Documentation

Fadenza is a music player for macOS built around playlists you fill by hand. There is no library, no import step and no database. You give it audio — files, folders, playlists, stream URLs — and it plays them in the order you chose.

These pages describe how to use it. They do not describe how it is built.

Start here

Open Fadenza and drag something onto it. That is the whole setup.

Your playlists survive quitting: reopen the app and it comes back with the same tracks in the same order, the same track selected, at the same position — paused. Fadenza never starts playing on its own.

The pages

• Formats — the seven formats it plays, and what metadata each carries.
• Playlists — the sixty-four lists, the permanent Queue, and where each kind of import lands.
• The queue — every way to get audio in, how rows report trouble, and what happens with duplicates.
• Keyboard shortcuts — the fixed ones, and the eight transport shortcuts you assign yourself and can make work while another application is in front.
• Sessions — what is remembered, where it lives, and what happens if the file breaks.
• Output devices — sending audio somewhere other than the system default, and what happens when that device is unplugged.
• Automation — media keys, Shortcuts, AppleScript, the local HTTP API and MCP.

For the complete v1 scope including what is deliberately absent, see the full feature list. For how Fadenza compares to other players, see competitors.

Two things worth knowing up front

Fadenza never writes to your audio files. It asks macOS for read-only access and that is all it has. Metadata is displayed, never edited. There is no tag editor and there will not be one — see formats for why.

Nothing is dropped quietly. A file that has moved, a stream that died, a format that cannot be decoded — the track stays in the list with a badge explaining what happened. If a track vanishes from a list, that is a bug, not housekeeping.