bTunes - a return to when music players were fun, and not a sales channel
2026-08-22
bTunes is a music player for the Mac that looks and works like iTunes circa early 2000s, with a Winamp-style mini mode.
bTunes is not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple, or by whoever owns Winamp these days. iTunes is a trademark of Apple Inc. and Winamp is a trademark of its owner. None of their code or artwork is in here. This is a personal, non-commercial project.
While bTunes can import (non-protected) music and playlists from iTunes, bTunes never writes to your audio files or to your iTunes library.
What this is and why it exists
My iTunes library goes back about 25 years and is primarily organized around playlists. I can't get my playlists on Spotify, and fuck not owning your music. One day, this Mac will die, or Apple will turn off its servers. This has been a simmering problem for a decade.
My media center is a Mac old enough to have a driver's permit; El Capitan is the last OS it will run.
I want all my playlists and metadata from iTunes, with an interface from when iTunes didn't suck, and I want it to run on my media Mac.
What it does
- looks like iTunes 4: gray window, search top right, transport top left, readout in between, sources down the left
- genre / artist / album browser columns across the top of the library
- smart playlists, built from rules
- playlist folders (which iTunes 4 didn't have)
- imports from an iTunes library: songs, ratings, play counts, date added, and playlists
- mini mode: a small dark panel with a spectrum analyzer that floats over everything, including full screen apps
- a ten band equalizer
- plays audio CDs, and rips them to AAC or Apple Lossless
- burns a playlist to an audio CD, with CD-Text
- syncs playlists to an iPod
AI disclosure
A lot of the code in here was written with AI. But it's taken months of refinement to make it feel awesome.