Question 1

My music is in Music.app, Plex or foobar2000 today. Do I start over?

Accepted Answer

My music is in Music.app, Plex or foobar2000 today. Do I start over?

No. You point Musicae at the folders your files already sit in, and it builds a library from what is there. The tags you have spent years on are the starting point, not something it overwrites.

Your old app keeps working on the same files, because nothing is moved, renamed or copied into a vault. You can run both until you are sure.

What does it add to what I already have?

Do my playlists and ratings come across?

Do my folders have to be arranged a certain way?

Can it rip my CDs?

My tags are a mess. Is that a problem?

Question 2

What does it add to what I already have?

Accepted Answer

It listens to every file and measures tempo, key, energy, loudness and spectral balance — properties no tag holds. Then it asks the open music databases about the releases and fills in what was missing: cover art, artist pictures, album and artist descriptions, genres, and the words that are being sung. Most collections come out of the first pass knowing more about themselves than they did in the app they came from.

Question 3

Do my playlists and ratings come across?

Accepted Answer

Playlists as M3U files import directly — Musicae matches the paths against your library, including the usual variations between machines and drives. Ratings depend on where they live. If they are written into the files, as foobar2000 and MusicBee do, Musicae reads them, ID3v2 POPM included. If they only live inside another program's own database, as with Music.app, they stay there — nothing in your files carries them.

Question 4

Do my folders have to be arranged a certain way?

Accepted Answer

No. Musicae reads what is in the files, not what is in the path — an artist-slash-album tree is welcome, a folder called rips 2011 works just as well. You can add several folders on several drives, including a NAS, and Musicae remembers its way back to them after a restart. Collections that grew across three disks over fifteen years do not have to be tidied up first.

Question 5

Can it rip my CDs?

Accepted Answer

No. Ripping is its own craft — offset correction, AccurateRip, error recovery — and doing it badly is worse than not doing it. XLD and dBpoweramp do it properly and are free or cheap. Musicae takes over where they finish: point it at the folder and the rip is part of the collection, with everything it knows about the release already attached.

Question 6

My tags are a mess. Is that a problem?

Accepted Answer

That is the normal case, and it is half the reason Musicae exists. What is there gets used, what is missing gets measured or fetched, and what contradicts itself lands in the checking sheet instead of being quietly overwritten. You see each case, and you decide. Musicae never claims it corrected something you did not look at.

Question 7

Does Musicae change my files?

Accepted Answer

Not on its own. It reads your files and builds its own library from what it finds; nothing is moved, renamed or rewritten unless you ask for it. When you do ask — in the repair work, where Musicae reports what looks wrong — you see the change before it happens, the library is backed up, and it can be undone. That part is in development for 1.0.

Question 8

What does Musicae do with my files?

Accepted Answer

It reads the tags first — that is where it starts. Then it listens to the audio itself and measures tempo, key, energy, loudness and spectral balance, so it knows how a track actually sounds and not only what somebody typed about it. All of that happens on your Mac, with no internet involved, and it is written into Musicae's own library. Your files are only read.

Question 9

Where does my music have to live?

Accepted Answer

Wherever it already lives. Folders on the internal disk, an external drive, a NAS — Musicae points at them and leaves them alone. Nothing is copied into a vault of its own.

Question 10

What happens to my library if Musicae disappears?

Accepted Answer

Your music is untouched, in the folders it was always in. The library Musicae builds — what it knows about your collection — is a single file on your Mac that you can copy, back up and move. Nothing about your collection is held on a server, so there is no account to lose and nothing to get back.

Question 11

Do I need an account or an internet connection?

Accepted Answer

No account, ever. Everything — playing, browsing, analysis, recommendations — works offline. The internet is used for one thing: asking open databases about a title, an artist or an album, to fill in genres, artwork and biographies. Never about you. See the technical page .

Question 12

What does it cost, and is there a subscription?

Accepted Answer

Between €100 and €130, once. No subscription — not for the app, not for anything in it. The version you bought keeps working.

Question 13

Can I try it first?

Accepted Answer

30 days with everything unlocked, before any money changes hands — whether you buy here or on the App Store. Backup, undo and restore work during the trial as well; a library is never held hostage to a purchase.

Question 14

One-time purchase — what about updates?

Accepted Answer

Fixes and improvements to the version you bought are included. A major new version may be paid, later; when that happens, what you own keeps running as it is.

Question 15

Is it on the App Store?

Accepted Answer

Yes, at the same price as buying it here — and the 30 days are the same either way.

Question 16

What about the iPhone app?

Accepted Answer

Included, at no extra cost. The Mac stays the archive — analysis, repair, curation — and the phone carries a chosen part of it, prepared on your Mac rather than in a cloud. In development for 1.0.

Question 17

Which formats?

Accepted Answer

FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, CAF and AU up to 352.8 kHz and 32 bit; MP3, AAC and Opus for everything else. Gapless, and Spatial Audio stays intact. The list was made by decoding a file of each, not by trusting a file extension — the details are here .

Question 18

What does it not play?

Accepted Answer

WMA, WavPack, TTA, Monkey's Audio and DSD. macOS does not decode them, and Musicae will not claim otherwise.

Question 19

Single-file rips with a CUE sheet?

Accepted Answer

Not supported. Musicae works in files — one track, one file — so an album ripped as one long FLAC with a CUE sheet beside it arrives as a single hour-long track. Splitting it first, which XLD does, puts it right.

Question 20

What about classical?

Accepted Answer

Composers are read from your tags and you can browse by them. But there is no hierarchy of work, movement and performance — Musicae thinks in releases, artists and tracks, the way popular music is shaped. A classical corner inside a wider collection is fine. If your collection is mostly classical, software built for that shape will serve you better, and we would rather say so now.

Question 21

How large a collection can it hold?

Accepted Answer

There is no set limit. It is developed against a library of 35,480 tracks, which is where the numbers on the technical page come from.

Question 22

Exclusive mode, hog mode, automatic sample rate switching?

Accepted Answer

No, and we would rather be plain about it than let you find out. Musicae does not seize the output device and it does not set its sample rate for you. It watches what the device is doing, follows it, and shows you the rate you are actually playing at. Set the rate in Audio MIDI Setup and Musicae adds nothing of its own on top — no mixer, no processing you did not switch on. If taking sole command of the DAC is the feature you are shopping for, Audirvana and Roon are built around it and Musicae is not.

Question 23

Can I copy music onto a DAP, an SD card or a phone?

Accepted Answer

Your files never stopped being files. They sit in your folders in their original formats, so anything that reads a disk reads them — a Fiio or Astell&Kern, an SD card, a car stereo. For the iPhone there is the companion: you mark what should travel and it goes across as real files, playable with nothing in range. That part is in development for 1.0.

Question 24

Does it do multi-room?

Accepted Answer

No. Musicae plays on the Mac it runs on, and sends a curated part of your collection to your iPhone. If your listening is built around several rooms at once, this is not the right instrument.

Question 25

Which Mac do I need?

Accepted Answer

Any Mac with Apple silicon, running macOS 15 or later.

Question 26

Does it scrobble to Last.fm?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it is off until you turn it on. You sign in with your own Last.fm account, and from then on what you play is reported there; marking a track as loved can travel with it. Leave it off and Musicae reports nothing anywhere. That is the state it ships in.

Question 27

Does it play Tidal or Qobuz?

Accepted Answer

No, and it is not planned. Musicae is an instrument for the collection you own, and the moment a catalogue you rent is mixed in, half of what this software does stops making sense — a release you cannot hold has no versions to compare and no gap to show. Nothing stops you from running a streaming app beside it. They are answering different questions.

Question 28

I own the same album three times — original, remaster, MFSL. Do they become one?

Accepted Answer

No. They are three releases and they stay three releases, each with its own year, its own mastering, its own place. Nothing merges them because their titles look alike. What Musicae does add is the date underneath: it knows that a 2011 reissue of a 1979 record is a 1979 record. So the remaster keeps its own identity on the shelf, and still lands in the right year when you look back through time.

Question 29

What does the checking sheet actually find?

Accepted Answer

Contradictions a collection produces on its own over twenty years. Two discs of one release disagreeing about the year. A compilation with no album artist, which is what makes a release break in half. The same artist spelled two ways, once with an umlaut and once without. A genre that fits one track and no other on the record. A tempo that cannot be right. Each one is a case you can read, with what Musicae thinks the answer is and why. It does not fix anything behind your back.

Question 30

One album shows up twice, half of it under Various Artists. Why?

Accepted Answer

Because the software is sorting by a tag instead of looking at the record. When one track carries an album artist and the next one does not, the release splits, and the half you are looking for is filed somewhere you would not think to look. Musicae decides what a release is from its contents, not from that tag. In this library 510 of the sampler releases carry an album tag that would have made them ordinary albums — letting the tag win would have got them wrong.

Question 31

Why are compilations not just albums?

Accepted Answer

Because they are not. A sampler has no artist, its tracks come from everywhere, and it belongs to a series that continues. Filing it as an album by whoever happens to open it loses all of that — and in a large collection, most tracks live on compilations.

Question 32

Why does it show how old I was?

Accepted Answer

Because a release year on its own says little, and “you were seventeen” says a lot. It opens a second way through the collection: the years you were fourteen, sixteen, twenty. Musicae never claims you listened to something back then — only that it came out while you were that age. Your birth year is optional and never leaves the Mac.

Question 33

Where does the extra information come from?

Accepted Answer

From your files first — what is in the tags is what Musicae starts with. Open databases fill the gaps: MusicBrainz, Discogs, Last.fm and Wikipedia for genres, artwork, biographies and release dates. What arrives is stored on your Mac, so it stays when a source does not.

Question 34

Is any of this AI?

Accepted Answer

No model decides what you hear. Tempo, key, energy and spectrum are measured from the audio; relationships come from your library's own structure. Where something is inferred rather than known, Musicae says so instead of flattening it into a fact.

Before you trust it with a collection.

Coming from something else

Your files

Buying it

What it plays

Your gear

Other services

How it thinks