Rubis Music

A hi-fi player for macOS that plays the file, not an interpretation of it.

macOS 15+ Swift 6 bit-perfect on 24 fixtures notarized by Apple

Download the latest build

Why I wrote Rubis — the manifesto, and what every claim in it rests on in the code.
_{Читать по-русски: Почему я написал Rubis}

_{A player built for one listener, published because the audio path, the layout math and the release pipeline may be worth reading. Not a product: no support, no roadmap for feature requests. Issues and pull requests are welcome and answered when time allows.}

Now Playing: the album cover and the queue side by side, liner notes underneath

Rubis plays a lossless library — on your disk or on your own Navidrome server — the way the file was mastered: the device sample rate follows the track, the mixer is bypassed, the signal leaves the app untouched. Server tracks take the same path: they are downloaded whole, never transcoded, and played as files. That claim is not taken on trust — audio-verify compares output against 24 fixtures (44.1–192 kHz, 16/24-bit, FLAC/ALAC/WAV) and has to pass before any change to the engine is committed. The tool ships with the app, so the proof is yours to re-run, not a screenshot to believe:

brew install blackhole-2ch ffmpeg # loopback device + fixture generator
git clone https://github.com/Di-kairos/Rubis && Rubis/Tools/make-fixtures.sh
"/Applications/Rubis Music.app/Contents/MacOS/audio-verify" Rubis/Fixtures

Numbers that have not been measured are not claimed. Where the signal path is degraded — a device that cannot follow the rate, a shared output — the badge in the transport bar says so instead of hiding it.

Download the DMG from releases, drag Rubis Music to Applications, launch it. The build is signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple, so it opens with a double click — no right-click → Open, no Gatekeeper warning. Later versions arrive in-app through Sparkle.

Requires macOS 15 or newer on Apple silicon.

• Bit-perfect playback — exclusive device access (hog mode), automatic sample rate switching, no resampling, no software volume in the signal path. The badge in the transport bar tells the truth: rate, exclusivity, and any degradation.

• Gapless — track seams within an album are inaudible; the next decoder is armed ahead of time.

• DSD — DSF/DSDIFF via DoP when the DAC supports it, honest PCM conversion when it does not.

• Output device pinning — pick your DAC in Settings and stay on it, whatever the system default does.

• Library at scale — a 100k-track library loads off the main thread, full-text search answers under 50 ms, the shelf scrolls at 59–60 fps.

• Sources — folders on any volume; a disconnected disk greys tracks out instead of destroying history. A scan never deletes anything.

• CUE sheets — a disc ripped as one file plus a .cue becomes the tracks it actually holds. The sheet's titles and performers win over the file's tags, because that is where they live. Boundaries are handed to the decoder as a frame region, so seams stay gapless and the bit-perfect path is untouched.

• Your own server — a Subsonic/Navidrome library appears next to the local one. Tracks are downloaded whole before they play, never transcoded (format=raw), so the bit-perfect path is the same one local files take; the next track is prefetched while the current one plays. The download cache has a ceiling you set and clears by hand. A server that stops answering greys out its own tracks and says so in one line — no alert.

• A signed receipt for the signal path — copy or save a plain-text report of everything between the file and the DAC, signed with an Ed25519 key that belongs to your install (private half in the keychain, public half printed in the receipt). Edit one number in a receipt someone posts and the signature stops matching:

  "/Applications/Rubis Music.app/Contents/MacOS/audio-verify" --verify-receipt receipt.txt

  It proves the text was not altered after it was issued, and that two receipts came from the same install. It does not certify the binary — the key is local, not a seal from us. The same check runs under openssl pkeyutl -verify for anyone who would rather not trust our tool with it.

• DAC dossier — Settings → Audio asks the device what it can actually do: rates, bit depths, DoP ceiling, hardware volume, exclusive access, tested live.

• A private history — what you played, kept in a file on your Mac: top artists, top tracks, a recent feed, and one button that erases it.

• Every outgoing request, listed — Settings → Network names each connection the app has made: host, reason, outcome, bytes. On a clean install the list is empty.

• Liner notes — an optional note about the playing album, from Wikipedia and, for records Wikipedia does not cover, from Claude or DeepSeek with your own API key. Off by default: the app makes no network call you did not ask for.

• The usual comforts — playlists, queue with shuffle and repeat, media keys, Now Playing as a full-window screen, mini player, optional menu bar presence, position restored across launches.

• Self-updating — Sparkle 2, EdDSA-signed feed in rubis-releases.

Warm near-black instead of grey, serif display type for album and artist names, a thread of gold marking selection rather than a filled bar, and a single garnet ◆だいやまーく against the playing track — the only red in the interface. Albums are a shop window: one record lit from the front, the collection on a shelf below it.

Albums: the featured record with its track list, the rest of the collection on a shelf

The full system — palette, type scale, spacing grid, motion rules — is in DESIGN.md. Every colour, font and radius in the app comes from a token in the DesignSystem package; literals outside it are forbidden.

Five SPM packages carry the work, and dependencies point one way:

The app target is a thin SwiftUI shell; the logic lives in the packages. Swift 6 with strict concurrency complete, and the build carries no warnings.

The Xcode scheme and the core package are called Escapement — the project's working title, kept because renaming a scheme breaks more than it fixes. The product has been Rubis Music since 0.2.0.

./Tools/test.sh # swift test across the packages
./Tools/format.sh # swift-format in place (run before committing)
./Tools/audio-verify # the bit-perfect proof — required for engine changes
./Tools/make-dmg.sh # Release build → signed, notarized, stapled DMG
# The app target needs full Xcode, not Command Line Tools:
xcodebuild -scheme Escapement -configuration Release

All eight planned phases are done — scaffold, design system, database, audio engine, local library, interface, system integration, and Subsonic/Navidrome support, the last of which was built and verified against a live Navidrome instance. What is left is the part only ears and hardware can sign off: the manual checklist. Releases live in rubis-releases; the current one is signed, notarized, and verified by checksum against the file published there.

Binaries bundle libraries from other people, including two under LGPL terms — see docs/third-party.md.

MIT — take it, fork it, ship it. The libraries the binary bundles keep their own terms, two of them LGPL; see docs/third-party.md.