Grew up around hi-fi junkies arguing over cassette decks: Nakamichi Dragon vs Tandberg. I just fell in love with the hardware.
[mod pre-approved self-promo]
I was too young to have a real opinion back when the grown-ups argued about the Nakamichi Dragon and the Tandberg TCD 3014A, but I remember the machines themselves perfectly. The needles kicking. The clunk of the transport. The way using one felt like poking a hardware beast rather than a background thing. (Big part of why I ended up an electronics engineer.)
I've been chasing that feeling on mobile forever, and after years of buying physical DAPs and DAP apps I found nothing special. Then I had a bad snowboarding accident and used the hospital bed time to build my own.
It's a player for music you already own — FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, MP3 — though honestly the format list is the least interesting part of it. What I actually cared about was making it feel like industrial-grade audio equipment. There's a cassette that actually spins, and the reels wind across in proportion to where you are in the track, so you judge how much is left by how fat the reel is getting, proper retro. VU meters that move properly live and glow that unmistakable burning tungsten, with amber accents. A Nixie tube mechanical counter. A live audio graph. Haptics all over it, mechanical clicks under your thumb. Even a ferrofluid visualiser I spent an absurd amount of time on and would do again.
Cover art runs full bleed, edge to edge — somebody made that artwork and it deserves better than a 60-pixel thumbnail. There's a proper C++ crossfeed kernel, so headphones stop putting the band inside your skull. And a three-band EQ laid out in battle mode, inspired by the Allen & Heath DJ mixers from the golden years of rave. Compression, reverb and distortion if you want them, and a true bypass, so with everything switched off the output signal stays pristine — which is what you want when you're feeding a DAC or a preamp.
It talks directly enough to Apple's hardware that the whole thing weighs 39 MB — no bloated frameworks, no ad SDKs, nothing phoning home. It still catalogues terabytes of audio in seconds and does its genre sorting offline, on device.
And it looks tough as nails.
It's a one-time purchase. No subscription, no ads, nothing locked behind an upgrade, no account, no telemetry, and it works entirely offline. Updates are free. It's just me building this and I'd like to keep it that way. I oppose enshittification with all my heart.
Fair warnings: it's Apple only, and it plays files you already have — it isn't a streaming app. If your library lives on Spotify, this one isn't for you.
[Octopus on the App Store](https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6762027638?pt=128764606&ct=reddit\_returningretro&mt=8)
Official website: [singularcontinuum.com/octopus](https://singularcontinuum.com/octopus)
Happy to answer anything. And curious to know which one you'd have picked.