Streaming killed the need to manage your own music files — for most people. But if you rip CDs, buy lossless downloads, or just have a hard drive full of FLACs you actually care about, you still need something to play, tag, and organize them. Apple Music's library import is an afterthought bolted onto a streaming app. That's left room for three very different native macOS tools: Swinsian, foobar2000, and CrateDigger. Here's how they actually compare.
The three contenders
Swinsian ($34.95 one-time, macOS only) is the veteran — a mature, native playback and library-management app with a loyal following. foobar2000 (free) is the plugin-driven Swiss Army knife, historically a Windows staple that now ships genuine native builds for macOS, Android, and iOS. CrateDigger (free, MIT-licensed) is the newest of the three, built around batch conversion and organization with a skeuomorphic hardware-inspired interface instead of a standard list view.
Batch conversion & format handling
Swinsian plays a wide range of formats — FLAC, MP3, AAC, ALAC, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, WAV, Opus, AC3, AIFF, MusePack, DSF, and APE — but it doesn't convert between them. It's a playback tool, not a transcoder. foobar2000 goes further: its component architecture includes a built-in converter and CD-ripping support, so you can transcode and rip without leaving the app. CrateDigger's entire premise is batch conversion — its FFmpeg-backed engine queues whole directories at once, multi-threaded across every core but one, with collision-safe output naming so a batch job never silently overwrites a file.
Library organization
This is where Swinsian's age shows its value: folder watching, an Apple Music library import, a duplicate-track finder with flexible matching criteria, smart playlists, and regex find-and-replace across tags. It's a genuinely mature toolkit for cleaning up an existing library. foobar2000 leans on tag-script-driven renaming and its playlist system. CrateDigger takes a different approach entirely — new imports land in a "Prep Crate" staging area for review and tagging before they ever touch your permanent library, and crates themselves are portable, human-readable .cdlib JSON files rather than a proprietary database.
Interface & feel
Swinsian looks like what it is: a classic native macOS table-and-list app, with a mini window and a desktop widget for at-a-glance now-playing info. foobar2000's Layout Editing Mode makes it endlessly reconfigurable, but that flexibility comes with a real learning curve — it rewards people willing to build their own layout. CrateDigger trades some of that blank-slate flexibility for a fully designed-out "Carbon" hardware aesthetic — an OLED-style status display, physical-feeling transport controls, and dedicated views (a "Patch Bay" for conversion jobs, for instance) instead of one generic window that does everything.
Price & platform
Swinsian is $34.95 one-time, macOS only, with a free trial. foobar2000 is free and available on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. CrateDigger is free and open source under the MIT license, with an optional Patreon for people who want to support development directly — and, like Swinsian, it's macOS only (13 and later).
Which should you pick
If you want a mature, EQ-rich player with a genuinely good duplicate finder and don't need format conversion, Swinsian's one-time price is easy to justify. If you want maximum flexibility across multiple platforms and don't mind building your own layout, foobar2000 is hard to beat, especially since it's free. If your actual problem is a messy pile of mixed-format files that need converting and organizing — and you'd rather enjoy looking at your library than tolerate it — CrateDigger is built specifically for that, and it costs nothing to try.