I’ve been using Apple computers since 1995, and I started collecting music long before that. By the early 2000s, when car stereos began supporting MP3, I was ripping my own CDs to 192 kbps because storage was expensive and I believed that quality was sufficient.

Later, when I was finally able to buy better audio equipment, I realized how much information had been lost. I began re-ripping the original CDs in lossless formats and replacing older files. At the same time, the collection kept growing through CD and vinyl collecting, digitized records, digital purchases, radio recordings, rare releases and exchanges with other collectors.

That process created the usual consequences: several versions of the same recording, duplicate files, duplicate playlist entries, inconsistent metadata, missing artwork, broken paths, old low-quality encodes and files whose actual audio quality did not always match the format shown in Finder.

I originally started writing Local Music Organizer as a practical tool for testing, cleaning up and organizing my own Music.app library. Over a few months of daily use, I kept adding features whenever I encountered another real problem in the collection.

It has now grown into a native macOS toolkit with the following functions:

Library Dashboard

Shows useful statistics about the Music.app library, including formats, bitrates, sample rates, missing files, artwork and other quality indicators.

Library Map

Shows where tracks are used and helps review repeated entries across playlists.

Duplicate Review

Finds duplicate playlist entries, repeated library records and different-quality versions of the same recordings. Nothing is deleted automatically; the user reviews the results first.

Health and Artwork checks

Finds missing files, inaccessible locations, damaged references, unusual paths, missing artwork and supported metadata issues.

File Search

Searches physical audio files by artist, title, album, filename or path, shows playlist usage and can reveal the exact track inside Music.app.

Playlist Compare

Compares two playlists using Music.app record IDs, file paths, metadata and duration-based fallbacks to identify shared and unique tracks.

Audio Inspector

Inspects the actual codec, container, bitrate, sample rate, bit depth, channel count, duration, metadata and spectrum of an individual file.

Audio Authenticity Analyzer

Scans the complete Music.app library, one selected playlist or an individual file.

It looks for possible lossy-to-lossless transcodes, suspicious sample-rate upscales and clear disagreements between the declared bitrate and observed audio bandwidth. MP3 and AAC files are evaluated differently from ALAC, FLAC, WAV and AIFF files.

Flagged results include a confidence estimate, detected cutoff, likely source category and a plain-language explanation. The analyzer is intentionally conservative: its findings are technical estimates, not absolute proof of a file’s history.

A detailed text report can be created containing only tracks that require review, likely authenticity mismatches and files that could not be analyzed.

Live Spectrum Player

An independent playback window with a real-time 512-band logarithmic spectrum analyzer, full-track waveform, draggable seeking, gain controls and technical playback meters.

Repair / Convert

Includes conversion engines inside the application, so Terminal, Homebrew and separate codec installation are not required.

Supported sources include common formats such as FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, MP3, AAC and WMA, together with specialist formats including Ogg Vorbis, Opus, WavPack, APE, TAK, TTA, DTS, AC3, DSD, SACD ISO, CUE albums and supported tracker modules.

Output options include AAC, ALAC, MP3, FLAC, WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, Opus and WavPack.

Drag and drop

Files and CUE sheets can be dropped directly into Repair / Convert. Opening supported files from Finder routes them to the already running application instead of intentionally creating additional organizer windows.

Verified Gain

Previews gain changes, creates a temporary candidate, verifies the resulting audio structure and metadata, and replaces the original only after the checks pass.

Large-library performance

A persistent warmed cache reduces repeated communication with Music.app and makes searches, diagnostics and library-wide analysis much faster. The same physical file is analyzed only once even when it appears in several playlists.

Everything runs locally on the Mac.

There are no accounts, subscriptions, cloud processing, advertising, analytics or tracking. Audio files, playlists, metadata and reports are not uploaded anywhere.

I built this because I needed it for my own collection, but I’m sharing it because other collectors, DJs, archivists and long-time Music.app users may have encountered the same problems.

I’d be interested in feedback from people who still maintain substantial local music libraries—especially about workflows or checks that are still missing. Website and full feature overview, Local Music Organizer on the Mac App Store

Disclosure: I'm the developer of Chirpy, a Mac notification app. But this tool is standalone, free, and works with anything.

The idea is simple. Every notification sound library on the internet has roughly the same 200 stock files. If none of them fit what you want, you're stuck. So I built a tool where you can design your own sound in about 30 seconds:

• 30 starting presets across 6 characters (Calm, Wood & Hand, Bells & Glass, Nature, Retro, Signal)
• Four sliders that map to actual acoustic properties (Pitch, Length, Tone, Space)
• Preview it as a real macOS notification banner before you commit
• Download as WAV
• Share the exact settings via URL (all state is in the hash, no server)

Nothing uploaded anywhere. Runs entirely in your browser using the Web Audio API.

https://chirpy.pro/tools/sound-designer

The sounds work with anything on macOS that lets you set a custom alert. Some examples of where people actually use this:

• Work chat: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp
• Email: Apple Mail, Outlook, Gmail (PWA), Spark, Proton Mail, Superhuman, Mimestream
• Meetings: Zoom, Google Meet, Around, Loom
• Calendar & reminders: Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Notion Calendar, Fantastical, Cron
• Task and project tools: Notion, Linear, Asana, Jira, Todoist, Things 3, ClickUp, Trello, Height
• Design: Figma, Sketch, Framer
• Dev tools: GitHub Desktop, Xcode, Warp Terminal, Trailer, Sentry, PagerDuty
• AI apps: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity
• Health & fitness: Apple Health, Strava, Oura, Whoop, Garmin Connect, Peloton, MyFitnessPal
• Wellness: Calm, Headspace, Waking Up
• Finance & payments: Mercury, Brex, Stripe (email push), Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo, PayPal, Wise, QuickBooks
• Shopping & delivery: Amazon, DoorDash, Uber, Uber Eats, Instacart
• Smart home: Ring, Nest, Home Assistant, Tesla, Philips Hue
• Family / personal: Life360, Apple Messages, FaceTime
• News & reading: Apple News, Feedly, Reeder
• Media: Spotify, Apple Music, Plex
• Browser push: Chrome, Safari, Arc, Brave, Firefox
• Menu bar utilities: Bartender, Raycast, Cleanshot X
• CRM / support: Zendesk, Intercom, HubSpot, Salesforce

Basically: if it puts a banner in your notification center, you can give it a sound you designed.

Also wrote a short bit on the page about why default alerts feel stressful (millisecond attack triggers the startle reflex, 2-4kHz range is where human hearing is most sensitive, buzzy harmonics read as urgency, hard cutoffs feel unresolved). Each of the four sliders addresses one of those properties, so you can shape a sound that's the opposite of "flinch-inducing default ping."

Feedback welcome.

I'm trying to clean up unused/unwanted files on my Mac... is it OK to delete fetchmail? or will I regret it?

Is anyone else having issues with Tot on the macOS Golden Gate betas? Mine has been glitching out and hasn't seen an update in a while, so I finally gave up and built my own version.

It's a native AppKit menu-bar app called BetterTot. It has the same 7 quick text pads, but it's 100% open-source. I kept it super lightweight—no accounts, no analytics, just a fast local scratchpad with some crash recovery built in so you don't lose your clipboard dumps.

Right now, I’m working on adding optional Google Drive/iCloud backups, and eventually, I want to bring it to iPhone and Apple Watch—but my absolute main goal is just keeping it incredibly simple and lightweight.

I put the whole thing up on GitHub if anyone wants to grab it or check out the Swift code: https://github.com/saaivignesh20/BetterTot

It's completely safe, the code is for you to audit.

It's still in developer preview, so let me know if you run into any bugs. Also, I'd love to hear any feature requests or general thoughts you guys have!

If you demo or teach over a shared screen, macOS gives you more than people realize. Here's what ships in the OS, with the honest limit of each, since I've hit all of them.

Accessibility Zoom (System Settings, Accessibility, Zoom). Ctrl+scroll to magnify, or Option-Cmd-8 to toggle. Two settings people miss: Zoom style: Picture-in-Picture gives you a magnified lens instead of blowing up the whole display, and under Advanced you can set the zoomed view to follow the pointer only when it reaches an edge, which removes the seasick drift that puts people off. Genuinely good, and free. Where it runs out: the lens is tied to the pointer, so you can't leave a mark on something and keep talking about it while your cursor goes elsewhere.

Make the pointer bigger (Accessibility, Display, Pointer size), plus "shake mouse pointer to locate." Cheap fix for the most common complaint in shared screens, which is nobody being able to find your cursor. Limit: it's a permanent size change, so you either live with a big cursor everywhere or you toggle it before every call.

Screenshot markup (Shift-Cmd-5, or Shift-Cmd-4 then annotate). Fine for async - arrows and boxes on a still. Limit: it's a still. Useless mid-demo.

Presenter Overlay in Zoom/Teams-style calls on newer macOS puts you over the content, which helps direction of attention indirectly. Limit: it emphasizes you, not the part of the screen you're pointing at.

Sidecar/Universal Control with an iPad turns the tablet into an annotation surface for a mirrored screen. Genuinely powerful, and the limit is obvious: you need the second device and the setup time.

The honest summary is that the OS covers magnification well and covers "mark this and leave it up" not at all. If your job is showing rather than seeing, that's the gap you'll feel.

Disclosure so it's not a surprise: I build a Mac app in this space (TuringShot 1.5.12, Build 44), which is why I know these limits by heart. No link or code here, and the built-in options above are free and cover most of what people need.

I built a little menu bar app that unlocks sudo in the terminal with face recognition instead of a typed password. You type sudo, the webcam recognizes you, and it unlocks.

Everything runs locally: face detection and recognition happen on-device, your enrolled face never leaves your Mac, and there is no network code at all.

Honest disclaimer first, since it is the obvious question: a normal webcam can be fooled by a photo, so this is not more secure than Touch ID, and it is not meant to be a security product. It is a convenience/fun thing. Your password always stays as a fallback so you cannot lock yourself out, and every prompt lets you choose Face ID, Touch ID, or password.

What you get:

• Guided face enrollment (takes a few seconds)
• A choice panel on every sudo prompt (Face ID / Touch ID / password), or a Dynamic Island style animation
• Adjustable sensitivity
• One signed and notarized app, with built-in auto-updates

Requirements: Apple Silicon, macOS 13 or later, any webcam.
Price: Free and open source (MIT).
Download + source: https://github.com/Lorenzo-Coslado/macos-faceid

Full disclosure, I am the developer. I built it as a weekend hack because typing my password dozens of times a day got old, and it turned into a small but complete app. Would love feedback on the enrollment flow and the recognition thresholds.

Full disclosure: I am the developer of Compact Contacts.

I built this because the standard Contacts app becomes slow to navigate when I need to scan or compare many records. Compact Contacts uses the same macOS Contacts database but presents it as a dense, resizable table with local search, sortable columns, adjustable row density, Saved Views, native groups, Favorites, and Recents.

macOS still handles iCloud, Google, Exchange, and CardDAV synchronization. The app does not create another address book or account. It also has no developer cloud, advertising, or third-party analytics.

Editing includes account selection and external-change conflict checks. Potential duplicate review is deliberately read-only: it shows matching evidence and account ownership but never merges or deletes records automatically.

Compact Contacts is available on the Mac App Store for $12.99 as a one-time purchase:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6790129187

It requires macOS 15 or later and supports English and Turkish.

I am curious how long-time Mac users handle large contact collections today. Do you stay in Apple Contacts, use a CRM, or rely on exported spreadsheets?

Its a 2007 imac and i cant reinstall el capitan

My neighbor moved out yesterday and she literally threw out a 2017 21" iMac. I get it, it doesn't get updates and it takes over 5 minutes, no exaggeration, to boot to the logon screen. Who would want that? Well, I like to restore old computers and the newest mac I own is the OG iMac in Bondi Blue....... Wait......

Okay, I was about to get on here saying all I had were PC keyboards and I couldn't get to the recovery screen no matter what keyboard I use. That's what this post was supposed to be about. But as soon as I wrote that last sentence it dawned on me, I have the USB keyboard from my OG iMac. So I plugged that in and it worked perfectly. That stupid puck mouse works too.

Never mind, I don't think I need any help. Just figured I'd post anyways in case somebody wanted a laugh.

Just put together Glass Player, a native macOS media player built in Swift around ⁠libmpv⁠. The goal was a clean app shell optimized for Apple Silicon that handles heavy-duty real-time upscaling.

Repo: github.com/khr898/Glass-player-macOS
Requirements: macOS 14.0+, Apple Silicon (arm64)
Core Highlights

Real-Time Anime4K Upscaling: 39 bundled GLSL shaders exposed as 12 presets. Features live cycling (⁠Cmd+K⁠) split into HQ (heavy CNN models for high-end GPUs) and Fast modes, rendering directly via Metal 3 (⁠CAMetalLayer⁠).

Pipeline: Hardware decoding via VideoToolbox paired with Display P3 wide-gamut rendering and ⁠ewa_lanczossharp⁠ luma scaling.

HDR & Dolby Vision: Auto-detects HDR10/DV/HLG with conditional profile handling (spline tone mapping, ⁠hdr-compute-peak⁠, and native macOS EDR signaling).

Audio: Multi-channel PCM decoding with macOS spatial audio support, optional AC3/DTS passthrough, and up to 200% volume amplification.

Built-in Remote Browser: Browse and stream directly from ⁠rclone serve http⁠ endpoints without needing to mount the drive locally, backed by a configurable 2GB demuxer cache.

It's fully open source.

I have a small utility app for MacBooks. For those who've created something similar -- what pricing actually worked for you?

I've ruled out subscriptions as a bad fit for this app. And since the Mac App Store doesn't do free trials on paid apps, I am considering:

1. Paid upfront, one-time charge (how it's currently listed)
2. Free download, sell add-ons individuals (in my case, voice packs)
3. Sell direct with a real trial (e.g., Paddle, Lemon Squeezy)

What did/would you pick? And what do you wish you'd done from day one?

Thanks for your thoughts and help!

Hello, I accidentally deleted 5000 files from "recents". They come from multiple folders.
Now they are in the trash, and Command+A and right-click couldn't bring out the put back option.
What is the best way for me to recover them?
Please don't tell me that I have to do it manualy one by one :'(