iCanHazMusic

A music player for macOS 15.4 or higher. The latest stable version can be downloaded on the releases page, the latest unstable dev version is always available via this link (use with caution!), see below for compiling from source.

Main app:

Features

Playback

• Playback of everything macOS can decode natively:
  • MP3, FLAC, AAC/M4A/M4B (including ALAC), Ogg Vorbis, WAV, AIFF/AIFC, CAF
  • not supported: Opus, WMA, APE, WavPack, MPC and other formats macOS can't open
• Gapless playback with its own audio engine (built on AVAudioEngine, exact seeking, high-quality resampling with configurable quality)
• Playback modes & queue

Playlists

• Very large playlists (tens of thousands of entries at the very least)
• Drag and drop of files, directories and playlists, recursive directory import
• Tags reading, fast!
• Album art support (embedded or external images)
• Grouping by albums or a flat list if you prefer (can be switched per playlist)
• Playlist entries drag'n'drop reordering (in a nice non-confusing way)
• Playlists import/export (M3U8, M3U, PLS)
• Playlist search, Spotlight-style

Integrations

• Global hotkeys (media keys & custom ones) for playback, track/album navigation, random track/album, volume and search
• Dock menu with the current track and playback controls
• System notifications about the playback
• Last.fm scrobbling and now playing updates
• Lyrics: embedded in tags or fetched from LRCLIB (opt-in)

Under the hood

• Fully native macOS app, built in Swift/SwiftUI/AppKit with no third-party dependencies
• Very low resource usage
• Updates from GitHub releases (automatic check can be turned off, manual check in the About window)

Why

I was a big fan of the legendary foobar2000 until I moved to macOS in 2010. Naturally, for some time I continued using foobar under Wine, but the experience was subpar and eventually I started jumping from player to player. Some notable examples in no particular order:

• Clementine with its 10+ years old bug that makes it eat up to 50% of CPU for a simple mp3 playback
• cmus, which was fun and all, but just a bit too minimalistic
• DeaDBeeF with no stable release and insane bugs (back when I was using it, things seems to have improved since then)
• mac version of foobar2000 which is a fucking joke of a player

I remember many other apps, both free and paid, however each and every one of them did lack something important. It's also worth mentioning that with every year the chance to get a decent desktop audio player is only getting lower and lower - it's the age of cloud music now, not many people are still interested in those mammoths of a bygone era. But the urge of having a good desktop player is still here for me, that's why I finally decided to go for it myself.

It's by no means a replacement for foobar2000, just my personal compilation of things I would like to see in an audio player. Nothing is set in stone, however, feel free to create new issues with feedback and suggestions.

Roadmap

• more customization options
• simple web interface and API
• better Last.fm integration (like tracks, track info, number of plays, etc)
• Subsonic/Navidrome integration

What is not planned

• CUE support
• equalizer
• tags editing, format conversion and other Swiss knife functions
• advanced foobar2000-level customization

Compiling from source

iCHM is a Swift package (Swift tools 5.10, no third-party dependencies) for macOS 15.4 or higher.

1. Install Xcode command line tools (xcode-select --install) with a Swift 5.10+ toolchain.
2. Clone the repo.
3. Run ./build.sh to make a dev build: it builds the app for your architecture (arm64), creates dist/iCanHazMusic.app and launches it with its own working directory, ~/Library/Application Support/iCanHazMusic-dev (it runs in the foreground until you quit the app).

Other modes:

• ./build.sh test - generates test fixtures and runs the test suite, no artifacts.
• ./build.sh dev-release - universal (arm64 + x86_64) build, tests, dist/ichm-dev.zip, copies the app to /Applications (overwriting any existing copy), and uploads the zip with the share tool (specific to the author's setup, remove that step if you don't have it).
• ./build.sh release - universal build, tests, dist/ichm.zip and dist/ichm.dmg.

The plain compile check is swift build -c debug --arch arm64.

Optional requirements:

• FFmpeg (brew install ffmpeg) for generating the test fixtures (./build.sh test and the release modes).
• create-dmg (brew install create-dmg) for release.

Optional .env file in the repo root (git-ignored), read by build.sh:

• ICHM_SIGNING_IDENTITY - the codesigning identity (e.g. Developer ID Application: ...). Without it the app is signed ad-hoc, which is fine for running locally, but system notifications won't work in an ad-hoc signed build.
• ICHM_NOTARY_PROFILE (a notarytool keychain profile) or ICHM_APPLE_ID + ICHM_TEAM_ID + ICHM_APP_PASSWORD - notarization of the release builds.
• ICHM_LASTFM_API_KEY + ICHM_LASTFM_API_SECRET - your own Last.fm API credentials. They are embedded (obfuscated) into the bundle's Info.plist; without them the Last.fm integration is disabled.

The app keeps its data (config, playlists, caches) in ~/Library/Application Support/iCanHazMusic; pass --workdir /some/dir to the app to use another directory.