Output devices

By default Fadenza plays wherever the rest of the system plays. You can also send it somewhere specific — a USB interface, headphones, an aggregate or multi-output device — without changing the system output for everything else.

Your choice is saved with the session and applied on the next launch.

When a device disappears

Unplug the interface you were playing to and playback keeps going, on the system default output. Fadenza does not stop, and it does not sit silently pretending to play.

Plug it back in and it is selected again. You do not have to go and find it in a menu.

Why the saved device is checked before it is used

This is the one piece of engineering worth surfacing, because getting it wrong produces the single most confusing failure a music player can have.

macOS will accept an audio device identifier that no longer refers to anything. Ask for it back and you get the same identifier, unchanged. The player reports that it is playing, the position advances, the scrubber moves — and there is no sound. Nothing in the obvious places says otherwise; the real error is buried somewhere most implementations never look.

So Fadenza does two things:

• The saved device identifier is checked against the devices that actually exist before it is applied. A device that is gone is not silently requested.
• “Playing” is derived from the state of the audio item itself, including its error, rather than from the fact that a play command was issued. A player that thinks a rate of 1.0 means audible audio will lie to you.

If a device cannot be used, that is an error with a message, like every other failure here.

What Fadenza does not do

There is no exclusive or hog mode, no DSD, no automatic sample-rate switching to match the file, and no upsampling. Audio goes through the system mixer along with everything else on the machine.

If bit-perfect output is what you are after, Audirvāna is built for it and this is not.