Spite

A dignified music player.

Download Mac + iOS Download Mac only
Spite Spite Spite Spite

Free for 30 days, then buy it for $15 for Mac + iOS.
Or $10 for just Mac.
No subscriptions. No freemium bullshit.

Origin Story

Sometimes it’d be nice to go back. Before the internet poisoned our politics and stranded us in silos built by black box algorithms. Now more than ever, Adorno’s dictum rings true: we’re given “the freedom to choose what is always the same.”

So I decided to build an altar for the holy format of the MP3.

Renting music from Spotify is stupid and iTunes has become a sluggish beast. Other music players don’t work how I want. I craved a dead-simple widget that:

  1. Allows me to share a library with C so we can passive-aggressively delete songs from each other's playlists
  2. Displays nice album artwork and doesn’t feel like managing a spreadsheet
  3. Automatically sends playlists to my telephone before I go for a drive or a run and requires as little management as possible
  4. Runs on bulletproof XML rather than proprietary mysteries in the ether

I asked some friends if they’d like to help me build this. They wished me luck. “To hell with them,” I told C. “I’ll build it anyway and destroy Spotify and Apple.” C smiled and said spite was an interesting reason to make something.

Spite Custom

Customize your mixtapes with your own artwork. Or Jusepe de Ribera's.

RecordLabels

Organize by record label

Spite iPad

Looks smart on an iPad

Spite CarPlay

CarPlay

Spite iPad

Customize the background across devices

Features

  • Apple only. Requires iCloud or Dropbox for telephone sync.
  • Supports all the good extensions: mp3, flac, wav, aiff, aac, m4a, and opus.
  • A streamlined interface that keeps artwork big and playlists central.
  • Add custom artwork for your playlists and dig the harmonious accent colors.
  • Everything you like is fantastic, so there's no need for hearts or stars—just a delete button to ruthlessly clear out the cruft.
  • XML is the way. Playlists live in a folder you can see.
  • Works with CarPlay.
  • Looks nice on an iPad.
  • Last.FM integration like it's 2006. Wire it up under 'Settings' and set your scrobbles for the heart of the sun. 
  • Deepen your relationships (or destroy them) by sharing your music library. Everything the other person adds or deletes will affect you and vice versa. It's a good conversation starter.
  • Spite has been tested for up to 20,000 songs. It should still fly with more than that, but really, if your library has over 20,000 songs that’s too many songs. That’s like three solid months of music not including sleep. But there's a 30-day trial period for you to decide if Spite is good for digital hoarding.
  • Built by a tremendous music nerd who wants to organize albums by record label, quickly shuffle new acquisitions, and easily access a metadata editor. You're welcome.
  • After a 30-day trial, Spite costs $15—then it's unlocked on your desktop, iPhone, and iPad, free forever and ever with ongoing updates from a compulsive tinkerer.
  • Or skip the App Store's stranglehold and pay $10 for the desktop version if you don't care about the telephone. (The license includes a discount for iOS if you ever decide otherwise.)
  • No subscriptions, ads, creepy data harvesting, upsells, or usernames. Ever.

v5.4 • March 17, 2026

  • Better loop and shuffle logic.
  • Gapless playback (or pretty close).
  • Make new mixtapes on your telephone.
  • Shuffle your most recent acquisitions. Adjust the threshol in Settings.

If you have questions, complaints, revelations, or other psychic upheavels, please leave a comment below or email me.

Icon

This fragmented head of a colossal boy from two thousand years ago captures today’s psychic shred and shear better than anything I’ve seen.

Download Mac + iOS Download Mac only
Heavy duty thanks to Candy Chang, Tim Bornholdt, Michael Donaldson, Oliver Farshi, Jon Hicks, David Mead, Dan Parham, and Peter Rukavina