“Your” music rents itself back to you. Your books phone home.
Your files have a landlord.
Syncopation is for the people who opted out of the subscription economy — the ones done renting shelf space in a billionaire's digital closet. It organizes your digital life back onto hardware you own: music onto iPods and MP3 players, books onto e-readers, anything onto folders, drives, SD cards, and volumes. One window. Four modes. No connection required.
Music
Every audio format you've hoarded — MP3, FLAC, ALAC, AAC, WAV — folder structure intact. Any player, card, or drive that mounts.
ePUB / PDF
Your library, on your reader, without a storefront in between.
All Files
Everything. No filtering. You're an adult.
iPod
The mode nothing else does: native database, checksums, artwork. No fruit software needed.
THREE MODES COPY YOUR FILES UNTOUCHED. THE FOURTH TRANSLATES THEM INTO THE DEVICE'S NATIVE TONGUE.
THE APP TRANSFORMS TO WHAT YOU NEED.
FIG. 01 — THE SHIPPING LAYOUT, WEARING THE FACILITY'S COLORS. THE REAL WINDOW WEARS LIQUID GLASS.
THE PURPLE IS NOT A THEME, IT IS A POSITION.
“The greatest deception men suffer is mistaking access for possession. He who is fixed to a subscription does not own his library. The stream was once a file, and it never became anything better than a file.”
Pro and CE.
Same engine. Different clearance levels.
CE is not a demo, not a trial, and not crippleware — it's the full sync engine, free, under GPL v3, and it's our contribution to the open-source community: real code, openly licensed, patches welcome. Pro is what happens when the engine gets a valet, a tailor, and a direct line to the person who built it.
| Capability | Syncopation Pro | Syncopation CE |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $19.99 until Dec 31, 2026 — then $24.99. One-time. Not a subscription. Never a subscription. | Free GPL v3, source on GitHub |
| Ownership | You own itbuy it once, it's yours — every update through the life of the major version is free. The next major version is a new decision, not a renewal. | You own it twiceit's GPL — you own the binary and the blueprints |
| Native iTunesDB engine — hash58 checksums, FLAC→ALAC done right, artwork | Included | Includedwe told you it wasn't crippleware |
| All four Synco-modes | Included | Included |
| Device identification | Names your exact hardware“iPod classic (7th gen)” — clean-room table, 196 models of the click-wheel era | Names the family“iPod classic” — and that's all it will say |
| Two-way sync | Yeseach side ends up with everything | — |
| Match Default Source | Yesthe iPod becomes a mirror of your folder, deletions included | — |
| Liquid Glass interface | Yes on macOS 26graceful fallback on 13–15 | Flathonest, functional, flat |
| Distribution | Mac App Storesandboxed, notarized, reviewed by Apple | GitHubclone it, build it, own it |
| Support | GitHub Issues — answered by the developer | GitHub Issues — answered by the community, often also the developer |
PRICING DISCLOSURE: $19.99 IS AN INTRODUCTORY PRICE, NOT A COUNTDOWN-TIMER PSY-OP. ON JAN 1, 2027 IT BECOMES $24.99 AND STAYS THERE.
For people who want their exact iPod greeted by name, their sync running both directions, and their money buying software instead of renting it.
Get ProFor people who read build scripts for fun. The full engine under GPL v3 — our contribution to the open-source community. Patches welcome, forks legal, gratitude optional. If you outgrow it, Pro will be here. If you don't, that's fine too.
Get CEWhy Pro only ships through the Mac App Store.
You're about to trust an app from a stranger on the internet with hardware Apple stopped defending fifteen years ago. So we let Apple screen us first.
Sandboxed
The App Store build runs in Apple's sandbox. It touches exactly the folders and devices you grant it — it physically cannot wander. You'll see the grant dialog once; that's the sandbox working, not the app being needy.
Reviewed & notarized
Every update passes Apple's review and notarization before it reaches you. No “download this .dmg from our site and trust us.”
Data collected: none
The App Store privacy label reads “Data Not Collected.” Not anonymized. Not aggregated. Not collected. Your taste is not a product here — nothing studies your mood, wraps your year in December, or sells your listening habits to advertisers. We'll leave that to a certain shade of green.
Apple handles the money
Purchases, refunds, and updates ride Apple's rails. One price, one receipt, and your license follows your Apple ID — no license keys to lose.
The receipts.
Syncopation Pro, itemized. Everything below is native Swift. No Electron, no bundled browser, no 200 MB of Chromium cosplaying as a utility. The binary is measured in megabytes.
Audio-agnostic by design
The iPod gets the headlines; the engine doesn't play favorites. Music mode loads SD cards and any audio player that mounts as storage — folder structure intact, formats untouched. Interrupted syncs resume where they stopped, and a track the engine has seen once is never copied twice, even one some other app put there.
Own database engine
Syncopation writes the iPod's iTunesDB natively — tracks, playlists, albums, sort indexes — including the hash58 checksum newer click-wheel firmware demands. No iTunes, no Music.app, no libgpod runtime.
Audio pipeline
FLAC → ALAC conversion, iPod mode only — and done correctly: a 16-bit pipeline the firmware actually plays (naive conversions skip and stutter), with hi-res material downsampled to the classic's 48 kHz ceiling automatically. In every other mode, your files travel byte-for-byte untouched.
Artwork
Cover art extracted from your files and written as the iPod's native RGB565 ithmb + ArtworkDB format, validated byte-for-byte against reference implementations.
Era coverage
Works with iPod classic, video, nano (1st–4th gen), mini, and photo in disk mode — from 2005-era firmware (plain databases) through the final classic (hash58). Shuffle, touch, and iPhone are not supported. The shuffle knows what it did.
HARDWARE-PROVEN: nano 1G (2005) · nano 3G (2007) · classic (2009)
Requirements
macOS 13.0 Ventura or later. Universal binary — Apple silicon and Intel. An iPod in disk mode, or any player, reader, or drive that mounts as storage.
Deep documentation
The technical notes are public — database formats, firmware quirks, conversion pitfalls — because the next person shouldn't have to rediscover them.
Tickets are filed where the code lives.
No chatbot. No ticket portal. No hold music. You open a GitHub issue; a human who wrote the code reads it. Radical, we know.
Syncopation Pro
Bug reports, feature requests, and “my iPod is doing something weird” — all welcome. Include your macOS version and iPod model; the app's Debug drawer has everything else.
OPEN A PRO ISSUE →Syncopation CE
Same deal, community edition. Build problems, patches, and pull requests live here.
OPEN A CE ISSUE →What happens next.
Some of the roadmap has been cleared for release. The rest of this page has been reviewed by the facility and redacted where appropriate. Do not adjust your monitor.
- Cleared for release
- Artwork backfill for tracks already on the device
- Mirror & clear-all device maintenance
- iPod shuffle support — it has apologized
- Syncopation CE, free, on the Mac App Store
- Not cleared
- PROJECT LIBRARIAN: a manager for the library itself. Finding better cover art. Cleaning up tags and duplicates. Building playlists. The job iTunes used to do — before it became a storefront.
- SCOPE: not an accessory to your library. A full-feature application — the whole job, end to end.
- SUBJECT: players without an apple on the back. If it mounts, it is a target.
- TIMELINE: when it is ready and not one day sooner
If you can read the black bars, report to decontamination. // Cloud clearance: DENIED