2026-04-07 00:26:30
My ten-year experiment with Apple Music is over.
Over the past month I rebuilt my workflow for managing a large local music collection; roughly 36,000 tracks. After a lot of experimentation, these are the tools that finally clicked.
This is the story of moving from Apple Music back to files I actually own, and the workflow that makes that practical in 2026.
Streaming trained us to tolerate a mess we never should have accepted.
Tracks, albums, and playlists quietly disappear. You’re never quite sure what counts as “your library.” Metadata changes underneath you. And if you cancel the subscription, it’s not always clear what remains.
For casual listening that trade-off may be fine. For anyone who has spent years curating a library, it’s frustrating.
Using a big old iPod Classic forces a certain discipline.
It’s a surprisingly healthy constraint.
My library comes from a mix of sources:
In the early years, iTunes purchases were DRM-protected AAC files. Later Apple switched to DRM-free downloads and eventually provided ways to convert older purchases.
That history leaves many long-time iTunes libraries in a messy transitional state.
For $25, iTunes Match will upload up to 100,000 songs in almost any format.
The useful trick is what happens next: once the songs are matched or uploaded, you can re-download them as 256 kbps AAC files.
That’s not lossless audiophile territory, but it’s a big improvement over the 128 kbps MP3s many of us ripped twenty years ago.
In my case it did two useful things:
It’s not magic, though.
A “matched” track can sometimes be:
Those substitutions can break album coherence. Keeping a backup of your original files is essential so you can restore anything that gets replaced incorrectly.
Old iTunes libraries accumulate a lot of structural problems.
AC/DC vs ACDC, smart quotes, stray spaces, or hidden characters create duplicate artist entries.You can fix these issues manually for a small collection. Mine required automation.
Yate turned out to be the right tool. Its strengths include:
Swinsian is the perfect ongoing management layer.
Yes, it’s a player. But more importantly, it’s a tool for keeping a large collection curated over time.
Examples from my library:
Files. Tags. Structure.
Local libraries come with responsibilities.
Discovery becomes a separate task. There’s no instant “add to playlist” from a streaming catalog.
You also have to care about the plumbing:
My library uses a simple Artist/Album/Track folder structure so both Swinsian and streaming remain predictable.
I’m also paranoid about losing data, so I keep backups on external drives and in the cloud. If you follow a 3–2–1 backup strategy, you’re golden. At minimum, use Time Machine.
The upside is control. The downside is maintenance.
This turned out to be the easiest part.
Navidrome is the layer that makes your local library available everywhere.
Point it at your curated music folder, let it scan the files, and your collection becomes streamable from:
The key advantage is that Navidrome reflects your existing organization.
Yate handles tag cleanup and upgrades.
Swinsian handles library management and playlists.
Navidrome simply serves whatever you’ve already organized.
Once it’s set up, it mostly disappears into the background.
Exactly the way infrastructure should.
This isn’t a retro flex. It’s an engineering decision.
A locally managed library quietly removes an entire category of annoyances: licensing uncertainty, cloud weirdness, metadata drift, and app strategy whiplash.
And with the right combination of tools — iTunes Match for upgrades, Yate for tagging, Swinsian for management — a 36,000-song library becomes not just manageable, but pleasant again.
2026-04-05 18:15:36
"The Ballad of the Green Berets" by SSgt. Barry Sadler
A song that represents where you live
My high school girlfriend lived in the same neighborhood where Barry Sadler did when he recorded The Ballad of the Green Berets - about a mile from the gate of Ft. Bragg. I've been a soldier or lived among them my entire life. The guys in Special Forces tend to be pretty smart and usually interesting. The training is rigorous, mentally and physically. It's kind of funny how many of them become teachers when they retire - at all grade levels. One of the most decorated men I ever knew (five Purple Hearts, four Bronze Stars, a Silver star) taught third grade.
2026-04-03 18:17:52
"Where Did You Sleep Last Night (Live Acoustic)" by Nirvana
A song that's largely acoustic
Showing a deeper appreciation for grunge's roots than most, Kurt Cobain's performance of this tune (AKA In the Pines), a Leadbelly song has been one of my favorites.
2026-04-03 06:32:17
I spent the afternoon experimenting with Radial 4, a rapidly evolving pie-menu app from independent developer Gustav Lubker of AppVerge. If you’re not familiar with pie menu apps, they present a circular menu divided into sections (or slices), each representing an action or command. When configured well, they map naturally to muscle memory and can be extremely fast to use.
Other pie-menu apps I've used include:
In Radial, pie menus can include the following types of actions:
The only obvious thing missing right now is deep-link support for tools like Raycast and similar command launchers.
Radial is much more than an app launcher, but it works well for that role. You can create multiple menus and switch between them once a Radial menu is invoked with a keyboard shortcut or mouse gesture. One practical approach is to build menus around categories of apps you use regularly.
Examples:
This kind of grouping works well because the direction of the slice becomes the memory trigger rather than the app name.
Radial calls menus that are available everywhere global menus. It also supports context-aware menus that appear only in specific apps or groups of apps.
Because Radial includes a template feature, you can create menus that behave consistently across your main working apps. Anything that can be triggered with a keyboard shortcut can live in the menu.
If you place common commands in the same slice position across multiple apps, muscle memory kicks in quickly.
Examples of commands that translate well across apps:
You can still add app-specific commands; just keep their placement consistent so your muscle memory stays intact. I created Radial menus for Safari, Things, Obsidian, and Drafts using this approach.
Where Radial really shines is as an automation hub.
Instead of launching apps individually, you can trigger an Apple Shortcut or a Keyboard Maestro macro that launches an entire workspace with a single click. A second action can close the same apps when you’re done.
If you combine this with a window manager like Rectangle or Snaps of Apps, you can go even further and launch apps on specific displays and in specific Spaces with windows already arranged.
Another useful trick is reducing menu-bar clutter. Many utilities can have their core actions exposed through a Radial menu instead of living permanently in the menu bar.
Examples of apps that work well this way:
I also adapted my morning checklist into a Radial menu using a mix of actions:
Once it’s set up, everything can be accessed from a single menu instead of hunting through menus, booksmarks and other launchers.
I couldn’t find a formal privacy policy on the AppVerge website beyond a statement that AI queries are not retained.
Radial includes an AI feature powered by Groq that can generate actions automatically. I don’t use services tied to X or Groq, so I didn’t test this feature. Ideally, future versions will support additional providers.
Radial is developed in Denmark, which means it falls under EU privacy regulations.
Radial offers a seven-day free trial. The full license costs €14.99 and covers five seats, which is fairly generous for a utility in this category.
Radial’s website includes solid documentation and clear explanations of how the system works.
2026-04-02 17:19:25
"Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show
A song by a band whose merchandise you've bought - what was the merchandise
My last concert was Old Crow Medicine Show in Winston Salem and I bought a t-shirt of course. Wagon Wheel is the unofficial state song of NC. A little known fact - Bob Dylan gets half the royalties and a co-writers credit. Dylan recorded the chorus in 1973 while OCMS added verses 25 years later.
2026-04-02 08:08:50
If you rely on iCloud but don’t have a true backup of that data, BackiGo is one of the simplest ways to create one.
BackiGo is an iCloud backup app I can recommend for anyone looking for an alternative to Parachute. Parachute is a well-known iCloud backup utility that was recently acquired by a company with a solid reputation, but also a history of price increases and subscription transitions.
BackiGo is particularly useful if you:
Sometimes Apple’s logic escapes me. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the opaque world of iCloud.
If you don’t have a method for keeping a versioned backup of your iCloud documents and photos, you should set one up sooner rather than later.
The simplest approach looks like this:
This works because Time Machine will keep historical versions of those files.
Unfortunately, that approach isn’t practical for everyone. If, like me, you pay for 2TB of iCloud storage but your Mac has a much smaller internal drive that can’t be upgraded, downloading everything locally simply isn’t feasible.
Experienced Mac users already understand the core issue: iCloud is a syncing service, not a backup.
If you overwrite a file, the new version replaces the old one everywhere. If you delete a file, it disappears everywhere. If a file becomes corrupted, that corruption syncs too.
Even with Time Machine running, you still won’t have copies of many files if Optimize Mac Storage is enabled, because those files never existed locally on your Mac.
The core idea is simple: get a second copy of your iCloud data somewhere Apple’s sync engine can’t touch it.
One more thing - you can find multiple stories of people permanently losing access to their iCloud accounts through ID theft, malware and Apple’s own policies.
This is where BackiGo comes in. The app lets you create a copy of your iCloud data and store it in a variety of locations:
Some of the features I’ve found useful:
AmerpieMBA/2026/04)No data collected.
BackiGo – Complete iCloud Photo backup and restore solution for iOS and Mac
Available on the Mac App Store with Family Sharing enabled.
