I built Local Music Organizer to clean up and maintain large local Music.app libraries
Problem
A large local Music.app library becomes surprisingly difficult to maintain after years of use. Files get replaced, renamed, moved or deleted. Old Music.app records can remain after the physical files disappear, while other files may still be on disk but no longer exist anywhere in the Music.app library. Playlists accumulate duplicate entries, the same tracks appear in several playlists, artwork goes missing, and files from different sources collect comments, URLs, converter names and other unwanted metadata. Older low quality copies can also remain beside better replacements. Music.app does not give me one place to compare what is in the library with what is actually stored on disk, so I built Local Music Organizer to help with this.
Competitors
Tune Sweeper is probably the closest alternative I found for general Music.app library cleanup. It can find duplicate records, missing files, files that are not in the library, missing artwork and track information problems. I could not find documented tools there for duplicate entries inside one selected playlist, comparing two existing playlists, mapping relationships between playlists, finding every playlist that uses one physical file, inspecting hidden embedded tags, or checking possible audio transcodes and upscales. According to its public App Store version history, there was a gap of approximately six years without a published update. A small number of technical updates have appeared more recently.
beaTunes can also inspect Music.app or iTunes libraries, find duplicates, missing files, inconsistent metadata and artwork problems. It also includes music analysis and playlist creation tools. Its focus is somewhat different, and I could not find the same kind of detailed tools for examining existing playlist relationships, repeated physical paths, hidden embedded tags and the physical state of files referenced by Music.app.
Local Music Organizer
Local Music Organizer is a Mac application for maintaining large local Music.app libraries and the physical audio files behind them. It can find Music.app records whose physical files are missing or inaccessible, find readable audio files on disk that are not registered anywhere in the library, find duplicate entries inside a playlist, duplicate library records and tracks repeated across several playlists, compare two playlists, find every playlist that uses a particular track, and find different physical versions of what appears to be the same recording and compare their technical quality. It can analyze the actual physical files for codec, bitrate, sample rate, bit depth, duration and size instead of relying only on cached Music.app information, and it can fix outdated Music.app technical file information by asking Music.app to refresh it from the actual local audio file.
It can also find unwanted comments and hidden embedded tags left by converters, ripping software, websites and download sources. Detected embedded tags can be reviewed, edited or removed. Common Music.app fields such as title, artist, album, album artist, composer, genre, year, track and disc numbers and comments can also be edited directly.
There is an Audio Authenticity Analyzer that looks for possible lossy to lossless conversions, lower bitrate transcodes, suspicious bandwidth limitations and possible sample rate upscaling. These results are technical estimates, not proof of a file's history. Individual files can also be inspected with the built in Audio Inspector, including metadata, artwork, waveform and spectrum.
The app can convert and repair many audio formats, including some formats that Music.app cannot import directly, and normalize selected files from the Library Dashboard. Before conversion or normalization, the original can be kept, moved to Trash or saved in an LMO Backup Folder. The library index is stored locally in SQLite. Audio files, playlists, metadata and reports are not uploaded anywhere. The app has no analytics, advertising or tracking. It supports macOS Sonoma and later on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. Local folders and external disks are supported.
Pricing:
There is a three day trial with access to all features. Continued use is a one time in app purchase of $29.99. There is no subscription and nothing is charged automatically when the trial ends.
Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/local-music-organizer/id6790746382?mt=12
Website, screenshots, documentation and user guide: https://local-music-organizer-site.pages.dev/
