Getting started

Ansuz doesn't browse folders: it reads your music's tags once, builds a catalog, and searches, sorts and plays from there. Start with ⌘O or File › Add Folder… and pick one or more folders, local, on external drives or on a mounted NAS. Each folder is a source and shows in the sidebar with a rune icon you can change with a right-click. Every sidebar section (Library, Sources, Playlists, Apple Music, Spotify) folds with the chevron that appears at the right of its header when you hover over it; Ansuz remembers which ones you closed.

Ansuz never modifies your files on its own. Everything it generates (index, thumbnails, caches) lives in its own folders.

The first scan counts the files, then reads every one, with the progress and time left measured against that count; later scans only compare size and date and are fast. If you quit Ansuz while a scan is still running, the next launch counts and compares the whole source again, but only reads the tags it had not read yet; once a scan has finished, opening the app does not start another one. Ansuz asks before quitting while a scan is running. Local folders are watched automatically; network folders are rescanned from the source's menu. If a source isn't mounted, its tracks stay greyed out until it returns. If you move the collection to another drive or NAS, use Relocate… in the source's menu: ratings, playlists and history are kept.

Needs the server password. Ansuz mounts network folders by itself, without showing any dialogs, using the password in your keychain. If the keychain doesn’t have it (for example, because you moved your NAS from AFP to SMB), the source stays in the sidebar marked Needs the server password, and hovering over it shows a help tag that explains what to do. Right-click the source › Connect in Finder… opens the connection with your user name filled in: type the password and tick Remember this password in my keychain. From then on Ansuz mounts it by itself. If the server doesn’t answer at all (you’re on another network, it’s turned off), the source becomes Not available, as always.

Source info. Right-click a source (in the sidebar, or on its icon at the top level of the folder view) › Source Info… opens a window with its rune at the top and everything about it: what the library knows (songs, missing files, albums, artists, total time, size, songs with lyrics in Ansuz and the formats with their share of the space), the files in the folder by type (songs, .lrc lyrics, images and other files, with how many there are and how much space they take), where it is (the folder, whether it is on an internal, external or network disk and which server, the volume and its free space) and the disk that holds it (model, SSD or hard disk, how it is connected and its SMART status). Counting the files means going through the whole folder, which on a NAS with many songs takes minutes, so Ansuz keeps the last count with its date and counts again only when you click Count Again. A source that isn’t available shows what the library knows and its last count.

The runes. Each source’s rune is drawn like the Ansuz logo: gold on a black square. In the folder view, where the sources are shown large, it also has a gold frame and the rune’s name under the symbol; right-click it › Change Rune to pick another. With Show Unavailable Sources turned off, a source that isn’t available disappears everywhere: from the songs and albums, from the genre list and its counts, and from the folder view.

The library

• Rating and Loved. The songs table has a Rating column with five stars (click a star to rate, click the same one again to clear) and a Loved heart. Both are also in the row's context menu, for several rows at once, and you can sort by rating. When Last.fm is connected, loving a song also marks it as loved there.
• Songs shows the table. Clicking a header sorts by that column; the Sort button offers up to four levels (artist, then year, then album…) and is remembered. Right-click a header to choose which columns to show; BPM, key and album artist have their own columns.
• Albums shows the cover grid, with its own four-level Sort. One click opens the album page: large cover, details, Play, Shuffle, Play Next and the track list. Double-click the cover there to see it larger, in the full quality of the image in your files. Double-click the artist’s name to see all their albums (the ones where they are the album artist and the ones they appear on); Back returns to where you were. The Fields menu picks what appears under each cover: title, album artist, artist, year, songs, duration, plays or date added. Right-click a cover for a menu with Play, Shuffle, Play Next, Add to Queue, Edit Tags, and the library jobs limited to that disc: re-read tags, rescan the album’s folders (only those, in seconds: it adds what is new, marks what is gone and joins songs the server now shows under another name), find cover, identify, analyze BPM and key, calculate ReplayGain. The same menu appears when you right-click the cover on the album page. An album with several discs shows its songs grouped by disc, as in Apple Music.
• Search filters by title, artist, album and genre as you type, in both views.
• Playlists: the sidebar's + creates one; right-click one or more tracks to add them.
• Tracks without tags (WAV, DFF, half-tagged files) take artist, album, year and track number from the folder and file names, e.g. Artist - Album (Year)/01 - Title; a tag that is present always wins.
• Recent in the sidebar lists the last 100 albums added to the library, newest first.
• Home, first in the sidebar and where Ansuz opens, puts what you play every day within reach: shelves of Favorites, Recently Played and Most Played albums above the whole collection, all in one scroll. Scroll a shelf sideways; See All opens it as a grid. Mark an album as a favorite with the heart on the album page or Add to Favorites in the cover’s menu; it is a mark in the library, the files are not touched. Most Played counts the plays of the album’s songs; Recently Played, the last time any of them played.
• Covers come from the files or a cover.jpg in the folder; failing that, from Cover Art Archive and Last.fm.

Renamed or moved folders. If you rename a folder or move it within a source, Ansuz recognizes its songs by file name, size and date: they stay the same songs, with their ratings, playlists and history. The same goes for a file that shows up under another name in its own folder: a NAS shared over SMB cannot send names with «?» or «:» and gives them a short name like 0HCQHK~2.M4A. On the next scan (Rescan in the source’s menu, or ⇧⌘R) the old song and the new one become one again, with everything from both. A subfolder macOS won’t let Ansuz read (a NAS’s #recycle bin, another user’s folder) is skipped, and its songs are not marked as missing.

Artists shows album artists with their photo, or one of their album covers until it arrives. The letters on the right jump to any letter, and the toolbar search filters the list. An artist’s page has a short biography, Play and Shuffle, their albums from newest to oldest and related artists from your library. Albums, EPs, singles, greatest hits and compilations appear in separate sections. The type is worked out from the title and the length: up to 3 songs is a single and up to 6 an EP, both under 30 minutes.

Artists with the same name. Two bands called the same are a single artist as far as the tags go. Ansuz keeps them apart with a qualifier shown in gray next to the name; it is never scrobbled or sent to online searches, but the library search does use it: airbag argentina finds only that Airbag. It separates them on its own when the files carry MusicBrainz artist IDs, when the artist’s folder is named “Name (something)”, such as “Airbag (argentina)”, and when matching albums with MusicBrainz shows that a disc belongs to another artist of that name. To do it by hand, right-click an album › Separate Artist…, or use the ⋯ button in the Artist panel: choose the albums that belong to the other artist and a qualifier. Your choice is remembered and wins over the rest; moving the albums back to the artist without a qualifier joins them again. Each artist then gets its own biography, photo and upcoming shows. Your files are never changed.

Disconnecting a source. Going away and leaving the NAS or the external drive at home? Right-click the source › Disconnect. A disconnected source is left alone: Ansuz does not look for it at launch, does not try to mount the share (so macOS does not show its connection dialog), and does not scan or watch it. Its songs stay in the catalog like those of any unavailable source, hidden or grayed out according to your setting. The source stays in the sidebar, marked Disconnected; when you are back, right-click › Connect and Ansuz checks it and rescans it.

Genres. A song’s genre is a list. Ansuz takes every GENRE value in the file and also splits the ones written as one text (“Chillout, Lounge, Downtempo”, “Pop/Rock”, “House|Deep House”), so a song counts for each of its genres. Genres in the sidebar lists them all with their song counts; the search field narrows the list, and a click opens the library filtered by that genre. The genres also show as buttons on the album page and in the track info window, there is a Genre column in the songs table (right-click the header to show it) and a Genre field for the album grid, and the search field finds songs by any of their genres. In smart playlists, “Genre is Rock” matches a song tagged “Pop, Rock”. In the tag editor the album’s Genre field fills every track and each track has its own; write several genres separated by commas, and they are saved as separate values.

Release date. An album carries its full release date when it is known, not just the year: “March 12, 1995” under the title on the album page, and a Release date field you can show under each cover in the album grid. Ansuz reads it from the DATE tag of your files (and from RELEASEDATE or ORIGINALDATE when they fall in the same year), and matching an album with MusicBrainz adds the month and day when your tags only have the year; a date from a different year never replaces yours. Sorting albums by year puts them in release order within each year. In the tag editor the Release date field takes the year alone, year and month, or the full date (1995, 1995-03 or 1995-03-12) and writes it to every track. The album inspector offers the MusicBrainz date as a difference you can accept, and Artwork - PDF prints it in the booklet and on the tray card.

Compilations. Compilations in the sidebar shows only the albums your tags mark as compilations: those with the compilation flag set (COMPILATION = 1, the “Part of a compilation” checkbox in most taggers) or with “Various Artists”, “Varios Artistas” or “Various” as the album artist. Ansuz does not guess from the contents: a label sampler filed under the label’s name stays out unless you mark it. To mark an album, open the tag editor and turn on Compilation.

Discs by album artist. Ansuz builds each disc by the album artist in your tags, not by each track’s artist. When the tags have none, it decides by folder: tracks in the same folder with the same album title are one disc. If any of them has an album artist, it applies to all of them; otherwise the artist of most of the tracks wins (a “feat.” counts for the main artist), and with no majority the disc is shown as Various Artists. That does not add it to Compilations, which still shows only what your tags mark.

Large libraries. Ansuz is built for collections of up to a million tracks. The song table, the album grid, the folder view and search never load the whole collection: they ask the database only for what is on screen, so scrolling to the end of the table is as fast as the top. Local folders are watched, and when a file changes only its folder is read again. A search of a single letter or digit doesn’t filter (with a million tracks it would match almost all of them); from the second character on it does. With large playlists, the iPhone syncs in parts and only brings what changed.

Folder view

Besides Songs and Albums, the Folders view browses your music the way it is stored: every source is a folder, and inside it you walk the same folders you see in the Finder. It has the Finder’s three layouts, chosen at the right of the path bar: icons (a folder shows the cover of the music inside), list (with disclosure triangles to open a folder in place) and columns (one column per level, with a preview of the selected song). Double-click a folder to open it, and a song to play it along with the rest of its folder. The back and forward arrows and the path bar take you around, and the search field filters the current folder by name. Right-click a folder to play it, shuffle it, queue it, make a playlist from it, analyze BPM and key or calculate ReplayGain where still missing, or show it in the Finder; songs have their usual menu. Go to Folder, in the menu of any song and in the ⋯ menu of the player, jumps to the folder that holds it.

The folder view comes from the library index, not from the disk: it also works while a drive or share is disconnected, and it lists only the audio files Ansuz indexed. With a source selected in the sidebar, the view stays inside that source.

Column browser

The fourth mode in the bar at the top of the window, after Songs, Albums and Folders, is Columns: the library narrowed down step by step. At the top, two to five columns side by side; below, the songs table with what you chose. Each column lists the values of one field among the songs the columns to its left let through, with how many songs each value has. All is always first, and at the end Unknown, Unrated or Various Artists gather the songs that lack that information. ⌘-click picks several values in one column. Double-click a value to play everything it lets through, or right-click it for Play, Shuffle, Play Next and Add to Queue; the table below has its usual menu. To fix a wrong genre (or any other tag) without leaving the view, right-click an album in the Album column, or songs in the table, and choose Edit Tags…: the album’s tag editor opens on top, and when you save, the columns are counted again. Saving keeps the change in the library; writing it to the files needs Allow editing tags in files in Settings › Library.

There are fourteen fields to choose from: genre, artist, album artist, composer, album, year, decade, format, sample rate, source, rating (stars), loved, key and BPM (in steps of ten). Columns are kept in named setups: the menu in the strip above the columns switches between them, and Edit Columns… renames the current one, chooses the field of each column, duplicates it, deletes it or brings back the built-in ones with Restore Defaults. Four come with the app: Genre (genre → album artist → album), Composer (composer → year → album), Decade (decade → album artist → album) and Audio Quality (format → sample rate → album artist → album).

The column browser works within what is selected in the sidebar (all music, a source…) and within the search, and leaves out duplicate versions when the library hides them. Everything is counted in the library database: even with a million songs, the first column takes a fraction of a second and the next ones are instant.

Playlists

Create a playlist with the + in the sidebar, File › New Playlist… (⌘N) or New Playlist from Selection… in the songs menu. Add songs with Add to Playlist in that menu or by dragging rows onto the playlist in the sidebar; if some were already there, Ansuz asks whether to add them anyway or skip them. Inside a playlist, drag rows to reorder them and press Delete to remove them. Right-click a playlist to play it, shuffle it, play it next, add it to the queue, rename, duplicate, export or delete it; drag playlists to reorder the sidebar. The header shows how many songs and how long they last. Save as Playlist… in the queue pane keeps what you were about to hear.

Smart playlists (+ › New Smart Playlist…, ⌥⌘N) fill themselves from rules and are always up to date: match all or any conditions on title, artist, album, genre, year, rating, loved, plays, last played, date added, duration, BPM, key, format, lyrics, identification, cover, availability or source; optionally limit them to a number of songs, minutes, hours or megabytes chosen at random or by a field, and pick their order. The editor shows live how many songs match. Edit Rules… is in the header and the menu.

Files: Export… writes M3U8, PLS or XSPF (choose by the extension) with absolute paths; Import Playlist… reads those formats, finds each song by path in your sources or, failing that, by artist and title, and shows what it found before creating the playlist.

Analysis for a playlist. Right-click a playlist in the sidebar › Analyze BPM and key or Calculate ReplayGain runs that analysis on its songs, only where it is still missing, so a long playlist does not redo work already done. To redo one, use the menu of the song or of the album.

Moving from Music or iTunes

Years of ratings, play counts and playlists do not have to stay behind. In Music, choose File › Library › Export Library… and save the XML; in Ansuz, File › Import from Music… reads it (iTunes exports the same file). Songs are matched by the path of their file, so add first the folders where that music lives. If the folder has moved since (a NAS mounted somewhere else, a collection copied to a new disk), Ansuz still finds the songs by the last part of the path, and it works with the drive disconnected. Songs that are not files on disk (Apple Music, streams) are left out.

Before anything is written you see how many songs were found, examples of those that were not, and what can come over: ratings (only where you have none in Ansuz, unless you ask to replace them; the ratings Music computes from an album rating are ignored), Loved, play counts, skips and the last played date, and your playlists, each with how many of its songs were found. Folders become part of the name (“Parties / Wedding”), smart playlists arrive with the songs they hold today, and a playlist whose name you already use in Ansuz is only replaced if you tick it.

Plays from Music are added to the ones in Ansuz, and Ansuz remembers how many it already took from each song: import a newer export later and only the difference is added. Nothing is written to your files or to the Music library.

Statistics

Statistics in the sidebar shows what you have been listening to. Pick a period (7, 30 or 90 days, 12 months, or all time) and you get the number of plays with the change against the previous period, the listening time, and how many different artists, albums and songs you played; a chart of plays over time; the top artists, albums, songs and genres (10, 25 or 50), each with a bar; and your plays by decade, by hour of the day and by day of the week. Click an album to open it, a song to find it in the library, a genre to browse it, or an artist to search for them. You also see the artists you played for the first time in the period, your current and longest streak of days with music, and the artists’ photos next to their names; Export… saves everything as a CSV file for a spreadsheet.

A play is a full listen by the Last.fm rule: half the song or four minutes. A song counts for each of its genres. For a period, everything comes from the dated history that Ansuz keeps. “All time” uses the play counters, so it also includes what you imported from Music; the charts by date, hour and weekday only count what was played in Ansuz. At the bottom, Library tells how much of your collection you have never played, and a button creates a smart playlist with exactly those songs.

Playback

Shuffle and Repeat. Two buttons in the player bar. Shuffle keeps the current song first and mixes the rest; turning it off restores the order, and while it is on every new queue starts shuffled. Repeat cycles off → the whole queue (the playlist or the disc) → the song. Both are remembered.

Mini player and menu bar. A compact floating window (Window › Mini Player, ⇧⌘M) with the cover, the song, the controls, the progress and the volume, always above your other windows. And Ansuz in the menu bar: the song that is playing with previous, play/pause and next, one click away.

While loading. When a song takes a moment to start (a busy network drive, a disk waking up), the play button shows a spinner and the bar shows the requested song with Loading… below it until it starts playing. There is no need to click again: asking for the same song again does not restart it. If you pause while it loads, the song opens paused and ready (the bar says Loading… (paused)). The same happens when you jump to another part of the song with the progress bar, and on the iPhone when it controls the Mac.

Double-click a track to play it and queue the rest of the visible list. The bottom bar has previous, play/pause, next, the position (click to seek) and volume; click the speaker to mute. Playback is gapless between tracks; in Settings › General you can set a crossfade of up to 12 seconds, which fades the end of each track into the start of the next (never between tracks cut from the same disc image).

Gapless, to the sample. With no crossfade, when two songs in a row have the same format (sample rate and channels), the second one starts at the sample right after the last one of the first, with its own ReplayGain from its first sample: live albums and continuous mixes play as one piece. If a file stops being readable in the middle of a song (a NAS that dropped off), playback stops with a message instead of racing through the whole queue; press Play when the drive is back.

Formats: MP3, AAC, ALAC, FLAC, WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, and DSD (DSF and DFF), which Ansuz converts to high-resolution PCM on playback. Also APE (Monkey’s Audio), WavPack, Musepack, WMA, TTA, TAK, Shorten, RealAudio, ATRAC and TrueHD: whatever macOS can’t decode is decoded by FFmpeg, which ships inside the app as a replaceable framework, and lossless formats sound exactly like the original, sample for sample. The keyboard media keys, Control Center and headphones control playback. DTS-CDs (a DTS bitstream inside a WAV or FLAC) are recognized by their sync words, listed as “DTS” and decoded with the DTS decoder from FFmpeg, which ships inside the app as a replaceable framework; 5.1 discs are mixed down to stereo unless your output has more channels.

Volume leveling (ReplayGain). Settings › General › Volume Leveling reads the REPLAYGAIN tags your files already carry (from foobar2000, MusicBrainz Picard, mp3gain and the like) and plays every track at a similar loudness. Track evens out everything; Album keeps the level differences within a record; Automatic uses the album gain when the previous or next track in the queue is from the same album and the track gain otherwise. Preamp adds or removes decibels on top, and Prevent clipping caps the gain at the peak stored in the tags. Tracks without tags play unchanged. Computing the values for files that lack them is a scheduled task, described below.

BPM and key. Tempo and musical key are read from the tags (BPM, INITIALKEY) and shown in the track info window (⌘I); the key can be written the classic way (F♯m, B♭) or on the Camelot wheel (11A, 6B), chosen in Settings › General.

The ⋯ menu. Next to the progress bar, the ⋯ button has the actions for the song that is playing: track info, add it to a playlist (or to a new one), love and rate it, Go to Album, Go to Song (shows it in the songs table) and the library tasks for that one song: Complete Tags, Re-read Tags, Analyze BPM and key and Calculate ReplayGain. The same tasks are in the right-click menu of any song, also inside an album page.

Audio output

In Settings › Audio, or with the output button next to the volume slider (it shows the device’s icon), you choose where Ansuz plays: System Output follows whatever the Mac uses, or pick a device (a USB DAC, headphones, the built-in speakers). Only Ansuz plays through it; every other app keeps using the system output. Ansuz remembers the device between launches.

• Match the sample rate to each file (on by default): the device switches to the file’s rate, 44.1, 48, 96 kHz…, so nothing gets converted. If the device doesn’t have that rate, Ansuz uses the closest clean one (a whole multiple, like 88.2 for 44.1). Songs with the same rate stay gapless; when the rate changes between two songs there is a short gap while the device switches.
• Exclusive mode (off by default): while Ansuz has a song loaded, no other app can play through that device, not even system sounds. It is released when playback stops. Some devices, such as aggregate devices, don’t allow it; the settings say so.
• Volume: if the device you chose has its own volume control, Ansuz’s slider moves it and the audio reaches the device at full digital level. When you switch to such a device, Ansuz takes the level the device already had.
• Bit-perfect: the label next to the volume turns green when the device receives the file’s samples exactly as they are. When it is grey, its tooltip says what changes them: a different sample rate, Ansuz’s volume below the maximum, ReplayGain, crossfade, DSD or DTS converted to PCM, multichannel mixed down to stereo, a file with more bits than the device takes, or Bluetooth and AirPlay.
• Native DSD (DoP): if your DAC accepts DSD over PCM (DoP), turn on Send DSD natively (DoP) for it in Settings › Audio; the option appears when the device reaches 176.4 kHz. DSF, DFF and SACD files then reach the DAC as their original 1-bit stream, DSD64 to DSD256, with no conversion. While DSD plays this way, Ansuz takes the device in exclusive mode and doesn’t touch the samples: ReplayGain and crossfade don’t apply, and the volume slider only works if the device has its own volume control. The label next to the volume reads DSD · DoP. Turn it on only for a DAC that supports DoP: any other device plays it as loud noise.
• If the device you chose is disconnected, Ansuz pauses, switches to the system output and tells you; when it comes back, it offers to return to it.

When Ansuz quits, each device goes back to the sample rate it had and exclusive mode is released. Ansuz never changes which device the rest of the Mac uses.

Whole discs in one file

A whole CD ripped to a single file shows up in the library as its tracks, not as one hour-long line: each track with its own title, duration, rating, history and lyrics, played gapless one after the other. The whole file is not listed as well.

Audio image + .cue sheet. Any format Ansuz plays works as the image (FLAC, APE, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, ALAC, MP3, and DSF/DFF for vinyl rips in DSD). The .cue sheet goes in the same folder as the image:

• It is matched by the name the sheet declares in FILE: exact, or the same name without extension (the sheet says .wav, the image is .flac). With several sheets in the folder, the one named like the image wins.
• A sheet may have several FILE entries, for instance one vinyl side per file. Each track runs from its INDEX 01 to the next one; the pregap stays with the previous track, as in EAC and foobar2000.
• A per-track sheet (one file per track, each with a single TRACK at 00:00:00) splits nothing: those files are indexed as usual.
• The sheet provides track titles and performers, the album title and artist, REM DATE, REM GENRE and REM DISCNUMBER; whatever it leaves out comes from the image's tags (album, year, genre, cover). When they differ, the sheet wins. UTF-8 or Latin-1 encoding.
• If the sheet changes or disappears, the next scan rebuilds the tracks. These tracks stay out of the tag editor: their data lives in the sheet.

SACD ISO images. A Super Audio CD .iso is read directly, plain DSD or DST-compressed, regular images or raw dumps. Tracks come from the disc's table of contents: title, performer and composer per track, album title and artist, year. The ISO carries no artwork: put a cover.jpg in the folder. The stereo area is used; in Settings › Library, Play the multichannel area plays the surround area when there is one, mixed down to stereo or as 5.1 if your output supports it.

Not supported: sheets pointing to another folder, raw BIN images and data ISOs with files inside (they are not SACDs).

The side panel

⌥⌘I opens the right panel, which follows the playing track:

• Queue: what's playing and what's next. Double-click jumps to a track, drag reorders, ⌫ or right-click removes, Clear empties it.
• Lyrics: from a .lrc file next to the song, from the file's tags, or from LRCLIB (exact match by title, artist, album and duration; if several candidates fit, you pick one). Synced lyrics highlight the current line, and a click seeks there. Lyrics you bring yourself win over everything else: Import Lyrics… takes a .txt or .lrc, Paste Lyrics takes the clipboard, and you can drop a file on the panel. A plain lyric can then be synced in the Sync editor: press Space or Enter on each line as it is sung, ↑↓ to move, ←→ to adjust ±100 ms (⇧ 10 ms, ⌥ 1 s), ⌘↩ to play from a line, ⌫ to clear it, and undo everything with ⌘Z. Saving keeps the sync in the library; Settings › Library can also write a .lrc next to the file. Publish to LRCLIB shares a synced lyric with the public database after a preview of the metadata; Ansuz solves LRCLIB's proof-of-work in the background and tells you when it is done. Contributed Lyrics in the sidebar lists what you published. Remove Lyrics deletes what is stored so Ansuz looks again next time. The A buttons above the lyrics make them smaller or bigger, as do ⌘− and ⌘+ (⌘0 goes back to the normal size) and pinching on the trackpad; Ansuz remembers the size.
• Artist: photo, biography in your language and the official website, found by asking in turn your files’ tags, MusicBrainz, Wikidata, Discogs (once you add your token in Settings › Discogs) and Last.fm; buttons for the site, Bandcamp, Wikipedia, Discogs and social profiles, each with its source in the tooltip. If no site turns up, Search the web opens your browser; the Website field lets you type it yourself and Ansuz keeps what you wrote. Also the official social profiles (Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube, Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, Discogs… whatever MusicBrainz has on record), upcoming shows with date, city, venue and a ticket link from Bandsintown and Ticketmaster (Bandsintown covers the whole world; Ticketmaster only where it sells), genres and similar artists.
• Similar: similar tracks according to Last.fm, marking the ones you already have.

⌘I or View › Now Playing Info… opens a window with everything Ansuz knows about the playing track: artwork, album details, recording characteristics (format, sample rate, channels, bit rate, duration and, for a track inside a disc image, its segment, and the ISRC code and MusicBrainz recording ID when the file carries them or Ansuz identified it), the physical file with its location and a button to show it in the Finder, library usage and the lyrics. Track Info… in the table’s right-click menu opens the same for any track.

Preferred versions

When the same track exists in several sources (say MP3 and FLAC), Ansuz groups the copies and picks a preferred version: the source highest in the sidebar wins (drag to change priority) and, within a source, the best quality. All Music shows only preferred versions; each source shows everything it has. Tracks with copies carry an “N versions” mark, and Show All Versions in the right-click menu lists them. Right-click All Music to turn duplicate hiding off.

Last.fm and ListenBrainz

In Settings › Last.fm, Connect opens your browser to authorize Ansuz; once you authorize, Ansuz notices on its own and connects within seconds. In Settings › ListenBrainz there is no app key to authorize: paste the user token from your ListenBrainz profile (listenbrainz.org/settings) and press Connect. You can use one service or both. From then on every listen is sent once you pass half the track or four minutes, with the track number, the album artist and the MusicBrainz recording ID when Ansuz knows it (and the ISRC to ListenBrainz), so the services match the exact recording instead of guessing from the names. Without a connection, listens are stored and sent later; each service has its own queue and its own Retry Now.

Apple Music, Spotify and TIDAL

All four live in Settings › Platforms, each with its own switch: a platform you turn off disappears from the sidebar and from Publish on, and its account stays connected.

In Settings › Platforms › Apple Music, Connect asks macOS for permission; no account or key is needed beyond your Apple ID. Then an Apple Music section in the sidebar lists your Apple Music playlists: each one shows its songs, marks the ones already in your library (play them from your files with Play), has Open in Music and, with an Apple Music subscription, Play on Apple Music streams it inside Ansuz. Right-click one of your own playlists and choose Publish on Apple Music…: Ansuz matches each song with the catalog (by ISRC when your files carry it, otherwise by title, artist and length), shows what it found and creates the playlist in your Apple Music library, so it follows you to your phone. Songs not found are left out.

Spotify works the same way from Settings › Platforms › Spotify: Connect opens your browser to authorize Ansuz and brings you back. Your Spotify playlists appear in the sidebar, the songs you own play from your files, Open in Spotify opens the playlist in the Spotify app, and Publish on › Spotify creates it in your account. Spotify only shares the songs of playlists you own or collaborate on: a playlist you follow shows a note instead of its songs. Open in Spotify offers the Spotify app or the website, and each song you don't own has the same two icons in the Listen column. Spotify does not let other apps stream its catalog on the Mac, so there is no play button here.

TIDAL works the same way from Settings › Platforms › TIDAL: Connect opens your browser to authorize Ansuz and brings you back. The playlists you own on TIDAL appear in the sidebar, the songs you own play from your files, Open in TIDAL offers the TIDAL app or the website (also per song), and Publish on › TIDAL creates the playlist in your account as unlisted. TIDAL only lets other apps play previews, so there is no play button here either. YouTube Music is import only: Settings › Platforms › YouTube Music connects your Google account with read-only permission, your YouTube Music playlists (and your likes) appear in the sidebar, the songs you own play from your files and the rest open on the YouTube Music website. Publishing to YouTube Music is not offered: YouTube's daily quota is shared by everyone using Ansuz. To take a playlist there anyway, Publish on › YouTube Music (CSV file for TuneMyMusic)… saves a CSV file with title, artist, album and ISRC of each song; upload it on TuneMyMusic (a free web service) with YouTube Music as the destination and it rebuilds the playlist in your account.

Artwork - PDF: booklet and inserts for your CD

From an album page, Artwork - PDF… (⌘P) makes a PDF out of what Ansuz already knows about the album: its cover, tags, lyrics and technical details. Choose the booklet (A4 or Letter, light or dark, with the technical details, credits, tags and lyrics you tick: cover page, album data and song list, every tag in the files (the ones all songs share once, then each song’s own), one lyric per page) or the case inserts (a jewel case with a four-face folded front and the tray card with spines, a jewel case with a single front, a slim case front or a four-panel digipak) at real size with crop marks, and a 3 mm bleed only if you send it to a print shop. The preview updates as you change options; Save PDF… saves it where you choose and Print… prints at 100 % so the measurements come out right. If the best cover is small, Ansuz warns you and can look for a larger one online. Your choices are remembered per album. It is meant for keeping your discs on the computer or replacing a broken cover: one album at a time, no disc labels, no barcodes.

Identification

Right-click › Identify with AcoustID computes the track's acoustic fingerprint and asks AcoustID and MusicBrainz. It stores the identifiers and, if the file had no tags, fills in title, artist and album in the library (not in the file). Settings › Identification can identify the whole library.

Complete Tags. Looks up on MusicBrainz what a song is missing (title, artist, album, year, genre, ISRC), identifying it by its fingerprint first if needed, and adds it to the Ansuz library. It never replaces a value that is already there and never writes to the file. Calculate ReplayGain on a single song measures its whole disc, because album gain needs every track.

Tag editing

Ansuz edits tags in two steps. Editing changes the library right away (search, playlists, the iPhone and every view see it at once) and leaves the change waiting to be written; your files are only touched when you press Write Tags. So you can edit with a disk or a NAS disconnected, undo, and review everything before a single file changes.

The Tag Editor (⌥⌘T, or Open in Tag Editor on selected tracks) has a filter on top: rules like the ones of smart playlists, plus Waiting to Be Written, In Conflict, Could Not Be Written and Part of a Disc Image, and ready-made filters such as No Genre or No Composer in the Filters menu. The result stays put while you edit (a track you fix does not vanish from the list) until you press Refresh. Double-click a cell or press Return to edit it; Tab moves to the next field and Return to the same field of the next track. Set … Apply to Selection or Apply to All puts one value in many tracks at once (leave the value empty to clear the field). ⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z undo and redo whole edits. Edited cells are shown in color, and a dot marks the tracks waiting to be written.

The side panel shows every field of the selected tracks, grouped: basics, credits (composer, lyricist, arranger, performer, conductor), release, identifiers and others. With several tracks, a field that differs shows Mixed: typing a value puts it in all of them, and the button next to it offers Use the First Track’s Value or Clear in All. An empty field that the album does have (album artist, date) appears in gray: press Return to confirm it in the track. While you type, Ansuz suggests values that already exist in your library, the most used first.

Go Through (⌘R) steps through the result one track at a time, with the fields you checked in the side panel (genre and composer by default) and the song playing from 30 seconds in; your playback queue pauses and resumes afterwards. Return accepts and moves on, ⌘Return applies the same values to the rest of the album, ⌘← goes back, ⌘D copies what you accepted in the previous track, and No Lyrics (Instrumental) marks a track so it stops showing up in No Lyrics. Outside the fields, Space pauses the song and the arrows move 5 seconds. Ansuz remembers where you stopped.

Patterns & Actions… changes many tracks at once, with a preview of every change before applying it: Tag → Tag fills a field from a pattern in the style of Mp3tag (%artist%, %title%, %track%, %filename%… and functions such as $title(), $num(%track%,2), $replace() or $regex()); File Name → Tags reads fields from the file name and, with “/”, from its folders (%artist%/%album% (%year%)/%track% %title%); Case applies Title Case in your language (small words such as “of” or “de” stay lowercase, Roman numerals and acronyms are respected), sentence case, uppercase or lowercase; Numbering numbers the tracks 1, 2, 3… in the order of the grid, per album and disc, with totals. Any of them can be saved as an action, and actions can be exported and imported as JSON; two come ready: Compilation (Various Artists) and Clean Up (spaces, quotes, dashes). Everything applies to the selected tracks or to all the results, and undoes with ⌘Z.

From outside: MusicBrainz… looks up the album of the selected track and lists the releases that look like it; choose one to see what it would put in each track (paired by disc and number): date, label, catalog number, barcode, identifiers, numbers and totals, and credits from the works (composer, lyricist, arranger, conductor). Only the fields you check are applied; title, artist and album start unchecked. Its genres, and the ones the side panel suggests with Genres from MusicBrainz, are never applied unless you click one. The grid’s menu also finds lyrics (your saved ones, a .lrc next to the file, the tags or LRCLIB) and marks them to be written into the files, and Mark the Library’s Values for Writing does the same with what Ansuz knows but the file may not say (deduced from the folder names or completed from MusicBrainz). When a file changed outside Ansuz, Show Changes… shows the three values of each field in conflict (before, in the file, in the library) and you keep yours or the file’s field by field. History… lists every change with how many tracks were already written, and Revert undoes it (if it was written, the revert waits to be written back).

Pictures and file details: the side panel shows the cover embedded in the file and lets you set a picture by type (front cover, back cover, disc, artist, other) on the selected tracks: choose an image, take the large one from the internet (Cover Art Archive, Last.fm) or drag one in; Shrink to 1200 px keeps multi‑megabyte covers from bloating every track of an album. Replacing one type leaves the other pictures in the file. Its Technical section reads the file: which tags it carries and their version (ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, ID3v1, APEv2, Vorbis, MP4…), the embedded pictures and every raw key; a Custom Field adds any key you need. The grid’s menu calculates ReplayGain and marks it to be written into the files, and Clean Up the Files When Writing leaves an MP3 with ID3v2.4 alone (no ID3v1 or APEv2) and a FLAC without ID3. Check… looks for typical problems in the result (no year, repeated or missing track numbers, several artists without album artist, different genres in one album, no cover, garbled text) and Show puts those tracks in the grid.

Searching by text and Shortcuts: next to Rules, the filter has a Text mode for typing searches such as genre:"" year<1990 or album:contains Live NOT artist:"Various Artists": field:value (without caring about capitals or accents), field:"" empty, field:* not empty, field:contains x, year<1990, bpm>=120, is:pending, is:conflict, has:cover, no:lyrics, loose words (title, artist or album), AND, OR, NOT and parentheses. Filters › Save Current Filter… keeps a filter of either kind in that menu. In the Shortcuts app, Ansuz offers Tags Waiting to Be Written, Set a Tag and Apply a Tag Pattern (on the tracks of a text search) and Write Tags. Settings › Library › Tag Editor sets where Go Through starts each song, the language of Title Case and whether new pictures are shrunk to 1200 px.

Renaming and moving files: the Rename Files tab of Patterns & Actions… builds each file’s new path from its tags, inside the same source: %albumartist%/%album% (%year%)/$num(%track%,2) %title% (“/” makes folders; the extension stays; characters a network share does not accept are replaced, and a slash inside a value such as AC/DC does not create a folder). The preview shows the path now and after, and marks what cannot move: another file already there, two tracks that would get the same name, tracks of a disc image with a cue sheet (the .cue names the file). Nothing moves until Write Tags, and an existing file is never replaced; the .lrc written by Ansuz goes along with its song, and a folder left empty is removed. Your playlists, plays and ratings stay with the song.

The bar at the bottom counts what is waiting in the whole library. Show Changes… lists every field before and after; from there you discard, write only what you choose, or settle conflicts. Write Tags needs Allow editing tags in files turned on in Settings › Library (off by default).

How Ansuz writes: it copies the file, writes the tags in the copy, checks that the audio is exactly the same as before (a fingerprint of the audio alone, without the tags) and that the tags read back as expected, and only then replaces the original in one step. If the file changed since Ansuz last read it, nothing is written and the field shows up In Conflict, so you choose between your value and the file’s. The song that is playing waits for the next round. Tracks inside disc images with a cue sheet, and formats whose audio Ansuz cannot check, are edited in the library only. Writing tags does not make the iPhone download the song again: only the new tags travel.

The album editor (Edit Tags… on an album) works the same way: Save keeps the changes in the library, and Save and Write Tags also writes them to the files. Artist (all tracks) among the album fields sets the same artist on every track at once; right-click a track and choose Apply this artist / composer / disc number to all tracks to copy that row’s value to the whole column.

Album inspector

Inspector on an album page (or Album Inspector… in an album’s right-click menu) shows, source by source, what the library knows about the disc: whether it is matched with a MusicBrainz release and a Discogs release, how many tracks have a MusicBrainz recording, an ISRC, an acoustic fingerprint and lyrics, the barcode, and the cover with its size. Below, the list of what is missing. Check Online asks MusicBrainz, Discogs (with your token from Settings), Last.fm and Cover Art Archive, associates the Discogs release when the barcode or the artist and title find it unambiguously, tells you when a larger cover is available, and lists the differences between your library and those sources: album title, year, label, catalog number, barcode, country and track titles.

Use this next to a difference writes that value into the Ansuz library only: your files are never touched. Re-reading the tags brings back what the files say; to change the files themselves, use the tag editor. The album artist is shown for comparison but never changed from here.

Add to MusicBrainz… (in the inspector of an unmatched album, or in the album’s right-click menu) is for discs MusicBrainz does not have yet: Ansuz opens your browser on the MusicBrainz release editor with everything filled in from your files: title, artist, year, country, label, catalog number, barcode, and one medium per disc with each track’s title, number, length and recording when known. You need a MusicBrainz account; you review, complete and submit there, and nothing is added until you do. When MusicBrainz confirms the new release it sends you back to Ansuz, which links the album to it right away. The release editor has no field for ISRCs, so those stay in your library only.

Prepare Discogs Draft… (in the inspector of an album with no Discogs release, or in the album’s right-click menu) does the same for Discogs, which has no editor seeding: Ansuz saves a CSV in the exact layout of Discogs’ CSV-to-Draft tool (artist, title, label, catalog number, format, genre, tracks, date, barcode) and opens that page in your browser; you upload the file there and Discogs creates a private draft that you review, complete and submit. The tool takes one label, one format and one genre, and the tracks without position, duration or artist, so Ansuz writes the country, the genres from your tags and the full tracklist with durations and artists into the notes, ready to copy into the form. Nothing is published until you submit the draft on Discogs.

Scheduled tasks

Some jobs take days on a big library: re-reading the tags of 200,000 files on a NAS, looking for covers album by album, fingerprinting what has no tags. Settings › Tasks lets them run on their own inside time windows you choose, one per day of the week (Monday to Friday from 3:00 to 7:00, say). Ansuz has to be open: a sandboxed App Store app cannot work in the background. While a task is running the Mac does not go to sleep on its own (the display may turn off); keep the lid open and the adapter connected.

A task that does not finish inside a window resumes in the next one, and nothing is done twice: every track and album records in the library what was already done (which tag reading it got, whether a cover was searched, whether it was fingerprinted), so the next run skips it. A task switches itself off when it has nothing left to do; when the last one of the round switches off, all of them switch back on for the next round. The tasks run in the order of the list: drag one onto the row where you want it. Each task shows how much is pending, its last result, and has a Run Now button that ignores the windows; Stop halts after the current batch.

• Look for added and removed files: the same incremental scan as ⇧⌘R, source by source (size and date; only changed files are read).
• Re-read tags: tracks indexed before Ansuz stored ReplayGain, BPM and key.
• Find missing covers: embedded, folder, Cover Art Archive, Last.fm.
• Identify untagged tracks: acoustic fingerprint with AcoustID and MusicBrainz.
• Match albums with MusicBrainz: each album is matched to a MusicBrainz release by barcode, by the release group AcoustID found, or by artist, title and track count, verified track by track against the durations. Ansuz stores the release, the recording ID and ISRC of every track, the label, catalog number and country, and the Discogs release MusicBrainz links; nothing your tags already say is overwritten. Albums with no match are retried after 30 days. Match with MusicBrainz in an album’s right-click menu matches that album right away and also loads every tag MusicBrainz has into its songs, replacing what they say: titles, artists, numbers, date, label, catalog number, barcode, ISRC, identifiers, credits and the most voted genre. It changes the Ansuz library only (Write Tags takes it to the files) and undoes as one edit in the tag editor’s history. Songs repeated in the album (another edition, another folder) get the same tags.
• Analyze BPM and key: for tracks whose tags lack them, Ansuz decodes up to three minutes and estimates the tempo (onset envelope and autocorrelation) and the key (chromagram against the Krumhansl-Kessler profiles). Tags always win: the analysis only fills what is missing.
• Calculate ReplayGain: for tracks whose tags lack it, Ansuz measures the loudness of the whole file with EBU R128 (ITU-R BS.1770-4, with true peak) and stores track and album gain, referenced to −18 LUFS. It works one disc at a time, so the album gain comes from the whole record; tags always win, and re-reading tags keeps what was measured. The track info window says when a value was measured by Ansuz. Nothing is written to your files.
• Find lyrics: .lrc next to the song, tags, then LRCLIB, for songs without lyrics; a song with none is retried after 30 days.
• Publish missing synced lyrics to LRCLIB: off by default; the first time you turn it on, Ansuz explains that LRCLIB is public. It publishes the synced lyrics you imported, synced or that came from .lrc files and tags, one song per second, skipping what is already there with the same content.

Analyzing by hand. Analyze BPM and key and Calculate ReplayGain from the menu of a song, an album, a playlist or a folder run one job at a time: its progress shows in the toolbar, with a button to stop it, and at the end Ansuz tells you how many songs could not be analyzed, if any.

Ansuz on iPhone

Ansuz for iPhone has two modes in one app: remote control, which browses your Mac’s library and runs what plays there, and play on this iPhone, with a library on the phone that mixes the playlists your Mac copies to it with your own music. The iPhone also works without a Mac. Between the iPhone and the Mac everything goes over your local network, encrypted, with no accounts or servers in between. Switch modes with the button at the top left.

Home, the first tab in both modes, shows shelves of your Favorites, Recently Played and Most Played albums; swipe a shelf sideways, or tap its title to see all. The heart on an album’s page marks it as a favorite. Controlling the Mac, the shelves are the Mac’s; on the iPhone they come from the music on the phone, with the favorites you marked on either side (they travel with each sync) and the plays of this iPhone.

Your music, without a Mac. Ansuz has its own folder in the Files app (On My iPhone › Ansuz): whatever you copy there is added to the library on its own, and whatever you delete from it in Files leaves the library. You can also copy music into it over a cable from a computer: on a Mac from the Finder (the iPhone’s Files section), on Windows with the Apple Devices app. The Ansuz folder is not included in the iCloud backup: when you switch iPhones, you have to copy the music again.

Importing and adding folders. In Sources, the + button offers Import from Files…, Send from a Computer…, Connect to a Server… and Add the Music App Library (see below). Import from Files… opens a single picker where you select audio files, zips and folders, all together: files are copied to the Ansuz folder, and for each folder Ansuz asks: Copy to Ansuz keeps it on the iPhone even if the original goes away; Use in Place takes no space, but plays only while the folder is available: a USB drive plugged in, iCloud Drive, a network server mounted in Files, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive… A folder used in place is never modified. The picker doesn’t let you select several folders, so to choose folders, go into the one that holds them and tap Open without selecting anything. If it has subfolders, Ansuz shows Choose What to Import with each subfolder checked (uncheck the ones you don’t want; the loose music in that folder is listed too): Copy Selected to Ansuz copies what’s checked, and Use “folder” in Place uses the whole folder with all its subfolders. For example, open Downloads and check the albums there. Ansuz also shows up in Open with… and the share sheet for audio files and zips: AirDrop, WhatsApp, Mail, Safari downloads; they are copied to the Ansuz folder and added on their own. A zip is never unzipped without asking (Unzip the music?), and only the music, .lrc lyrics, .cue sheets and artwork are extracted. On the iPhone Ansuz plays FLAC, ALAC and AAC (M4A), MP3, WAV and AIFF, and reads tags and artwork (embedded or cover.jpg) on the phone itself. A strip at the top shows the progress of what is being imported, with a button to cancel, and then the result.

Sending from a computer. In Sources › + › Send from a Computer…, the iPhone shows an address (for example http://192.168.1.20:8080), a QR code of that address and a six-digit PIN. On a computer on the same Wi-Fi network (Windows, Mac or Linux, any browser), open that address and type the PIN: an Ansuz page appears where you drag files or whole folders, or pick them with Choose Files or Choose a Folder. Each file shows its progress, three are sent at a time, the folder structure is kept, whatever is already on the iPhone isn’t sent again and anything that isn’t music is skipped; a zip arrives on the iPhone, which asks whether to unzip it. The music goes into the Ansuz folder and joins the library as it arrives. While the screen is open the iPhone doesn’t lock by itself; leave it open until the transfer ends (if you leave the app, the transfer stops, and when you come back it resumes with the same PIN). The server exists only while that screen is open and works over your local network, without internet or any cloud; the PIN protects access (five wrong PINs lock it for 30 seconds). The first time, iOS asks for permission to use the local network.

Music servers. In Sources › + › Connect to a Server… you add a Subsonic or OpenSubsonic server (Navidrome, Airsonic, Gonic and other compatible ones): its address (http:// or https://), user and password, or Use an API key (OpenSubsonic); an optional name; and the Download Quality (Original, MP3 320 kbps or MP3 192 kbps). Ansuz tests the connection before saving. The password stays in the iPhone’s keychain and never travels: each request carries a one-time token. The server’s catalog joins the iPhone library: its albums appear with the rest (an album that is on both the server and the iPhone shows once), search covers everything, its playlists appear read-only, and it works in CarPlay. It is read again once a day or with Sync Now. Each song is downloaded to a cache on the iPhone when it plays (and the next ones in the queue while the current one plays). To listen offline, Download to iPhone on an album or playlist with songs from the server copies them to the Ansuz folder, where they stay as iPhone music. Tapping the server in Sources shows its status, address, user, last sync and download quality (MP3 uses less mobile data; Original keeps lossless files as they are), with Sync Now and Remove from Ansuz…, which takes its songs out of the library without changing anything on the server; what you downloaded stays. If the server doesn’t answer (no network, away from home) it shows Not connected: its songs are hidden until it comes back, and what you downloaded keeps playing. If the network drops mid-song, Ansuz stops at that song without losing the queue. At the very top, under Server Type, you pick Subsonic or DLNA / UPnP. A DLNA server is the media server of a NAS or a computer (Twonky, MiniDLNA, Plex, Gerbera…): under On Your Network Ansuz lists the ones it finds by itself a few seconds after you open the tab (Search Again repeats the search), and a tap adds one. It searches the iPhone’s network and also the networks of the servers and NAS you already use: in homes with two networks, the media server is often on the NAS’s. It only needs the local network permission. For a server on another network, under Another Server you type only its IP address or name, with no user or password, and Ansuz finds the server; if it doesn’t, type the full address of its description (for example http://192.168.1.10:9000/dev0/desc.xml). If the server has a folder view, Ansuz uses it, and a song the server shows in several views appears only once. FLAC, ALAC, AAC, MP3, WAV and AIFF download as they are; for other formats Ansuz downloads the version the server converts, if it offers one, and otherwise the song isn’t listed. Playlists from a DLNA server aren’t imported, and if the server rebuilds its database, its songs may come in again as new ones. SMB is for the shared folder of a NAS or a computer, through the Files app. Type the address (for example smb://192.168.1.10) and tap Connect in Files: Files opens Connect to Server with the address already filled in; tap the blue ✓ at the top right and sign in with your NAS user (Files keeps the password, not Ansuz). When you come back to Ansuz with ◀ Ansuz, the picker opens: tap Browse, go back to the list of locations, open the NAS under the Shared heading, go into the music folder and tap Open without selecting anything. The folder is used where it is, without being copied or changed. Servers you have already used appear under Recent Servers, so you don’t have to type the address again. When Files disconnects from the NAS, the source shows Not connected without losing its songs; on its screen, Connect in Files takes you to reconnect, and when you come back the folder returns by itself.

The Music app. In Sources › + › Add the Music App Library, Ansuz asks for permission to read the Music app’s library (iOS asks only once) and adds it as the Music App source: songs you bought, ripped from a CD or synced from a computer join the Ansuz library alongside the rest (the same album in two sources shows once), with their playlists, which are read-only, and in CarPlay, and they play with Ansuz’s gapless playback, ReplayGain and crossfade. Ansuz reads them where they are: it never copies, changes or deletes them, and they take up no space. What you add to or remove from Music appears or disappears by itself. Apple Music songs with copy protection and songs that are only in iCloud and not downloaded play only in the Music app: they aren’t listed, and the source says how many there are. If you turn off the permission in Settings › Apps › Ansuz › Media & Apple Music, the source shows Not connected until you allow it again; Remove from Ansuz… takes it out of the library without touching the Music app.

Sources. The Sources tab lists each source with how many songs it has, how much space it takes and its status: indexing, with progress; Not connected; or downloading from iCloud (so many of so many). Synced from the Mac is what the Mac copies; tapping it opens the sync screen. The Ansuz Folder screen has Index Again and Delete All Music in This Folder…, which asks for confirmation and is the only thing Ansuz ever deletes. A folder used in place that isn’t available shows as Not connected, and its songs are hidden until it comes back, but not deleted; Remove from Ansuz… takes its songs out of the library and leaves the files where they are. If a folder in iCloud Drive has songs that aren’t on the phone, Ansuz requests them from iCloud and shows how many have downloaded before reading them. If the same album is in two sources, it appears only once (the copy from the Mac wins). The playback settings (ReplayGain, crossfade) are at the bottom of Sources.

Pairing. On the Mac, in Settings › Devices, turn on Allow Ansuz on iPhone and Apple TV to connect. Open Ansuz on the iPhone on the same network: it finds the Mac on its own. The first time, the Mac shows an alert with a code; pair only if it matches the code on the iPhone. After that it reconnects without asking. Paired Devices lists each iPhone and lets you revoke it.

Remote control. Albums, artists, genres, playlists and search across your library, with artwork; play, pause, skip and seek; shuffle and repeat; the queue, to reorder, remove or play next; ratings and loves; Ansuz’s volume and the Mac’s audio output; synced lyrics for the song that is playing. While an iPhone is connected, the Mac does not go to sleep from inactivity. In Artists, each album artist appears with a photo and, on the right, a letter bar: tap a letter or slide your finger along the bar to jump. Tap an artist to open their page: photo, biography with Read More, Play and Shuffle, their releases split into Albums, EPs, Singles, Greatest Hits and Compilations, and Related Artists from your library.

Taking music to the iPhone. On the Mac, right-click a playlist › Take to iPhone and choose the format: the original file (converted when the iPhone can’t play it), Apple Lossless 16-bit / 44.1 kHz, or AAC 256 kbps, the smallest. DSD, SACD, DTS-CD and CD images with a cue sheet are always converted; converted copies are kept in Ansuz’s cache. Smart playlists travel already resolved. On the iPhone, Sources › Synced from the Mac shows how much each playlist takes and how much is left to download; Sync Now downloads the rest in the background, even with the phone locked, and removes what the Mac no longer sends. Lyrics, artwork and ReplayGain travel with each song. With Prefer the lightest version in Settings › Devices, a song you have in several copies (MP3 and FLAC, say) travels as the one that makes the smallest file; ratings and plays still go to the preferred version.

Playing on the iPhone. Playlists, albums and search over what is on the phone, gapless, with crossfade, ReplayGain, and controls on the Lock Screen and in Control Center. Plays are scrobbled from the iPhone to Last.fm and ListenBrainz with the Mac’s accounts (queued when there is no internet), and the Mac does not send them again. Ratings, loves and plays go back to the Mac as soon as the iPhone finds it on the network; if a song was rated on both, the newest change wins. In a regular playlist, Edit lets you remove and reorder songs, and the change is applied on the Mac without overwriting what you added there; smart playlists are built by the Mac and are read-only on the iPhone. In the Albums tab, the switch at the top goes to Artists: the same list with photos, letter bar and artist page as when controlling the Mac, with the music on the iPhone and on the servers you connected (Subsonic, DLNA). Play and Shuffle play on the iPhone.

CarPlay. In the car, Ansuz shows the music on the iPhone: your playlists, albums and songs, each with Shuffle, and the standard Now Playing screen with shuffle and repeat. It works without a network connection; the Mac isn’t needed. The Artists tab has a letter index on the side (with many artists you pick the letter first); each artist shows Shuffle and their releases split into Albums, EPs, Singles, Greatest Hits and Compilations. With no signal, as in streaming apps, what is only on your servers disappears and what is on the iPhone stays; it comes back by itself when the signal does.

Siri. Say “Play Coldplay with the Ansuz app”: an artist, an album, a song, a playlist or a genre, and also “…next”, “…later” or “shuffle…”. It works with the phone locked and in CarPlay. It plays where it would if you tapped it: in remote-control mode with the Mac connected, it searches the Mac’s library and plays on the Mac; otherwise, the iPhone’s. If it isn’t on the iPhone but your paired Mac is on the network, Ansuz connects by itself, finds it in the Mac’s library (your NAS, for example) and plays it on the Mac. Names are matched ignoring case, accents and a leading “The”; a song plays followed by the rest of its album, and an artist or a genre plays shuffled. “Play Ansuz” on its own resumes what was playing. Siri often takes “in Ansuz” as part of the title: say “with the Ansuz app” instead, or just “Play Coldplay” and pick Ansuz from the list Siri shows.

Apple TV. With Sources › Apple TV › Share with Apple TV turned on, an Apple TV with Ansuz on the same network can browse and play the music on this iPhone while Ansuz is open here (see Ansuz on Apple TV). The first time, the iPhone shows the Apple TV’s code: accept only if it matches. The same section lists the paired Apple TVs; swipe one to remove it. Songs from the Music app aren’t shared.

There is no Ansuz cloud and there are no Ansuz accounts. The iPhone only talks to your Mac over your local network (and, while you send music from a computer, to that computer’s browser), to the scrobbling services you already use, to the music servers you connect, to an Apple TV you share your library with (Share with Apple TV) and, only if you choose a folder in iCloud Drive or another provider, to that provider through the Files app. The music from your Mac travels to your phone (and, if you share it, to your Apple TV) and nowhere else.

Ansuz on Apple TV

Ansuz for Apple TV plays your Mac’s library on the TV, streamed over your local network, encrypted. It stores no music on the Apple TV: each song comes from the Mac as it plays. It has Albums, Artists, Playlists, Now Playing and search (the magnifying glass), with the on-screen keyboard or dictation. Sources is the last tab. Back in Now Playing returns you to the tab where you chose the song.

A vertical bar of letters on the right of Albums and Artists jumps straight to a letter: move right to the bar and select it. Albums follow the order of their grid, by album artist.

Playing a song keeps you where you are, so you can try several songs from an album. To open Now Playing, use its tab, or press and hold the song that’s playing and choose Now Playing.

Artists shows a grid with each artist’s photo (one of their album covers until it arrives) and a search field. An artist’s page has the photo, a short biography, Play and Shuffle, their albums and Related Artists: artists similar according to Last.fm that are in your library. Photos and biographies need an internet connection the first time.

Home, the first section on the TV, shows the same shelves as on the Mac and the iPhone: Favorites, Recently Played and Most Played, from the library you chose (the Mac’s or the TV’s own servers), with See All for each. The heart on an album’s page marks it as a favorite.

If the song has lyrics, a “Hold to show lyrics” label appears under the progress bar: hold the clickpad and choose Show Lyrics. Synced lyrics follow the song with the current line in white; plain lyrics scroll along with it. The choice stays on for the next songs, and while the lyrics are on screen the TV does not switch to its resting screen. Songs from a Subsonic or Navidrome server show the lyrics the server has (embedded in the file or in a .lrc), synced when it has them that way.

Pairing. On the Mac, in Settings › Devices, turn on Allow Ansuz on iPhone and Apple TV to connect. Open Ansuz on the Apple TV on the same network and choose your Mac. The Apple TV shows a six-digit code and the Mac shows an alert with a code: click Pair only if they match. After that it reconnects on its own, and the Apple TV appears under Paired Devices, where you can revoke it.

Formats. Everything the Mac plays. What the Apple TV can’t decode (DSD, SACD, DTS-CD, APE, songs from disc images with a .cue, Ogg Vorbis…) the Mac sends converted on the fly: playback starts right away, without waiting for the whole song to be converted, and you can still jump to any point.

Music servers, without the Mac. In the Sources tab you choose which library the Apple TV shows: your Mac’s, live, or Music Servers. One at a time, because the same music on the Mac and on a server would show up twice. Add a Subsonic or Navidrome Server… adds a Subsonic or OpenSubsonic server (Navidrome, Airsonic, Gonic, LMS): its address, and a user and password or Use an API key (OpenSubsonic). Add a DLNA Media Server… adds a DLNA/UPnP media server (Twonky, MiniDLNA, Plex, Serviio, Universal Media Server and the ones built into many NAS drives), found on its own under On This Network or typed in By Address. The Apple TV reads each server’s catalog into its own index and plays straight from the server, even with the Mac turned off; an album on two servers shows once, and a server that doesn’t answer is hidden until it comes back. What the Apple TV can’t decode (Ogg Vorbis, APE…) is requested from a Subsonic server converted to MP3; on a DLNA server that song is skipped. Servers are read again once a day, or with Read Again on the server’s screen. The index lives in the cache: if tvOS clears it, it is rebuilt on its own; the servers stay saved and their passwords stay in the keychain. Shared folders (SMB) aren’t available: tvOS has no Files app. With no Mac paired, the first screen also offers Use a Music Server Instead.

Long reads. Reading a large server takes a while: 180,000 songs over DLNA take more than an hour. The Apple TV notes how far it got every 5,500 songs or so, so if the read is interrupted (you left the app, it was closed, or the network went down) it continues from there by itself when you return to the app or open it. If the network drops, it tries again by itself after 5 seconds, 15 seconds and a minute, and meanwhile Sources shows The connection was lost. Trying again… The server’s screen shows Reading stopped at N songs., with Continue Reading (N songs) to go on and Read Again to start from scratch. If the server rejects some folders (a busy Plex does), they are requested again; and if some folder still couldn’t be read, the read doesn’t remove anything that was already there. The Apple TV doesn’t re-read the whole server every time it starts: it does when the server reports songs added or removed, and once a week for tag changes; an interrupted read picks up where it left off for three days.

Scrobbling and plays. The Apple TV scrobbles to Last.fm and ListenBrainz with the accounts of the Mac (or iPhone) it is paired with: there is no need to sign in on the TV. Plays of songs from the Mac go to the Mac’s history and play counts, and are kept on the Apple TV while there is no connection. Plays of songs from music servers stay on the Apple TV.

An iPhone as the source. On the iPhone, turn on Sources › Apple TV › Share with Apple TV (off by default). The Apple TV lists the iPhone next to the Macs, with an iPhone icon; choose it and confirm the six-digit code on the iPhone. From then on the Apple TV browses and plays the iPhone’s library. It works while Ansuz is open on the iPhone (with an Apple TV connected, the iPhone’s screen doesn’t turn off on its own). The iPhone sends the original file, without converting it: songs the Apple TV can’t decode are skipped. Songs from the Music app and from disc images with a .cue aren’t shared. Plays on the TV go to the iPhone’s history. The Apple TV is paired with one Mac or iPhone at a time.

Now Playing and the Siri Remote. The Now Playing screen is made to be read from across the room, with a background taken from the cover. On the clickpad: click to play or pause; swipe quickly right or left for the next or previous song; drag slowly to scrub through the song (it jumps when you let go); click the right or left edge to go 10 seconds forward or back; swipe down for the queue; press and hold for the song’s menu (Go to Album, Go to Artist, Up Next).

Menus and the queue. Press and hold a song or an album in any list for Play Next, Add to Queue, Go to Album and Go to Artist; albums also have Play and Shuffle. In Up Next, choosing a song jumps to it; press and hold it for Play Now, Play Next, Move Up, Move Down and Remove from Queue. Clear Up Next empties everything that follows. On an album from a DLNA server (such as Plex), Re-read Tags reads just that album’s folder from the server again: in seconds new songs come in, tags are corrected and what is gone is removed. Use it when you’ve just tidied up an album and want to see it right away; if you renamed its folder, the folder above is re-read.

Rest mode. If music is playing and nobody touches the remote for two minutes, instead of the system screen saver Ansuz shows the cover and the song full screen, drifting slowly. Any button brings you back. While paused, the system screen saver works as usual.

If the connection drops. If the network goes down or the Mac is turned off, the Apple TV pauses, tells you and reconnects on its own; it resumes the same song at the same position. After more than 10 minutes without a connection it stays paused. Ansuz also answers to the Apple TV’s Control Center and to the remote in the iPhone’s Control Center.

Subsonic Server

Ansuz can serve your Mac’s library to Subsonic-compatible apps such as Amperfy, play:Sub, Symfonium, Feishin or Supersonic, on your phone, tablet or another computer. Turn it on in Settings › Devices › Subsonic Server; it’s off by default.

• Connecting an app: create a user with Add User…, open Credentials and copy the password or the API key. In the app, enter the address shown in Settings (for example http://192.168.0.20:4533), the user name and the password.
• Profiles: Own device sees every source (or the ones you choose), counts your plays and can change likes, ratings and playlists unless you make it listen-only. Guest is for someone else: it sees only the sources you choose, changes nothing, and its plays don’t count in your statistics.
• Plays: what you play in an app with an own-device user goes into your history and statistics and, with Send plays from Subsonic apps to Last.fm and ListenBrainz on, is scrobbled from the Mac. Turn off scrobbling in the app itself, or each song will count twice.
• Quality and data: with no limit, the app gets the original file (a CD-quality FLAC uses about 1 Mbit/s; a 24-bit/96 kHz one, 3). DSD, cue images and unusual formats arrive as WAV. If the app asks for a bitrate limit, Ansuz converts to AAC on the fly (also when it asks for MP3: the Mac has no MP3 encoder).
• Away from home: the server only accepts connections from your local network. To listen from elsewhere, install Tailscale on the Mac and on the phone and use the Mac’s 100.x address in the app. With Outside Home › Open a port on the router, Ansuz asks your router to forward a port to the Mac (UPnP or NAT-PMP) and shows whether it worked. Connections from the internet are accepted only over HTTPS with a certificate: until one is set up, nothing from outside gets in. If your provider uses CGNAT (one public address shared by many customers, common on fiber and mobile networks), no port can be opened and Tailscale is the way. To load the certificate, use Import Certificate and Key… (the two files from tailscale cert, or fullchain.pem and privkey.pem from certbot) or Import .p12…. It has to be for a name that points to the Mac: your own domain pointing to your public address, or the Tailscale name. With it, Ansuz also listens on port 4534 over HTTPS, and the apps use https://name:port. Access from Outside lists who connected from the internet and the failed sign-ins. With Automatic Certificate, Ansuz gets the certificate from Let’s Encrypt by itself and renews it: enter the name, choose ZoneEdit or Cloudflare and save its credentials (ZoneEdit: the user and the zone’s dynamic authentication token; Cloudflare: an API token with DNS edit permission). Try it first with the test service, then turn that off. With dynamic DNS, the name follows your public address when your provider changes it. → Away from home, step by step
• Always available: closing the window doesn’t stop the server; the menu bar shows how many apps are connected, and while any is, the Mac doesn’t go to sleep on its own. With Settings › General › Open at Login it’s available again after a restart.

Listening away from home, step by step

With this you can listen to your library from anywhere, on your phone or another computer, over an encrypted connection with a certificate that apps accept. The first time takes about half an hour; after that there is nothing to do: Ansuz renews the certificate and follows your public address when it changes.

Important: this guide relies on services run by other companies: ZoneEdit (the DNS of your domain), Let’s Encrypt (the certificate), your router and your internet provider. Any of them can change their pages, menus, names or terms without notice, and then what you see may not match this guide. That is not an Ansuz error: look for the equivalent option on that service’s page or in its help. Ansuz’s messages always say which service failed.

What you need:

• The Mac on, with Ansuz open and Serve the library to Subsonic apps turned on (see Subsonic Server). If the Mac sleeps or is off, there is no music from outside.
• A router that can open ports by itself (UPnP or NAT-PMP). Most internet providers’ routers can; sometimes it has to be turned on in the router’s settings.
• A domain of your own (for example yourname.com), bought from a domain registrar. Ansuz does not sell or give away domains.
• A ZoneEdit account to manage that domain’s DNS.

Step 1: the port on the router

1. In Settings › Devices › Outside Home, turn on Open a port on the router.
2. Wait a few seconds and look at Router:
   • It says the port is open (by UPnP or NAT-PMP) and shows the Public address: go on to step 2.
   • The router did not answer: open the router’s settings (usually in a web browser, at the address printed on a label on the device), find UPnP and turn it on. If it doesn’t have it, forward by hand the TCP port that Ansuz shows to this Mac’s address.
   • A warning about CGNAT: your provider shares one public address among many customers and no port reaches your home. This guide can’t work there; use Tailscale (see Subsonic Server) or ask your provider for a public address of your own.

Step 2: the domain at ZoneEdit

1. Create an account at zoneedit.com and add your domain as a zone. ZoneEdit shows the name servers to use.
2. At the registrar where you bought the domain, replace the domain’s name servers with ZoneEdit’s (some registrars call this delegating the domain). The change can take several hours to be seen on the internet.
3. Choose the name you will use, for example music.yourname.com. A subdomain is best: the bare domain may already be in use for something else, like a website.

Step 3: the ZoneEdit token

Ansuz needs permission to change two records in your DNS: a temporary one that proves to Let’s Encrypt the domain is yours, and the name’s address when your provider changes it. That permission is the dynamic authentication token, which is not your ZoneEdit password.

1. At ZoneEdit, open your domain’s DNS and find DYN RECORDS (dynamic records). Click the wrench icon.
2. Add the name you chose (for example music) with a TTL (the value ZoneEdit suggests is fine).
3. Under DYN AUTHENTICATION TOKEN, click ENABLE, then NEXT, and confirm. ZoneEdit shows the token: copy it.

If you can’t find these options under these names, ZoneEdit has changed its site: search its help for “dynamic authentication token”.

Step 4: the certificate in Ansuz

1. In Settings › Devices › Automatic Certificate, turn on Get and renew a certificate automatically.
2. Name: the full name you chose (music.yourname.com).
3. DNS provider: ZoneEdit. User: your ZoneEdit user name (not your email). Dynamic authentication token: the one from step 3. Zone: your domain (yourname.com). Click Save Credentials. Ansuz keeps them in the Mac’s keychain.
4. Turn on Keep the name pointing to this Mac (dynamic DNS). In a few seconds Name points to shows your public address.
5. With Use the Let’s Encrypt test service on, click Get Certificate Now. It takes from half a minute to a few minutes; Status shows each step and ends with Certificate obtained ….
6. Turn off the test service and click Get Certificate Now again: this is the real certificate. By requesting a certificate you accept the Let’s Encrypt Subscriber Agreement.

From then on Ansuz renews it before it expires (about every two months) and updates the name if your public address changes. The Mac has to be on now and then for that to happen.

Step 5: the user and the app

1. In Subsonic Users, create a user for each phone or person (Add User…) and copy its password from Credentials.
2. In the app, type the address shown in Address from outside (for example https://music.yourname.com:4534), the user and the password. Use the exact name: with any other name the app rejects the certificate. The same address works at home and away.
3. In Ansuz for iPhone: choose Play on This iPhone with the mode button, then Sources › + › Connect to a Server… › Subsonic Server. On the server’s page choose the quality: Converted, 192 kbps uses less mobile data.

Step 6: try it

Turn off the phone’s Wi-Fi and play something over mobile data. On the Mac, Access from Outside shows the phone’s address, the user and the app. If it works, you’re done.

If something fails

The router did not answer	UPnP is off on the router: turn it on, or forward the port by hand (step 1).
CGNAT	Your provider doesn’t give you an address of your own: use Tailscale, or ask for a public address.
The DNS provider rejected the user or token.	Check that the user is your ZoneEdit user name, not your email, and that the token belongs to that zone. If in doubt, create a new token at ZoneEdit and save the credentials again.
The DNS record did not show up within 3 minutes.	ZoneEdit took longer than usual. Try again in a while.
Could not connect to Let’s Encrypt	Let’s Encrypt may be under maintenance (its status is at letsencrypt.status.io). Its test service is sometimes down longer than the real one: if that’s the case, you can go straight to the real certificate.
Let’s Encrypt could not verify the name	The domain isn’t delegated to ZoneEdit yet (step 2), or the zone is wrong. Wait a few hours after delegating it.
The app says the certificate is not valid	You typed a name other than the certificate’s, or you still have the test service’s certificate (step 4, item 5).
Works at home but not away	The name doesn’t point to your address (see Name points to), the port isn’t open (step 1) or the Mac is asleep. Some providers block incoming connections: ask yours.

Security: from the internet the only way in is HTTPS with the certificate, with a user and password; after 10 failed attempts that address is blocked for 15 minutes. Use one user per device: if you lose the phone, you disable only that one. To stop accepting connections from outside, turn off Open a port on the router.

Settings

• General: app language (needs a relaunch) and appearance (System, Light or Dark). Crossfade between tracks (0 to 12 seconds). Volume leveling by ReplayGain (Off, Track, Album, Automatic) with preamp and clipping protection. Key notation: Standard or Camelot. On that album’s page, under the buttons, links take you to more music by the author on YouTube Music, Apple Music, Spotify and TIDAL; the YouTube Music link is also in the source’s menu and next to this setting.
• Audio: output device, matching the sample rate to each file and exclusive mode. See Audio output.
• Library: tag editing, the SACD multichannel area and the bundled sample album (can be removed and brought back). “Show unavailable sources”, off, hides disconnected sources from the sidebar, and their tracks from All Music and Recent, until they return. How many albums each Home shelf brings (100 by default).
• Last.fm: account and scrobbling.
• ListenBrainz: user token and sending listens.
• Discogs: personal token for artist profiles, photos and links.
• Apple Music: permission, subscription status and your playlists.
• Spotify: connection through your browser and your playlists.
• TIDAL: connection through your browser and your playlists.
• Identification: bulk fingerprint identification.
• Devices: allow Ansuz on iPhone and Apple TV to connect, paired devices, and the playlists that go to the phone with their format. See Ansuz on iPhone and Ansuz on Apple TV.

Keyboard shortcuts

⌘O	Add folder
⌘⇧R	Rescan all sources
Space	Play / pause
⌘→	Next
⌘←	Previous (or restart after 3 s)
⌘I	Now playing info
⌥⌘I	Show or hide the side panel
⌘− ⌘+ ⌘0	Smaller, bigger or normal-size lyrics
⌘,	Settings
⌘?	This help
⌫ in the queue	Remove the selected track
Double-click	Play

Acknowledgments

Ansuz is built on open-source software: TagLib (LGPL 2.1 / MPL 1.1) reads and writes tags, Chromaprint (LGPL 2.1) computes acoustic fingerprints and ships as a replaceable framework inside the app, FFmpeg (LGPL 2.1) decodes DTS-CDs and the formats macOS lacks (APE, WavPack, Musepack, WMA and others), also as a replaceable framework built with audio decoders only, and GRDB.swift (MIT) drives the SQLite database. The license texts are included in the app package.

Ansuz includes the album “Desnudo Frente a Vos” (2026) by Alberto Yualé, the app’s author, with his permission, as a sample source; it shows in the sidebar like any other source and can be removed from Settings › Library.

Metadata comes from AcoustID, MusicBrainz, Cover Art Archive, Last.fm, LRCLIB, Wikidata and Wikipedia, each under its own terms. Ansuz only contacts them for what you ask: identifying a song, fetching covers, lyrics or biographies, and, once you connect your account, sending your listens to Last.fm.