https://privatepress.app/deadwax/ Notes on music collections, artwork quality, and the tech behind Private Press. en Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:35:29 GMT https://privatepress.app/deadwax/what-apple-music-actually-knows-about-your-files/ https://privatepress.app/deadwax/what-apple-music-actually-knows-about-your-files/ Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT 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. https://privatepress.app/deadwax/how-we-wrote-a-flac-codec-in-pure-swift/ https://privatepress.app/deadwax/how-we-wrote-a-flac-codec-in-pure-swift/ Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT 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. https://privatepress.app/deadwax/music-app-broke-every-automation-on-tahoe/ https://privatepress.app/deadwax/music-app-broke-every-automation-on-tahoe/ Mon, 23 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT 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. https://privatepress.app/deadwax/built-for-collections-worth-protecting/ https://privatepress.app/deadwax/built-for-collections-worth-protecting/ Fri, 20 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT 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. https://privatepress.app/deadwax/apple-music-artwork-disappears/ https://privatepress.app/deadwax/apple-music-artwork-disappears/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT 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. https://privatepress.app/deadwax/your-audio-is-never-re-encoded/ https://privatepress.app/deadwax/your-audio-is-never-re-encoded/ Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT 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. https://privatepress.app/deadwax/the-ecosystem-moved-on/ https://privatepress.app/deadwax/the-ecosystem-moved-on/ Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT 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.