Improvements

• Contextual menu in the playback queue now has options to favorite, auto skip, journal, set star rating (when supported by the current source type).
  • Previously, this was partially implemented for some source types, but was accidentally shipped unfinished – we apologize for any confusion.

Fixes

• Fixed: Contextual menu icons were not appearing on macOS 27.
  • (Just for the record… we have been using a limited selection of icons in contextual menus since our app was originally designed for macOS 15. We did not add any new ones for macOS 26 or 27.)
    
    
• Fixed: In the source icon picker, the top row of icons were not appearing on macOS 27

API changes

• [OpenSubsonic sources] Radiccio now supports all of the authentication methods in the OpenSubsonic spec. This should improve compatibility with some servers, and continue working with Navidrome’s future plans.

• [Radiccio Server] Radiccio Server now supports all of the authentication methods in the OpenSubsonic spec. This should improve compatibility with some clients.

A general reminder about personal media servers: In order to keep your passwords and other credentials secure, we recommend always using HTTPS, or a secure VPN like Tailscale, to access your server.

Fixes

• Fixed: Playback controls and some other buttons were nonfunctional when running on macOS 27 Golden Gate
  • In order to make these buttons functional again, they have been temporarily reverted to their pre-Liquid Glass design, as also seen on macOS 15 Sequoia.
  • This is a result of an apparent bug in macOS 27, which we have reported to Apple. (FB24780612) We plan to bring back the Liquid Glass design if or when Apple fixes it.
  • macOS 26 retains the Liquid Glass appearance. Radiccio continues to support all three macOS versions.
    
    

• Fixed: Incorrect sidebar icon appearance on macOS 27

• Fixed: Apple Music album artwork did not appear on macOS 27

• Fixed: When viewing an album on macOS 27, artwork and controls at the top of the screen were sometimes partially hidden

Fixes

• This update fixes some UI sluggishness that was inadvertently introduced several versions ago. Radiccio should now be snappier overall, with fewer incidents of the dreaded beachball cursor.

  In order to fix this, we needed to do a one-time UI reset. App Settings and Source Settings have not been affected by this. But for example, your sorting options have been reset to defaults, and you will be asked to select a source the first time you launch Radiccio after this update. I apologize for the inconvenience, and this should hopefully not happen again.

  As a result, I hope you find Radiccio faster and nicer to use, and I will keep looking for ways to improve it further. You can never have enough snappy!

• Fixed an issue where customizing the toolbar was unavailable when the sidebar was set to “Sources List” in Settings > Navigation. It should be available regardless of the state of that setting.

Improvements

• From the Dock menu (control-click or right-click on Radiccio’s app icon in the Dock), you can now toggle favorite and auto-skip status, and set a star rating, for the currently playing song, if these features are supported by your current source.

Scrobbling

This was another one of the most-requested features. For those unfamiliar, “scrobbling” is a way to automatically share your listening activity with social music web sites. It’s kind of hard to explain if you’re not already familiar with it, but we’ve received quite a lot of requests for it!

The original scrobbling web site is Last.fm, and we’re also supporting ListenBrainz. You can use either one, or both at the same time.

To set up scrobbling, visit App Settings > Integrations.

Scrobbling works with all source types – notably, it even works with Apple Music, which is something the built-in Music app has never supported.

(And don’t worry – if you don’t set it up, nothing will be transmitted anywhere. Our privacy policy is as serious about this as ever.)

Scrobbling is available to all users and does not require Radiccio Plus!

Playlist editing – the Mac way, with drag & drop and multiple windows

A music player should have a way to create and edit playlists, and this is one of the features I wish we could have had at launch – but it took time to get it right. Now it’s finally here!

I always thought that the natural way to add items to a playlist would be drag and drop: You would browse your music collection the way you normally would – in the main window – and when you find what you want to add, simply drag it from there and drop it into the playlist window. So, that’s the way I designed and built this feature. You can see exactly where the items are coming from, and where they will end up, because everything is visible on the screen at the same time.

One of the most powerful and useful things about the Mac is its ability to display multiple windows at a time, and to resize and position them anywhere on your screen. Although Radiccio is largely a single-window app, we have the ability to open more windows when it would be helpful – so why not do so? The playlist window floats above the main window, so you don’t have to worry about it getting hidden while you’re looking for items to add to it.

You can drag items from anywhere in the main window, even from the playback queue. And you can have multiple playlists window open at a time, and drag and drop between them. (Note that a playlist belongs to a specific source, so you can’t drag items from other sources.)

It’s surprising to me that other Mac music apps don’t do it this way. It bothers me when an app forces me to edit playlists in a single window, without letting me look at my library at the same time. That kind of thing can happen with a “mobile first” design that gets ported to Mac later – Mac-specific features are an afterthought, if they are thought about at all. That’s the reason why Radiccio was made for Mac first.

You can create a new playlist with the “New” button in the Playlists view, or in the menu with File > New Playlist.

You can edit an existing playlist with the “Edit” button when viewing a playlist, or by command-clicking (right-clicking) a playlist and selecting “Edit” in the menu.

Playlist editing works with all source types except Apple Music. Sorry! I hope to find a solution in the future.

Playlist editing is available to all users and does not require Radiccio Plus!

Single source mode

From what I have been hearing, Radiccio users tend to fall into one of two categories: Either they have one source, or they have more than 10 sources. These are very different experiences! And I’m glad Radiccio works for so many kinds of people, but I felt like there was room for improvement in how Radiccio works for the former group.

For those with only one source, the sidebar was a bit useless. After all, the entire purpose of it is to switch sources, so if you only have one… what’s the point? In the past I’ve tried to remind people that you can hide the sidebar if it’s not needed, but still, I thought I could do better.

Single source mode is a new setting that you can find in Settings > Navigation > Sidebar > Single Source. When you enable it, the sidebar now shows the navigation items that were formerly shown in the horizontal tab bar: Overview, Artists, Albums, Songs, Playlists, Folders. Since the tab bar is no longer needed, it is hidden in this mode.

Also, if you are using a source type that supports pins (such as On My Mac or Radiccio Server), pinned items are also displayed in the sidebar in single source mode.

You can use single source mode even if you have more than one source. Although single source mode only shows one source at a time, you can still switch sources by clicking the source name at the top of the sidebar, or by using the Source menu in the Mac menubar.

Single source mode is available to all users and does not require Radiccio Plus!

Immersive View

Inspired by a blog post by Jon Hicks, Radiccio now has an “Immersive View” that you can use when music is playing. It simplifies the UI, and shows an enlarged version of the album artwork, with background colors and highlights that automatically change based on colors found in the artwork. You can toggle this mode using the new toolbar button, from the menu with View > Enter Immersive View, or with the keyboard shortcut command-shift-i.

Immersive View is available to all users and does not require Radiccio Plus!

Other changes

• When using sources list mode (the default sidebar mode) tabs can now be customized. Find this in Settings > Navigation > Tabs. Hide or show tabs, and drag and drop to reorder.

• You can now double-click a tab (Overview, Artists, Albums, etc.) to quickly navigate back to the start of that tab.

• Playlists can now be pinned (only for On My Mac + Librarian sources, and Radiccio Server sources)

• The main window toolbar can now be customized (View menu > Customize Toolbar…)
  • The toolbar now includes buttons for Journal and Immersive View by default. If not wanted, customize the toolbar and remove them.
  • When customizing the toolbar, you can optionally add a button to open the Server Activity window (not shown by default).
  • The toolbar is not always totally reliable about remembering your customizations. For best results, don’t remove the spaces on either side of the volume control. I’m looking for ways to improve this.
    
    

• When adding a Plex source, the server URLs are now shown. This may help with troubleshooting connectivity issues.

• Fixed an issue where command-W wasn’t always working correctly. (When the main window is in front, it closes open files, if any; it does not close the main window. When other windows are in front, it closes them.)

• Improved cleanup of temporary files, to avoid unnecessary disk space usage

• Known issue: When the playback queue auto-scrolls to a song, the scrolling animation is not smooth. (Manual scrolling seems fine.) This bothers me quite a lot, and I have spent many hours trying to fix it. I’m still looking for a solution.

• Known issue: VoiceOver incorrectly indicates that items in the Songs view are “not draggable”. These items are draggable with a pointing device. I’m looking for a solution. Workaround: When using VoiceOver, drag items from a different view (Artists, Albums, Playlists, Folders)

Everything new in this version is free

I mention this again because I think people don’t always notice that Radiccio is actually a free app. Of course, we offer Radiccio Plus! because that is the only way we can afford to keep making Radiccio for you. But if you don’t need the extra features in Plus!, you don’t have to pay, ever – and, as I hope this new version demonstrates, Radiccio keeps getting better, whether or not you’ve paid.

And when I say “free”, I don’t mean “free, as in, it’s going to annoy you until you pay”. We never nag you or show ads. There’s no time limit and no catch. Whether you pay or not, I really want you to enjoy Radiccio.

Why? Because the built-in Music app is free, and I want to provide a better alternative. I want Radiccio to be the best music player on the Mac, and I want as many people as possible to be able to use it.

Up next

In my last update I said I was going to focus on the “core music listening experience”, and this update is the first part of that effort. The next major update will continue this work. I’m looking forward to sharing it with you!

If you are enjoying Radiccio, please help spread the word! It’s really hard to get noticed these days, and a personal recommendation makes a huge difference.

– dmd

Fixes

• Fixed unnecessary truncation of buttons in album view (Play, Shuffle, etc.)
• Improved compatibility with more OpenSubsonic servers

Astiga

• Radiccio now supports Astiga
• With Astiga, you can store and stream your music collection with cloud services you may already have, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Amazon S3, and many more
• To use Astiga with Radiccio, add an OpenSubsonic source and select “Astiga” from the server list

New features

• You can now control-click (or right-click) an album or artist in the list, and play or shuffle these items immediately, or add them to the queue. (By customer request)
  • This is a quick shortcut, so you don’t have to click through and browse to the album(s) first
  • Available for all source types except Apple Music

Fixes

• Improved reliability of database upgrade operations
• Fixed: Auto Skip was missing from “⋯” menu in Now Playing for Radiccio Server sources
• Fixed minor issues with Radiccio Server API responses
• Fixed a potential database locking issue if Radiccio was quit while Librarian was scanning

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

Fixes

• Fixed: Crash when opening journal from the “…” menu in the song list
• Fixed: Radiccio was not properly handling expired subscriptions in some cases
  • If your subscription or free trial has expired, you may have been able to access Radiccio Plus! functionality for free. This was unintentional and should now no longer happen. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.
  • We hope you will consider supporting our work with a subscription. It is the only way we can continue working on new features and improvements for Radiccio. Thank you very much for your support.

Changes

• For new Plex sources, it is now possible to manually specify a URL to connect to. This may be useful in rare situations where the Plex cloud service does not provide any usable URLs for your server.

Fixes

• Fixed: Plex sources did not correctly prefer plex.direct URLs
• Fixed: Error messages did not properly appear when Radiccio was unable to connect to a Plex server during the “add source” workflow

Performance improvements

These improvements should reduce the occurrence of the “beachball” cursor where the UI appears to freeze momentarily.

• Improved performance of OpenSubsonic sources across all areas of the app
• Improved performance of the Songs tab for all types of sources

(We are aware of a remaining issue where there may still be a brief beachball when you first create a source in some cases. It should not occur again after initial source creation. We are aware of this and we are working on it!)

Navidrome

One of the most requested features so far has been support for Navidrome. It’s such a perfect fit for Radiccio that, if I had known about it at the time, I would have included it from the beginning! So, this is just another example of how helpful your feedback can be. Thank you for your patience! And now it’s finally here.

Navidrome is a personal media server, similar to Plex and Jellyfin (which we already support). However, Navidrome specializes in music. Funny coincidence – so do we!

Now you can add your Navidrome servers in Radiccio. Just like with Plex and Jellyfin, each Navidrome library on your server will appear as a separate browsable item in the sidebar. You can choose to add all libraries from a server, or only certain ones. And of course, you can connect to multiple Navidrome servers. There are other Navidrome players out there already, but not all of them can do these things. So, we hope we are bringing something new and interesting to the Navidrome landscape.

Navidrome sources require Radiccio Plus!

OpenSubsonic

Navidrome is compatible with OpenSubsonic, which is a community-developed standard that works with a variety of servers and music players. It’s sort of like a common language that they all speak, which provides for a large ecosystem of apps and servers that all work together.

What this means for Radiccio is that it is also compatible with other OpenSubsonic servers. We have additionally tested Radiccio with these:

• Gonic
• Lightweight Music Server

And hopefully, it will be compatible with any other music servers that use OpenSubsonic in the future.

OpenSubsonic sources require Radiccio Plus!

Also in this update

• The UI for adding a new source has been redesigned
• Fixed issue where some UI elements were not being properly restored after quitting and reopening the app for many users, depending on system settings. (For example, when you resize the now playing and playback queue views.) This should now work as intended regardless of system settings.
• Fixed issue where “View All” favorite albums in Jellyfin source would incorrectly display all albums, not only favorites
• Fixed Librarian issue where manually scanning a single source would incorrectly push back the next scheduled full scan

Next up…

We’re full speed ahead on making Radiccio the ultimate music app for Mac. The theme for the next major update is: “Dream bigger.” Stay tuned!