- Everything you'd expect from an offline music player!
- Map your music folders and browse your library in an organised view.
- Create playlists and manage the play queue interactively.
- Browse music using folder view when needed.
- Pin anything (almost!) to the sidebar for quick access to your favourite music.
- Navigate easily: right-click a track to go to its album, artist, year, etc.
- Native macOS integration with menubar and dock playback controls, plus dark mode support.
- Search quickly through large libraries containing thousands of songs.
The app is still in alpha, so things may look unpolished, but I've been testing the alpha builds for the past few weeks and fixing issues as I find them for v1 release. I welcome any feedback (and contributions!) on GitHub repo. Please give it a try and let me know what you think!
> Motivation
> I have a large collection of music files that I’ve gathered over the years, and I missed having a good offline music player on macOS. I used Swinsian (great app, by the way!), but it hasn't been updated in years. I also missed features commonly found in streaming apps; so I built Petrichor to scratch that itch and learn Swift and macOS app development along the way!
I also have a hard time seeing myself using a desktop music player without an iTunes-style column-mode browser.
The advantage is that you are forced to organize your music in your file system and that translates incredibly well to all other future systems. Want a special playlist? Just copy the files over and name them with a numeric prefix counting up. You can open that playlist ten years later on a different operating system.
Since I tend to listen to full albums, this has been a good way of doing things.
The main thing I'm missing is volume leveling.
* Smartlists, preferably with nested rules
* Proper search, the way iTunes did it: you have a huge excel-like list of songs that filters as you type
* Volume leveling
* Corresponding Windows/Mac/iPhone programs, with the ability to sync my collection like Dropbox
I would gladly pay $100 for this.
Search should already be very fast (and filter through matches across any metadata field) as the app uses FTS5 on SQLite db to search tracks. But let me know if you still notice performance issues or bugs around it.
There might be iOS app in future but no plans for Windows app as that's a separate project of its own.
For cloud storage syncing, I did consider it at one point but then scope of this app would be very large, and there are plenty good apps to sync cloud storage data, like I personally use https://maestral.app/ for syncing Dropbox.
> P.S. I plan publish it on Homebrew soon.
1. Please consider publishing on MacPorts too.
2. Please consider supporting m4b audiobooks (it’s a different file extension from the common m4a, but also supports chapters).
Audiobooks support looks like a neat idea, I'll see if I can accommodate it in future, for now, I'm keeping it limited to music files only.
> Petrichor is the earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil.
I currently use iTunes, and I might be an idiot, but I don’t seem to be able to export/import my library between installs, so I lose my plays and settings, but I never lose music files!
I have a massive music library and mostly just listen on shuffle, but it would be cool to be able to sync to my iPhone.
I’ll try all the recommendations in this thread!
But from the code, seems it does.
static let supportedExtensions = ["mp3", "m4a", "wav", "aac", "aiff", "flac"]Also just dropping a Winamp-like app I use on the Mac, it has quick access to AU Audio Units, which I like:
https://github.com/kartik-venugopal/aural-player
UPDATE: Oh, the developer discontinued it.
http://ssrubin.com/img/musiclibrary/iTunes.png
https://www.tech-recipes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/itun...
https://cpng.pikpng.com/pngl/s/556-5568070_flower-boy-itunes...
A thought, because of all the folks asking for volume limiting: if you're not into DSP, it might be easier to simply add a point in your audio output flow for AudioUnits and let people use one of the existing limiters for it - Apple just straight up includes one on every Mac in the AudioUnits library - or write one specifically and include it.
This would also allow not just limiting but EQ, compression or even simulated tube warmth if people wanted that. (Or, y'know, running everything through autotune and a bit crusher if they're psychopaths. :-D)
I've never coded in Swift but I imagine adding a point to route through AudioUnits is probably not hugely difficult and iirc Apple has example code for doing it, at least they used to.
Keep up the awesome work, either way!
Also, I'd like to ask if it currently supports smart playlists?
Congratulations on your work!
I'd expect winamp-level UI customization, cross-platform support, iTunes library smart playlist support...
That’s a pretty high bar for a Mac app assuming some hardcore offline music lovers might use older OS versions.
I was listening to some early 2000s alternative rock today and then randomly in the middle of my radio station it started playing a kids freeze dance song.
The best thing it has going for it is the lossless albums and native airplay casting. I got a free trial, but I’m not going to renew. I’d consider staying if they added native last.fm scrobbling, but even then I’m not sure.
I’m really bummed about the scrobbling because I lost several weeks of not a month of plays because my phone offloaded the scrobbler app and I didn’t notice. The official app for it on Mac says to use one or the other (macOS or iOS) because it will count twice.
I have been using itunes/music to do that and it honestly works just fine. I have hundreds of playlists from over 10 years ago that still works. Finding specific playlist or music to play is pretty easy, especially with Alfred.
The longevity is the biggest concern to me when considering the third party apps. If it stops being maintained in the future I would be stuck and need to do the chore of moving them properly to another application. With the native app I am sure it will work for the next 20 years.
You’re unfair. iTunes’ UI was much better in 2003 than Music.app’s in 2025.
There was a lot of great UI back then! None of it in iTunes, but still.
Nonsense, you could be using Spotify.
HOWEVER.
I can't run it. I get a message. '"Petrichor.app" can't be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software'
I've tried the release dmg and also the homebrew version.
The big advantage of Winamp was that it ran on Windows, and on ancient PCs at the time.
