From the deadwax
Deadwax
Scratched into the run-out groove — notes on music collections, artwork quality, and the tech behind Private Press.
What Apple Music Actually Knows About Your Files
Your Apple Music library contains at least four different kinds of files. Some you own. Some you rent. Some are ghosts. Here's how to tell the difference, and why most tools can't.
→How We Wrote a FLAC Codec in Pure Swift
Apple's Core Audio can play FLAC files but has no encoder. So we wrote our own. A complete RFC 9639 codec in pure Swift, zero C dependencies, using Accelerate for signal processing on Apple Silicon.
→Why Music.app Broke Every Automation on macOS Tahoe
macOS Tahoe silently broke AppleScript playlist playback, current track access, and artwork writes in Music.app. No deprecation notice. No migration guide. Here's what happened and what it means for your collection.
→Built for Collections Worth Protecting
You spent years building your music collection. The artwork should be as permanent as the music. Here's what it looks like when it finally is.
→Why Apple Music Artwork Disappears When You Move Your Collection
The album art you see in Apple Music lives in a local cache, not in your audio files. Move your collection to another Mac, an iPod, or a Plex server, and covers vanish. This isn't a bug. It's a design decision.
→Your Audio Is Never Re-encoded
How Private Press writes artwork into audio files without touching a single audio sample. Format-specific binary editing, atomic writes, and why we built every editor from scratch.
→The Ecosystem Moved On
The music industry optimized for streaming. Hardware optimized for AirPlay. Nobody optimized for the person with 10,000 albums who just wants correct artwork on every file. We did.
→From the deadwax
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