FREE & OPEN SOURCE FOR macOS

Your music. Your library.
Your crates.

Bringing the fun back to managing your own offline music files. CrateDigger is a native macOS utility that pairs the tactile joy of hardware decks with an ultra-efficient, multi-threaded organization and batch-conversion engine.

CrateDigger App Icon

Hardware-Level Curating

Toggle between Carbon (Dark) and Linen (Light) modes and hover over the hotspots to tour the console.

CrateDigger Interface Screenshot

Tactile Console Tour

Hover or click on the pulsing orange hotspots scattered on the console above to inspect CrateDigger's features and hardware components.

OLED LCD Status Row

Inspired by physical retro-modern receivers, the glowing OLED center displays a high-fidelity readout. It tracks your playing track tags, audio format, live bitrates, sample rates, file size, and includes an LCD timeline scrub bar. Toggles let you swap views to VU meters, active folder scan status, and batch conversion queues.

Double-Tier Crates Index

Organize offline tracks into portable, lightweight crates — a .cdcrate file is a plain JSON list of file paths, with the tags kept once in a shared store beside it, so a crate stays tiny no matter how large your library grows. The Prep Crate is the staging zone for newly scanned files, so you tag and review imports before they join your saved crates. Supports Subsonic/Navidrome libraries, CD audio ripping, mounted players, and local playlist files.

Active Tag & Artwork Inspector

Inspect nested audio tags and metadata details instantly. Resolves embedded artwork dynamically, searches local directories for cover assets, and pulls high-resolution covers from iTunes, Deezer, and — once you pick a MusicBrainz release — the Cover Art Archive's typed front, back, and booklet scans. Toggles between raw metadata fields and file-level info in secondary wells.

Physical Decks & VU Monitors

The bottom chassis hosts the mechanical audio control deck. Includes physical buttons for cue loops (A-B repeat), playlist advance, shuffle, and output-device selection. Integrates physical volume sliders, hardware-style EQ bands, and dual VU level meters for monitoring playback output.

CrateDigger batch conversion Patch Bay view
Conversion Engine

Batch-convert your whole library, safely.

CrateDigger's FFmpeg engine queues entire directories of mixed formats at once, using every core but one. Every destination path is planned before a single file is written.

  • Flat, source-relative, or metadata-template folder output
  • Collision-safe naming — never silently overwrites a file
  • Review sheet shows every destination path before you commit
  • Preflight checks disk space and write permissions first
CrateDigger Prep Crate staging sidebar
Library Organization

Stage new imports before they join your library.

Newly scanned folders land in the Prep Crate first — a staging area for tagging and review — instead of dumping straight into your permanent collection.

  • Crates are portable, human-readable .cdcrate JSON files
  • Review and tag imports before they touch your main crates
  • Switch instantly between local, remote, CD, device, and playlist sources
  • No proprietary database — your library folders stay yours
CrateDigger Radio streaming a YouTube source
Radio

Stream YouTube live sets and mixes, right in your library.

Paste a YouTube link and CrateDigger resolves it to a playable stream alongside your offline tracks — no separate app or browser tab.

  • Supports live streams, videos, mixes, and playlists
  • Sources grouped into sidebar categories like "YT Live" and "YT Records"
  • Chapter markers surface for long DJ sets and mixes
  • Same transport, EQ, and VU meters as local playback
CrateDigger album artwork inspector and viewer
Artwork

See your covers the way they deserve to be seen.

The artwork inspector resolves embedded art, folder images, and remote covers into one hash-keyed store, then lets you browse it full-size in a floating window while you keep editing tags.

  • Falls back from embedded art → folder image → iTunes → Deezer
  • Pick a MusicBrainz release for typed Cover Art Archive scans — front, back, spine, obi, booklet pages
  • Supports album booklets — scanned inserts and liner-note PDFs
  • One shared artwork store keyed by hash, so covers load instantly across every crate

Designed for Library Curators

We built CrateDigger because streaming services hide your music. It's time to own your files again.

✂️

Record Divider

Split one continuous vinyl-side rip into clean per-track exports. Auto-detects breaks from sustained silence, with a sensitivity slider and manual marker editing before you commit.

🔌

External Device Transfer

Push tracks straight to an iPod, USB drive, or phone with ⌘⇧T. Rockbox players get a cover.jpg written beside the album so art draws in colour, and FIX ART repairs a player you filled years ago without re-sending a file.

🛡️

Sandbox & Preflight Safety

Runs fully sandboxed with security-scoped bookmarks for every folder you grant access to. Every batch job checks destination write permissions and free disk space before it starts.

💿

CD Ripper & Subsonic Client

Rip physical CD audio tracks directly to FLAC or MP3. Connect to your Navidrome, Subsonic, or local streaming servers to sync remote crates and cache files offline.

⚡

Build Your Own Console

Press THEME, then EDITOR: every colour, corner radius, and typeface is a control, and the app repaints behind the panel as you drag — the preview is the application. One theme carries its own light and dark versions, fonts travel bundled inside it, and UNDO steps back ten changes. Four themes ship; the rest is yours. Read the theming guide.

⬇️

It Updates Itself

No more fetching a DMG and dragging the app across by hand. CrateDigger checks quietly once a day, verifies the new build was signed by us, installs it, and relaunches. Release candidates stay on their own channel, so a stable install is never handed a beta.

🗂️

Move & Consolidate

Point your Music Folder somewhere new and CrateDigger moves every file and repoints every crate that referenced them. Consolidate pulls strays from all over your disk into one place; the folder tree can keep itself organised by album artist as you edit tags.

📊

Last.fm & Metadata Probes

Scrobble plays to Last.fm seamlessly with "now playing" indicators. Rich probing via FFprobe extracts sample rates, exact encoding channels, profiles, and hidden streams.

How CrateDigger Compares

The landscape of offline music managers is either bloated or looks like a spreadsheet. CrateDigger bridges the gap.

Feature CrateDigger Apple Music / iTunes Foobar2000 Plex / Navidrome Swinsian
Batch FFmpeg Conversion ✓ Yes (Built-in, Multi-threaded) ✗ Single file only (AAC/ALAC) ✓ Yes (Built-in converter + CD ripping) ✗ No (On-the-fly streaming transcode only) ✗ No (Playback-only, no transcoding)
Tactile Hardware Interface ✓ Yes (+ full in-app theme editor) ✗ No (Modern flat list style) ✗ No (Windows-classic sheet grids) ✗ No (Responsive grid layout) ✗ No (Standard native list/table UI)
Collision-Safe Path Renamer ✓ Yes (Flat / Template / Mirror) ✗ No (Forces proprietary folders) ✓ Yes (Complex tag-scripts) ✗ No (Requires prep-organized folders) ✗ No (No batch export/rename)
Double-Tier Crate Staging ✓ Yes (Prep Crate vs. Saved Crates) ✗ No (Imports directly to main database) ✗ No (Flat playlists only) ✗ No (Monolithic library folders) ✗ No (Flat/smart playlists only)
JSON Portable Libraries ✓ Yes (Lightweight .cdcrate files) ✗ No (Locked in binary SQLite/XML db) ✗ No (Proprietary database binary) ✗ No (SQL databases on server host) ✗ No (Proprietary internal library)
Native macOS Performance ✓ Yes (AppKit/SwiftUI + Sandbox) ✓ Yes (Native, but bloated) ✓ Yes (Genuine native macOS build) ✗ No (Electron client or web browser) ✓ Yes (Native, lightweight)

Under the Hood

Audio Pipeline

FFmpeg 6.x + FFprobe static compilation. Asynchronous execution blocks using ProcessCommandRunner pipelines.

OS Platform

Built exclusively for macOS 13+ (Ventura, Sonoma, Sequoia, Tahoe) on Apple silicon. Native Swift, AppKit bridging, and SwiftUI components. Ships as a signed, notarized DMG that updates itself over a signed appcast.

Storage & Formats

Decodes FLAC, ALAC, WAV, MP3, AAC, AIFF, OGG, and M4A. Persists libraries via secure security-scoped bookmarks, lightweight .cdcrate path lists, one shared track store, and a hash-keyed artwork store — no index file ever carries image bytes.

Hardware Safety

Supports sandbox environments. Validates batch preflight destinations for write permissions and disk-space estimates prior to encoding runs.