Caesura

Caesura is a jukebox-style music player app I plan to write for Apple platforms (iOS/macOS) meant to recapture the magic of iTunes 4-era music players on modern devices/operating systems.

The source code repository is available on Codeberg.

Screenshot of Caesura 2021.10.14

Latest release: 2024.1.5 (Mac only)

Download Caesura for Mac 2024.1.5 - requires macOS 11 (Big Sur) or greater

Changes

Rationale

iTunes has always been a polarizing piece of software. You either really hated it, or it was so resonant with how you personally wanted to manage your music that nothing else really ever came close to competing with it. I adored iTunes, and I think the 4.x version cycle may be the best music player software ever made.

As mainstream music consumption shifted towards streaming services over the last decade, iTunes would become more and more hostile to users preferring to use an offline, hand-curated music library, in favor of pushing people towards Apple Music subscriptions.

Caesura is not trying to reinvent music listening. It's just trying to offer a modern-day take on iTunes 4-era music player software across all of Apple's platforms. It will probably be just as polarizing as iTunes originally was, but that's exactly what I want, and that's what I'm going to make.

A Trivial Technology

Caesura is an experiment in adhering to the principles of trivial technologies. In practical terms, this means:

Caesura Guided Tour

You can follow along with the development of Caesura by watching the Caesura Guided Tour video series, which takes you through building it up feature by feature. Currently, there is a backlog of videos to produce to catch the videos up to the head of the git repository, but I would eventually like them to make a video available shortly after the corresponding feature ships in a release.

Feature Wishlist

Short-Term

Mid-Term

Long-Term