Features

Everything it does.
Including the awkward parts.

This list was checked against the source rather than written from memory, which is why it includes things most feature pages leave out — like what happens when your hardware cannot do what the file asks.

macOS 13+

Universal — Apple silicon & Intel

19 modules · 33,000 lines

Items marked PRO need the one-time purchase. Everything else is free.

Playback & signal path

The engine, and the proof.

Every player claims bit-perfect playback. Quetzal shows you the codec, the rate the hardware is actually locked to, whether the device is held exclusively, and whether anything is touching the samples — while the music plays.

Playback engine

What happens between the file and the DAC.

Bit-perfect output — samples reach the DAC unaltered
Hog mode — takes the device so macOS cannot touch it · PRO
Integer mode — hog mode with mixing disabled · PRO
Automatic sample-rate switching, verified after the fact
Rate-mismatch refusal rather than a silent downgrade
Memory playback — track loaded before the needle drops
Gapless — next track joined without breaking the frame counter
Idle device release, keeping your place
Sleep, wake and device-loss recovery
Crash safety — the device is freed even if we die

Signal path

Shown continuously, at every window width.

Live readout — codec, exclusivity mode, device rate
Bit-perfect lamp goes amber the moment anything breaks it
…and tells you which thing broke it
Hardware vs software volume, distinguished honestly
Underrun counting — contiguity measured, not assumed
Parametric EQ, reported as breaking bit-perfect · PRO
Upsampling — polyphase, integer multiples, two qualities · PRO
Decimation when the hardware cannot reach the source rate

Formats

Everything your library is likely to contain.

Native DSD

DSF & DFF

Native and over DoP. Not converted to PCM behind your back.

Free tier

MP3 · 48 kHz · 16-bit

That is the honest ceiling without Pro — which is exactly why the 14-day trial exists. You cannot judge this thing on MP3.

Library & browsing

Built for collections that took years.

Library

Indexing, metadata and artwork.

Fast scanner with progress and incremental rescans
SQLite with migrations and cascade deletes
Artwork extraction and caching
Artist images via MusicBrainz
Metadata across every supported format
Play counts and recently-added tracking
M3U import and export
Folder tree with recursive counts

Browsing

Ten places to be: Music, Favourites, Songs, Albums, Artists, Folders, Radio, Playlists, Devices, Settings.

Cover-led home with horizontally scrolling shelves
Album filters — A–Z, genre, sort order
Album favourites kept separate from track favourites
Multi-column folder browser
Global search (⌘S) with a full results page
Right-click menus throughout — play, queue, go to album

Playlists & queue

Ordinary things, done without friction.

Create, rename, delete, reorder
Deletion confirmation is a preference, not a lecture
Add to playlist from anywhere
Queue panel with position indicator (⌘⇧U)
Queue without disturbing what is playing
Shuffle that preserves the underlying album order
Repeat-one

Internet radio

Free for everyone, every codec.

Radio Browser directory with mirror failover
Filter by genre, country, language and codec
Minimum-bitrate filter — how you skip the 64 kbps stations
Broken streams hidden automatically
ICY now-playing titles where stations send them
Live spectrum strip in place of a waveform

Transport & visualizers

A player you would keep open anyway.

Transport

Two footer skins — Standard, and a machined hardware front panel with brushed metal, lit switches, an LCD clock and signal-path lamps.

Hardware front-panel skin · PRO
Waveform overview with drag-to-seek
Hover-scrolling titles that reveal long names
Full keyboard control — space, ⌘←/→, ⌘⇧U/V/E/N, arrow volume
Media keys keep working while the device is hogged
Now Playing stage with large artwork
macOS Now Playing and lock-screen integration

Nine visualizers

All full-screen capable. The Metal ones are feedback-loop renderers with bloom, responding to bass, mid, treble, level, transients, stereo width, beat phase and spectral centroid — which is a long way of saying they react to the music rather than to a timer.

Canvas

Metal

Interface & integration

Six languages, and it reads aloud properly.

Interface

Themes, sizes and the accessibility work that usually gets skipped.

Light, dark and system themes
Six accent colours
Three interface text sizes
Six languages — EN, DE, FR, ES, IT, PT
412 strings each, checked by tests rather than by hope
Full VoiceOver support — labels, values and traits on every control
Mini player
Responsive layout ladder at 760 and 1000 points

Connected to this site

The app pulls from the website, so collections update without you downloading anything.

Free Music and Hi-Fi Picks shelves, side by side
Music Tastes settings tab, genres synced live from the site
New genres appear without an app update
Personalised filtering across both shelves
Caching — banner hourly, posts daily, genres weekly
All of it survives offline, and fails silently when it cannot

Licensing

One purchase. No subscription.

A one-time In-App Purchase through StoreKit 2. Restore purchases if you move Macs. The paywall notice sits above the play button with live pricing, and that is the entire commercial surface of the app — no upsells, no nagging dialogs, no “you are missing out” banners.

macOS 13+ · Apple silicon & Intel · Everything unlocked during the trial

Everything it does.Including the awkward parts.