Dad's Music Player

Free for macOS

The music you already own, on the computer you already have.

A small Mac app that plays the MP3s sitting in your folders. No account to make, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing watching what you listen to.

Download for Mac

Version 1.0  ·  macOS 13 Ventura or later
Apple silicon and Intel  ·  4 MB

The Dad's Music Player icon: a compact disc on a dark background.

What it does

Plays files. That's the whole idea.

Drag in a folder and press play. Everything below works on music that's already on your disk.

  • MP3 and the rest

    MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV, AIFF, and FLAC. Song titles and cover art come straight off the files.

  • Real M3U playlists

    Opens and saves the standard playlist format, so your lists work in other players too.

  • Cover art it finds itself

    Uses artwork stored inside a file, or picks up the AlbumArt and Folder.jpg images other programs left behind.

  • Fix the wrong song titles

    Edit titles, artists, albums and years, and save them into the file itself where any player can read them.

  • Look up what's missing

    Checks an open music database for details your files don't have. Nothing changes until you say so.

  • Gets out of the way

    Hide the song list and it shrinks to a small bar. Media keys on your keyboard work as you'd expect.


No lock-in

Your playlists are just text.

Playlists are saved as ordinary .m3u8 files with relative paths, so a folder of music and its playlist can be copied to another computer and still work. Open one in any text editor and it reads like this:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:213,Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime
Remain in Light/03 Once in a Lifetime.mp3
#EXTINF:264,ABBA - Dancing Queen
ABBA/Gold/01 Dancing Queen.mp3

Why it exists

It was built for one person.

My dad has a hard drive full of music he bought, ripped, and organised over twenty years. Every app that would play it wanted an account, or hid his files behind a library it controlled, or filled the screen with things to subscribe to.

So this one does the obvious thing instead: it reads the folders as they are, leaves them where they are, and plays them. If that's your situation too, you're welcome to it.


Get it

Free, and it stays free.

No trial, no paid version, no ads. The app checks this site about once a day to see whether a newer version exists, and tells you if there is one.

Download for Mac

Open the disk image and drag the app to your Applications folder.