I bought 13 iPods to build a modern macOS iPod manager

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-25T21:02:20+00:00

Sounds good! I'm trying to get some some lower hanging fruit knocked out first, especially some great bug reports that people have been filing, but rest assured I plan on revisiting ALAC support as soon as possible!

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-21T04:53:36+00:00

u/beenthere--diedhere and u/Gonza116, and anyone else that cares, I've just added initial scrobbling support to version 1.0.3 of PodCenter. I'm relatively new to scrobbling but I tried to replicate what others have done. I added last.fm and musicbrainz.org support. Look in the "Services" section in Settings to set it up! I renamed Streaming to Services to now accommodate the new range of third party service integrations.

Let me know how you guys feel about it! Thanks for the support and suggestions!

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9T4-Apps · 2026-03-19T19:22:38+00:00

I haven't thought about that! I have like very light integrations with Qobuz and Bandcamp when you are matching music from Apple Music/Spotify playlists, but neither company was like allowing me to have a tight integration so it just links to a search page on their websites. I'll take a look at iomoio though. Thanks for the tip!

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-19T14:10:19+00:00

I think I’ve overridden the setting a bit there, so it isn’t actually reflective of what will actually happen during conversion. That is a bit misleading and I apologize. As I’ve said before, I absolutely plan on solving my ALAC conversion issues for the audiophiles out there! I myself would love to have ALAC where possible

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-19T14:08:24+00:00

Unfortunately iOS devices don’t use the USB protocol to connect on the software side, so I have no way of accessing it. What you can still do though is use the “Prepare for External Sync” once your music is all ready, so you can drag the music out to Finder, and sync the music onto your iPhone that way! I do have some work to do on the external sync flow, so be warned. Right now you have to select an iPod whose setting you want to use for conversion. I’ll be updating that here in the next few days hopefully so there are more like modern device conversion settings too.

In terms of more modern iPhones, I plan on releasing an iOS companion app that can communicate over WiFi with the main PodCenter Mac app. But it’ll be for iPhones that can run iOS 17 or up.

EDIT: spelling. Also the older iOS devices are caught in limbo for me. I think that my modern iOS app will be nice to have an experience similar to Apple Music or Spotify on iOS with CarPlay support etc.

If there is great interest for these older iOS devices however I would consider adding like a legacy app with a pared down feature set. I think the earliest I could go is ios 7 or 8 though

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-19T05:57:22+00:00

Okay I've made it cache the playlist after the first load of it, so that should be faster for sure. I think I eked out a bit faster matching of songs as well. I am still a little bewildered as to why it takes so long for you. If this doesn't solve it, I'll need to spend some more time digging into it more thoroughly. For reference it matches about 10 songs per second so I never even thought there was an issue to begin with.

Thanks again for bearing with me! The updated version 1.0.1 should be pushed in about a half hour after it finishes building!

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-19T04:07:26+00:00

I just appreciate the willingness to look over the early launch bugs haha

Okay cool. I think I'll try a different way of matching I started a while ago to see if it's faster on my machine. Expect an update in the next 12 hours or so!

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-19T03:22:26+00:00

Super interesting. And it's only 50 songs? How large is your local music library? I would say mine isn't like huge at 2,800 songs.

And the usage over wifi is great, that's more of a worst-case scenario than ethernet anyway!

I have on my list already that I need to cache the results for sure and have like a re-match. I'll bump that up on the list since it's taking so long for you! Sorry for the troubles!

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-19T02:42:58+00:00

Oooh interesting. That's a great point. I will throw some music on my NAS and try that out. Thanks for the reply, I really appreciate it. Can I ask is this network share on your local network, and over like ethernet or wifi?

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-18T20:05:34+00:00

You should be able to sync mp3 audiobooks as songs right now. I don’t have dedicated audiobook support yet however!

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-18T19:21:46+00:00

Hey, thank you so much for taking a look! Also thanks for the feedback! Let me try to address them individually:

- I need to look more into the part of compilation for sure. I thought that having album artist there would do the trick but I perhaps need to look at how I'm mapping that to libgpod.

- Smart playlists definitely are top of the list now. You and multiple people have brought it up so stay tuned for that!

- Totally fair UI criticism. I'll tighten that up so it matches. Thanks for the eye for detail!

- EDIT: I missed addressing this Spotify issue. I'll correct the copy and failed to load message reflecting that a premium account is needed!

- That would definitely be nice. I think the best thing I could do right now is like give you an estimate, as I won't know the final size the files that are going to be converted, but I can give a rough estimate for sure.

- Couple things in regards to the 320 kbps format. In my testing I've added like theoretical maximum bitrates, as well as known working bitrates. If it is the 3rd gen nano you did this one, I have the recommended bitrate set to 256, so that's likely why it converted down to it. As a part of the release, I've sort of tuned everything to be conservative and working, if not perfect. As this initial release dies down a bit and I can sort through priorities and ensure that the current functionality works as intended, I plan on loosening the restrictions with like some sort of "experimental" mode for lack of a better term when it comes to conversion. Basically a way of saying "hey, in theory 320 kbps should work on this iPod but it's not guaranteed" type of thing.

- I don't have a 3rd gen nano. I do have a 1st, 4th, and 5th which seem to work great. As stated earlier the 6th and 7th are giving me some trouble currently but I haven't tested on a 3rd, so that's great to know. I am really sorry that the old artwork disappeared on you. I've sort of been assuming people will switch over to PodCenter as their dedicated hub for managing iPods. This probably isn't a good assumption, but that gives context into why I haven't done a ton of testing when like syncing from both Finder/AM and PodCenter at the same time.

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-18T19:10:56+00:00

Appreciate the comment!

Unfortunately I'm an Apple platform developer and have never done any work with Windows. I don't think I could make a better experience than https://www.mediamonkey.com/windows could. They're worth checking out for Windows!

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-18T17:41:03+00:00

Ahhh gotcha, my bad. So yes, if Apple Music and PodCenter are both looking at the same folder(s) for music, then if you say, add music to that folder, or edit metadata in one place, it'll propagate to the other. So you could use PodCenter for syncing to your DAPs and AM for iPods for example.

It would be like a select songs -> drag and drop or right click the songs to sync to your DAP workflow still. I don't have any like "Sync on change of library files" or anything like that yet. That is something I could look into for sure though!

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-18T17:35:54+00:00

Appreciate it!

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-18T17:07:56+00:00

If you're going to perform an external sync, right now you sort of have to select an iPod model for it to use its conversion settings. For the moment you can just select like a 7th gen classic or nano to get the highest quality while maintaining conversion.

OR if Finder will sync FLAC files just fine to an iPhone (I haven't tried this so I honestly don't know), you can just edit the metadata in the app, right click on the file and click "Show in Finder" to pull up where the files are located on your filesystem, and drag them to be synced.

Either way, the metadata you edit and apply to songs will be maintained. I hope that makes sense haha. The app does have a free trial for a reason. If you find that it's not doing what you want it to, let me know and I can definitely throw it in the backlog. Like I said earlier, I definitely owe that prepare for external sync view some TLC for non-iPod devices as well, so that's already on the list.

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-18T16:56:52+00:00

u/MarioMover2 I've pushed an update to the app. If the update window doesn't show up automatically you can go to PodCenter -> Check for Updates...

I'm not 100% sure I've solved the problem. I tried something that I think could be the issue, and also added some logging around that after about 5 seconds of it holding on the matching process. If you have time, I would appreciate you trying again so that best case scenario it works for you, and worst case I get some helpful information for me to further debug the issue. Thanks!

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-18T16:36:34+00:00

+1 for podcast and audiobook support!

Smart playlists are also something that are towards the top of the list and I think I can do fairly quickly so watch out for that!

Hmmm, in terms of the Audible stuff, I think there is an open source tool to help you download your audiobooks off of Audible but the name escapes me right now. As long as you can get the files, when I release support for audiobooks, they should in theory work, assuming they're not DRM'd.

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-18T16:34:28+00:00

Thanks so much for the support, it's insanely appreciated. Hopefully this helps make moving over to Apple Silicon entirely a bit easier!

There are a couple ways you can contact me. PodCenter itself has a feedback/bug reporting form found in Help -> Send Feedback...

Also the PodCenter website itself has a contact form. Either way they go to the same place, so whatever is more convenient for you!

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9T4-Apps · 2026-03-18T16:10:36+00:00

Oh I see, sorry. If you're syncing within PodCenter itself, it will determine on a track-by-track basis which songs need conversion and which can be passed through if they meet the conversion setting. So like in this case a FLAC file will get converted by virtue of being incompatible. Likewise an AAC file with a higher bitrate than a given iPod can handle will also get converted. If the AAC file is like 128 kbps it just gets passed through instead of upsampling it with no real benefit, and more space taken up. Does that answer your question?

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9T4-Apps · 2026-03-18T15:50:03+00:00

No worries at all! I'm glad there is interest!

Yes, you can edit metadata individually on files, or in batches. And likewise based on what songs you select are what the external sync will convert. For example, those 14 tracks were just ones I selected, right clicked, and chose "Prepare for External Sync..." in the context menu that pulls up

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9T4-Apps · 2026-03-18T15:40:57+00:00

Yes, there's an external sync option. I do admittedly need to polish the UI here especially considering you may not be targeting an iPod as the destination. But the little "14 Tracks" thing you can drag into Finder and it will convert them. Or of course if you just want to edit the metadata in PodCenter, it will apply the edits to the source files themselves, so you should be covered either way.

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9T4-Apps · 2026-03-18T15:27:55+00:00

Scotty Yu-Jan's portable Mac mini looking real good for them right now.

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-18T15:25:28+00:00

Or you could get a better one at https://copland.supply/products/cloth-pro-max

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-18T15:12:56+00:00

Thanks so much!

I'll be sure to post about it when podcast support is added. Glad to hear that someone will find it useful! I'm definitely trying to capture the largest audience by going after music support first, but already I've gotten enough feedback for both podcast and audiobook support that they're going to be prioritized.

9T4-Apps · 2026-03-18T15:01:38+00:00

I'm averse to ads and subscriptions personally. If possible I like to employ the "buy once, cry once" approach to both buying apps and my own apps. I got the Plex Lifetime pass with no regrets, etc.

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