macOS · Free & Open Source · Tauri + mpv
Local-first. Bit-perfect. No subscriptions,
no accounts, no telemetry. Your music. Your files.
ON OWNING YOUR MUSIC
I use streaming services too — I'm not here to be precious about it. But there's something different about a record you bought, ripped, and stored. It exists independently of any platform's decisions. It doesn't disappear when a label pulls its catalogue. It doesn't get remastered without your knowledge. It sounds exactly the way the engineer signed off on it.
Needle exists because I couldn't find a macOS player that treated local files the way they deserve to be treated. No resampling. No hidden EQ. No insistence on converting your FLAC to something more "compatible." Just direct playback via mpv , bit for bit, exactly as encoded.
The live dashboard — the spinning vinyl, the Wikipedia metadata, the artist portraits — came later, out of wanting the experience to match how seriously I take the music. A file list with a play button was never going to be enough.
FORMATS
FLAC · ALAC · WAV
AIFF · MP3 · AAC
Opus · OGG
PLAYBACK ENGINE
mpv
No resampling
No DSP applied
PLATFORM
macOS 13 Ventura+
Intel + Apple Silicon
Tauri · Rust
LICENSE
GPL v3.0
THE FULL PICTURE
01
Built with Tauri and Rust, rendering in a WebView with mpv handling all audio output. The architecture means Windows and Linux support is a packaging problem, not a rewrite. macOS is where it started because it's what I use — the other platforms will follow demand.
Tauri · Rust · mpv
02
Needle doesn't phone home — but I run my own infrastructure for metadata enrichment, library sync, and things I haven't shipped yet. Self-hosted, not a cloud product. The goal is to own the whole stack the same way I own my music. Still maturing; I'll document it as it does.
Self-hosted · In progress
03
A companion app that connects to your own library rather than a streaming service. Early work — not shipping yet. The idea is simple: the music you own, on your phone, without handing your listening habits to anyone.
Coming · iOS first
There comes a point in every hobby project when the technical challenges stop being the biggest obstacle and bureaucracy takes over. For Needlefin, a tvOS application I’ve been building alongside Needle Music, that moment arrived this week.
Read more →Needle was supposed to be a music player. Then it became a library manager. Then a backend. Then a web player. Then an infrastructure project. At this point, I've stopped pretending I know where the boundaries are.
Read more →The detective work pile claimed another victim. After spending hours scanning records into Needle’s newly born physical media archive system, I eventually stumbled upon a Madonna record that refused to cooperate with reality itself.
Read more →