No gap between songs
Kaseki marks where each song ends inside its buffer, so live albums and DJ mixes run straight through.
#TitleTime
2Table for Five4:09
3Green Light3:39
1Off Kanagawa4:38
The windows you’ll live in
Rules in plain words. Rating is greater than 3.5, last played over a month ago, and Honeycomb keeps the list current as you listen.
Watch the real app run
A screen recording of Honeycomb 0.1.0 on a Mac: scrolling and searching 100,000 tracks, then picking albums and playing them.
Measured on 100,000 tracks
Every change gets timed against the same generated 100,000-track library. These are the numbers for the current build, next to the build before it.
Measured 21 October 2026 on a MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro and 16 GB, release builds, Low Power Mode on. One machine and a generated library, so treat them as a guide, not a promise.
- Startup to the first list
- 0.95 swas 2.4 s
- Sort by title
- 68–76 mswas 3.1–3.6 s
- Search, per keystroke
- 62–65 mswas 230–252 ms
- Rebuild the library view
- 142 mswas 1.5 s
- Filter to one artist
- 65 mswas 133 ms
- Memory, app and web view
- 196 MBwas 222 MB
- CPU while idle
- 1–2%of one core
Built like a player should be
Played at its own rate
Where your output allows it, Honeycomb opens it at the song’s sample rate. Otherwise it resamples with a sinc filter.
Half stars, in the list
Rate straight from the track list. Smart playlists read the same half stars, so 3.5 means three and a half.
TitleRating
Breaking Wave
Rouge, after Midnight
By the Window
Honeycomb Centre
TitleFormatBitrate
Southampton WaterFLAC912 kbps
By the WindowM4A1041 kbps
Breaking WaveMP3320 kbps
Green LightM4A256 kbps
PatchworkOGG192 kbps
Moth LightWAV1411 kbps
Every format you own
MP3, FLAC, AAC and ALAC, Ogg Vorbis, WAV and AIFF, all gapless, with their tags read and merged.
Keys that just work
Headphone buttons, media keys and the macOS Now Playing controls reach Honeycomb from any app.
1:284:38
Your files stay put
Honeycomb never moves or deletes your music. It writes to a file only when you press Save in the tag editor.
Kaseki, the engine underneath
Honeycomb doesn’t borrow a playback library. Kaseki is its own audio engine, written in Rust, and it does one job: get every sample from the file to your speakers on time, with nothing added and no gap between songs.
2.33% idle CPU, down from 5.86% before Kaseki, measured with a 100,000-track library on an M1 Pro.
How Kaseki works- Decodes
- On its own thread, with symphonia: MP3, FLAC, AAC, ALAC, Vorbis, WAV and AIFF. If a broken file makes the decoder panic, Kaseki catches it, so it can’t take the app down.
- Reads ahead
- About five seconds of audio wait in a lock-free ring buffer, with a marker where each song ends, so the next one starts on the next sample.
- Resamples
- Only when it has to. The output opens at the file’s own rate when your device allows; otherwise a sinc resampler converts it. Surround folds down to stereo.
- Plays
- The output callback just copies samples and sets the volume. When headphones are unplugged, playback pauses instead of jumping to the speakers.
First, export your old library
Most desktop players can save an iTunes-format library XML. Choose it, and any M3U playlists.
Import done: updated 29 tracks, created 1 playlist, replaced 1 playlist.
- Export
- Match
- Choose
- Done
Why I’m building it
I wanted a player that treats a big library as the point, not an edge case: a column browser, proper tags, smart playlists, and play counts that mean something after ten years.
On a Mac, the ones I liked either weren’t native or slowed to a crawl once the library got big. So I started writing my own, in Rust, with its own audio engine.
Every build gets measured against a generated 100,000-track library: startup, search, sorting, scrolling and idle CPU. If a change makes those worse, it doesn’t ship.
Honeycomb is free and open source under the GPL, and it will stay that way. Next come Linux builds, Last.fm scrobbling, and syncing to USB drives and players.
n1ji
Makes Honeycomb
Write to me[email protected]
Common questions
Yes. It’s free and open source under GPL-3.0-or-later. No account, no subscription.
On a 100,000-track test library on an M1 Pro, it shows the list in under a second, searches in about 65 ms per keystroke and sorts by title in about 70 ms.
MP3, FLAC, AAC and ALAC in M4A, Ogg Vorbis, WAV and AIFF. All of them play gaplessly.
It never moves or deletes them. Tags are written only when you press Save in the tag editor. Ratings and play counts live in Honeycomb’s own database.
Yes. Export an iTunes-format library XML, which most players can do, plus any M3U playlists. Ratings, play counts, play dates, loved tracks and playlists come across.
Not yet. Mac and Windows builds exist now. Linux builds, as AppImage, .deb and .rpm, are planned for November 2026.
That’s December’s work: now-playing updates, scrobbles by Last.fm’s rules, and a queue for songs played offline.
Planned for January 2027. Pick playlists, copy only what changed, and get M3U files with relative paths that car stereos can read.
Alpha builds aren’t signed yet. The first time, open Honeycomb and close the warning, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway. You only need to do this once.
Yes. It’s free and open source under GPL-3.0-or-later. No account, no subscription.
Get the alpha,
free on GitHub
Builds for Mac and Windows. They aren’t signed yet, so the first time you open Honeycomb on a Mac, allow it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.