Glass: My intention is for Radiccio to feel like it belongs on the Mac, while meeting my standards of quality and usability; so, I want to take the time needed to get this right. Thank you for your patience.

The future

I have so many ideas for where I would like to take Radiccio next! Some part of me wishes I could have just kept working on it in secret forever, until it was perfect. But software is never perfect, and never finished.

I don’t want to fall into the trap of announcing features before they’re ready – I have worked in this industry long enough to know what happens! – so I won’t do that.

Suffice it to say, if you are anywhere close to as excited about Radiccio as I am, then subscribing to Radiccio Plus! is the best way to help me on my journey towards making Radiccio everything that it could be.

Thank you

The tagline on the home page is “the Mac music player of your dreams”, and I hope that it will be. But it probably won’t come as a surprise that it really is the Mac music player of my dreams. I have been a Mac user since 1993 and I have always wanted to make Mac apps. My career has taken a circuitous route to this point; but now I’m finally here, and working on Radiccio has been a joy. This has been the best work of my career so far, as well as the most personally fulfilling. And I’m just getting started!

Thank you so much for your interest in Radiccio.

You can get Radiccio on the Mac App Store.

You can learn more about how to use Radiccio, and everything it can do, in our user guide.

Questions or feedback? I would love to hear from you!

– dmd