Radiccio 1.0
Crispy Crunchy Computerware (Mastodon):
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.
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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.
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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. […] I designed Radiccio to be the opposite of lock-in; I want you to feel like you can leave at any time.
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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’m really excited to see development in this space, and I’ll be following Radiccio with interest, but at the moment it doesn’t seem like the app for me. Radiccio seems to be at its best when using the Librarian feature and On My Mac sources, but I prefer to use an Apple Music source (i.e. music managed by the OS, even if you don’t subscribe to the Apple Music service) so that my music and metadata will sync to my iPhone and be available to third-party apps there such as Marvis. Apple Music sources rely on MusicKit. In theory, this is supposed to let Apple handle the syncing and other hard stuff while third-party apps focus on the user experience. But the reality is that MusicKit has all sorts of problems and limitations. I feel like I’m still locked into Music.app until either MusicKit improves or someone makes a complete system (Mac, iPhone, watchOS, CarPlay) that’s compelling enough to get me to leave Apple’s world (though I would still use Music.app for purchasing).
Previously:
Update (2025-10-31): dmd:
Other players seem like they want to take control of your files; to abstract away the details of the filesystem, so that you don’t have to think about it. Radiccio takes the opposite approach: It leans into the filesystem, expecting you to manage your files the way you want, while adding a layer on top that provides music-specific tools. As I mention frequently on this web site, Radiccio does not modify your files; that is a policy I intend to continue. In this way, Radiccio works alongside Finder, as a complementary tool, rather than a replacement for it.
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The first thing most people notice about the UI is the large space set aside on the right side of the screen for album art, now playing info, and playback controls.
The biggest reason for this is that I wanted to see album art more clearly. For me, the album art is a significant part of the experience of enjoying music. I’ve never understood why most modern Mac music players relegate it to such a tiny, often literally thumbnail-sized area.
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I also feel that the auto-scrolling, marquee-like effect that you see in some apps has usability problems. What reason is there for making me wait for an animation to complete just so I can read a few words of text? Moreover, what is it about a music player that justifies such unique treatment of a line of text, the likes of which you would find nowhere else in any software?
I love posts like this that explain why certain design decisions were made.
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"until either MusicKit improves”
Probably right behind fixing ScreenTime….
"someone makes a complete system”
Roon? Not sure about watchOS / CarPlay though.
Gave this one a shot, but there is way way way too much friction between opening the program and just, say, shuffling a playlist. Everything feels like it requires thrice the number of steps as doing something in Music.app. I'm sure there's a certain user and mindset in mind for this one but I couldn't stand the experience of using it.
@billyok - Thank you for trying the app!
There is a button at the top of the playlist titled “Shuffle” that should let you do that in one click. (If you are using an Apple Music source, this button may be absent - this is due to current MusicKit limitations, like Michael mentioned; my news post gets into more about why that is, but I'll keep trying to improve it if I can.)
If interested, I’d love to hear more about your experience and how we could do better. feedback@radiccio.music
I can highly recommend Swinsian [0] as another option. Only plays local files but very pleasant to use.
It looks good.
I would never consider a subscription, and $129 is about double what a good music player should cost, though as a lifetime purchase, never needing to pay for upgrades might even that out.
Missing piece of the puzzle though - a Mac music library app is only half the story; it needs to have an iOS app that can be configured with playlists etc *from the Mac*.
This is why, nice as Swinsian is, it remains a nope for me.
I continue to recommend Doppler, which does most of the music stuff of iTunes, and has a little server menubar app that lets you sync music to and from Doppler on your iOS device, no cloud needed.
I don't understand why all those more "elegant" Music.app alternatives in the end looks worse the Music app. Doesn't look too elegant to my eyes.
@Michael I think you've hit the nail on the head: you can't replace an app without replacing the whole ecosystem, because even when you're syncing offline, MusicKit is just the Apple-approved (and Apple-limited) answer to interoperability. I doubt Apple will completely specify its protocols without inescapable legal/regulatory pressure, but that's what's needed. I too may have my issues with Music.app, which I use offline, but I need it to manage a library that can be synced to my iPhone, so that's that.
Here we go. Any player out there with resume playback? What I meant is that you are listening a very long playlist of thousands of songs on Mac, quit iTunes, reboot the Mac or shut down the Mac. The next time that you open iTunes it starts from song number one again, but you want it to resume from the last song played (say, song number 1456 or whatever). For me that is the most essential feature missing in iTunes, and it was available in SoundJam MP 2.5.3 back in 2001, from where iTunes was developed.
