Radiccio is not just a music player any more.

Radiccio is now your personal music server

These days, no music collection is an island. Most of us have a multi-device lifestyle, and we expect to be able to take our music with us wherever we go. Radiccio should be no exception. If Radiccio is going to be the best music player for Mac, then that means figuring out how to make Radiccio work with… well, everything!

Today, we’re taking a big step in that direction, with Radiccio Server.

With today’s update, Radiccio now includes an entire built-in personal music server. And it couldn’t be easier to get started: Simply go to App Settings > Server and click the checkbox “Enable Server”. There is no step 2!

On another Mac on your LAN, your new server appears instantly in the Radiccio sidebar, so you can start listening right away. We use the magic of Bonjour to automatically discover nearby servers, and iCloud to securely sign you in.

Even better: Radiccio Server uses the community-developed OpenSubsonic protocol, which means it is compatible with a whole new world of music player apps, on just about every conceivable device and platform. Yes, that means your phone, too!

Check out this list of player apps from our friends at Navidrome. We have tested many of the most popular OpenSubsonic player apps with Radiccio Server. But there are a lot of them, too many for us to test every single one, so if you have any issues please let us know!

Radiccio Server works with your “On My Mac” sources that have Librarian enabled, and requires Radiccio Plus!

Outside the home, too

At first, Radiccio Server is only accessible within your LAN. To access it outside your home, we recommend Tailscale. Tailscale is an easy and secure way to keep your devices connected no matter where they are, as long as they have an internet connection. Unlike a traditional VPN, Tailscale doesn’t touch your normal internet or LAN traffic – the magic only kicks in when it’s needed. It’s free for personal use – give it a try!

For more on this topic, see our user guide.

You can also use Radiccio Server with a variety of other available mesh VPN products and services – the choice is yours.

We are not affiliated with Tailscale, we just think they’re really cool!

Radiccio × Nautiline

Looking for an iOS app to use with Radiccio Server? We recommend Nautiline – it’s a beautiful and thoughtfully-designed music player for iPhone and iPad, and it’s the one we ourselves have been using the most with Radiccio Server.

Give Nautiline a try today and take your Radiccio music collection with you wherever you go.

Nautiline is made by Gledtone LLC, a separate company from us. We have been working together to ensure our products work great together.

A brief aside: How we got here, and where we’re going

A quarter century ago, Steve Jobs introduced Apple’s “digital hub” strategy, with the Mac at the center. Apps like iTunes on your Mac allowed you to organize and curate your own collection, and could help you transfer it to portable devices like CD players, iPod, and eventually, iPhone.

The “digital hub” eventually fell by the wayside, largely having been replaced by cloud services. And yet, we feel that, in comparison to the cloud, there are still distinct benefits to the concept of the Mac as a hub. There are those who appreciate a larger degree of ownership and control over their data – and in particular, their personal music collection.

With Radiccio Server, we are taking the first step towards building a new kind of digital hub for music.

I try very hard not to discuss future plans, because things are always in motion. But it’s hard not to acknowledge that a version of Radiccio for iPhone would make a lot of sense in the future – and I want that to happen. There is a lot more I still want to do with the Mac version of Radiccio, too.

We are a small, one-person business, and we can’t do this alone – we need your help. Right now, the best way you can help is by subscribing to Radiccio Plus! Your subscription directly supports our future development efforts. We have no outside investors, we don’t do ads or affiliate relationships, and we don’t collect or sell any data – making high-quality software for you is our only business, and Radiccio is our only product. So, your support is literally the only thing keeping us going. Thank you very much to everyone for their past and current support!

Bonjour tout le monde

In 2003, iTunes 4.0 introduced a feature that let you access music over the LAN via Bonjour. As it happened, this was just in time for me to go off to college. After I got settled in the dorm, I opened my laptop for the first time and suddenly found dozens of music libraries in my iTunes sidebar. With a single click, I could join the party, too. Whether you had Mac or Windows, everyone was welcome. It was one of the most magical computing experiences I can remember.

I thought it might be fun to bring that back. As mentioned, Radiccio supports Bonjour, so your server shows up automatically on other Macs with Radiccio on the same LAN. With the default settings, this only happens if both Macs are signed into the same iCloud account – after all, you don’t want your roommates messing with your favorites and playlists. But if you click the checkbox “allow anonymous access”, this restriction is removed – now any device on the LAN can access the server, just like in 2003. And don’t worry – anonymous access doesn’t allow making any changes, nor viewing personal information like play counts.

This feature in Radiccio is not compatible with iTunes or Music.app – it is inspired by that feature, but it is not the same feature. That’s because, instead of the old protocol from 2003 – which is seldom used any more – Radiccio uses OpenSubsonic, which has the benefit of much more developer support these days. Bonjour and anonymous access are two new proposed additions to OpenSubsonic that Radiccio is the first to implement; it is my hope that other app developers will implement these too, so that everyone can join in the fun.

As a little extra bonus: The free version of Radiccio can access Bonjour servers anonymously – no subscription needed. Tell your friends, and enjoy!

Some bookkeeping changes with Librarian

Since launch, the Librarian database has been located in the same location on disk as your audio files. I felt this was important for several reasons:

1. It’s your data, and that means you should be able to find where it is located, so you can do what you want with it.
2. For people who use shared external drives or network volumes, this allows Radiccio to share the same database across multiple Macs.

However, this came with a significant performance penalty. External drives and network volumes are almost always much slower than the internal SSD; often 10 to 50 times slower, or more! And when the database is also on the external drive, it’s not just the file scanning that is slowed down, it’s also every database query – scanning makes a lot of database queries, but even just simply navigating around the app is more sluggish this way. This was becoming painfully slow for those with large collections.

So, this version of Radiccio finally makes the change to move the Librarian database onto your Mac’s fast internal storage (if it wasn’t there already). This migration will automatically happen the first time you launch Radiccio after updating. You will no longer see the Librarian.radicciodb file in your music folders.

The result of this is that scanning should now be faster than ever before, both in terms of the first-ever scan of a new collection, and subsequent scans.

Going back to my original justification, I reëxamined whether those reasons still held, especially when weighed against the increasingly burdensome performance penalty:

1. It is still your data, and you should still be able to find it. I addressed this by adding a “Reveal Database” button in the Source Settings window.
2. For people who use Radiccio on multiple Macs, there is now a new and better way to share your collections between them: Radiccio Server. This should be much faster and more convenient than ever before.

For most people, who only used Radiccio on one Mac, no action is needed. The change happens automatically.

In cases where you were accessing the same external volume on more than one Mac: After updating to Radiccio 1.4, each Mac will have its own separate copy of the Librarian database. It will no longer be shared like it was before. This means that, going forward, each Mac will need to scan your files separately, and changes you make (like favorites, auto skip, and journal) will likewise only be reflected on the Mac that made the change.

We recommend using Radiccio Server to share your collections between your Macs, but it is up to you if you want to do this or not. If you prefer to have separate Librarian databases, no problem.

As always, Radiccio does not make changes to your audio files. This is not changing.

Integrations for metadata editing

Another frequent request we get is the ability to edit file metadata (also known as “tags”). We have not done this so far for several reasons:

• We like to be able to say, simply, that Radiccio does not make changes to your audio files. This helps new users feel more comfortable giving Radiccio a try.
• There are already some great Mac apps out there which specialize in audio file metadata editing. It would take us a lot of time to implement this ourselves, so we would prefer to focus our efforts on doing things that haven’t been done before!

That said, it would be convenient if there was a way to make some quick changes to the files you’re currently looking at in Radiccio.

That’s why this update adds integration with two great Mac apps: Meta and Mp3tag! If you have either app installed (or both), you’ll now see options in Radiccio’s “⋯” menus to use them to edit metadata. Choosing one of these options will launch the corresponding app, already loaded with the specific files you were looking at in Radiccio. Make your changes, then quit the other app – your changes will appear in Radiccio momentarily.

Also remember: Although not directly integrated, MusicBrainz Picard is another great option. While the others are more focused on making edits to a handful of files at a time, Picard is for making changes across your entire collection at once; it can automatically find and correct text and artwork metadata for you. After using Picard, do a full re-scan in Radiccio for it to pick up the changes.

We are not affiliated with the developers of these apps.

Other changes in this version

• When you click the reload button when viewing an album, the metadata is reloaded from the filesystem, so your metadata changes can show up without needing to do a re-scan.
  • This can take a moment if there are a lot of files in the album, or a slow storage device.
• Significantly improved performance of artwork image loading and caching
• Improved performance and layout of Journal window
  • In the Journal window, you can now collapse and hide the ratings options or the notes field, if you prefer to use only one or the other
• Fixed an issue where “No Items” might incorrectly appear after using the app for a while

Up next…

Radiccio Server feels like a big milestone for us. It was an enormous effort, but we felt that this was necessary in order to reach people who could not otherwise consider a music player that only works on the Mac.

A built-in server was always part of the plan, but it was supposed to come much later. The original plan for Radiccio was to primarily rely on Apple Music for syncing music across devices. However, Apple Music integration did not turn out the way we had hoped, due to unexpected limitations in what Apple provides to developers. Besides that, we have been hearing from more and more people that they are looking for alternatives to “big tech” streaming services, rather than to become more deeply entrenched in them. We agree. So now, our ambition is nothing less than to provide a complete, end-to-end music collection and listening solution – using open standards and formats, so that you’ll have the freedom to choose apps that work together instead of being siloed apart. After all, your music collection is yours – that’s what it means to #OwnYourMusic.

For our next few updates, we plan to get back to the basics, and focus more on the core music listening experience, now that we’ve reached the other end of this long detour. We also have had a lot of great feedback and feature requests that have been piling up – rest assured, we’ve been listening and we keep track of everything! So we’re looking forward to diving back in to our craft of making the best possible music player.

Talk to you again soon!

– dmd