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.

Welcome to the Center for Spite Studies, a place to review notes on the latest release, report your concerns, and suggest new features that I will probably resist for a while before eventually deciding it might be a good idea.

v4.8 • February 8

  • Special premium luxury superfresh playlist on iOS that automatically loads the five most recent albums added to your macOS library
  • This one's a shout-out to the perfectionists and obsessive-compulsives: right-click a song to edit the info in Meta.
  • Other crucial but unglamorous improvements: better file id logic, single iOS/macOS song registry,and set up library watching but who is watching the watching?
  • Added a search function to iOS because life is too short to be scrolling around.
  • If you don't like the Lynchian red curtain, you can upload your own wallpaper in Settings that will display in the left panel on macOS and the background of your iPhone.
  • I can confirm Spite is very speedy with loading and cacheing a library of five thousand songs. But I run a tight ship. Some people like to hoard 35,000 songs in case they live until the 22nd century, and while Spite should perform honorably under these conditions, I'm not going to swear to it.
  • Now with 17% less scrolling: double-clicking the Playlists/Albums/Artists tab takes you back to the top (thank you, Michael at the Tonearm!)
  • Clicking the Now Playing artwork or song info will display the current song in the left panel.

Coming Soon: v5.0 • February 15 

  • Dropbox support for telephone sync. (But Jesus, Apple makes it so painfully bureaucratic to integrate not-Apple things.)
  • last.fm scrobbling (thank you for the nudge on this, Jon Hicks!)
  • Support for opus files (thank you Christian!)
  • A new ‘Labels’ tab so you can gather your Chain Reaction flowers into a beautiful bouquet.
  • Renamed ‘playlists’ to ‘mixtapes’ and found myself in a heated debate with C about nomenclature. She thinks “mixtapes” is skeuomorphic and hokey. She prefers “mixes.” But I think “mixtapes” conjures the correct mood whereas “mixes” sounds like a deejay set. This debate will probably rage on until v99.0
  • A little less dumb-looking on an iPad
  • Design tweaks and obsessive-compulsive polishing will probably continue until the heat death of the universe.

If you notice something's broken or have any complaints, revelations, or psychic upheavals, feel free to share it below.

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