A native music player built for lossless audio
Tornade is a native macOS music player built with Rust and SwiftUI, designed for audiophiles who want full control over their music library without bloat.
The interface follows a three-panel layout: a sidebar for navigation (Search, Tracks, Albums, Artists, Genres), a content area, and a persistent queue panel on the right. A mini-player anchored at the bottom provides playback controls and volume at all times.
Tornade scans local directories, extracts metadata automatically, and caches album artwork - turning a folder of audio files into a fully browsable library in seconds.
Technology
Tornade is built with Rust for the audio engine and core logic, SwiftUI for the native macOS interface, SQLite with FTS5 for full-text search, and Symphonia for lossless codec decoding.
Lossless Audio, Every Format
FLAC, ALAC, OGG, MP3, WAV, AIFF - decoded natively via Symphonia
The track list shows the exact audio format for every file, so you always know whether you are listening to a lossless source or a compressed one.
Tracks view
The tracks view lists the entire library in a dense table with columns for title, artist, album, duration, and format. Each row displays the codec badge (FLAC, ALAC, AAC…) so the audio quality is always visible at a glance.
The library is sorted and filterable in real time. Tornade uses SQLite FTS5 for full-text search across all metadata fields, delivering instant results even on libraries with tens of thousands of tracks.
Playback state persists across restarts: Tornade remembers the current track, queue position, and volume, so you pick up exactly where you left off.
Albums and Artist Pages
Rich metadata views with album artwork, artist bios, and discography
Each album and artist page is built from metadata extracted directly from the audio files - no external API calls, no internet required.
Album detail
The album page surfaces the full track list alongside an info panel showing year, genre, label, and format. Below the tracklist, Tornade displays other albums by the same artist and any featuring collaborators - all derived from embedded tags.
Clicking a track adds it to the queue without interrupting playback. The queue panel on the right updates in real time and supports drag-to-reorder.
Artist page
Each artist page aggregates all albums and tracks attributed to that artist across the library. A short biography sourced from the embedded metadata is displayed alongside the discography.
The right-hand queue panel remains visible throughout, so adding tracks from an artist page to the current session is a single click.
Browse by Genre
A visual genre browser built from your own library tags
Tornade groups tracks by genre automatically, generating a mosaic of album covers that makes browsing large, varied libraries intuitive.
Genres view
The genres view displays each genre as a card with a representative album cover and a track count. With 67+ genres detected automatically from file tags, it transforms a flat folder structure into a browsable music collection.
Clicking a genre filters the library instantly, showing all matching tracks and albums without a page reload.
Global search
The global search bar queries the entire library simultaneously across artists, albums, and tracks. Results appear grouped by type in real time as you type, powered by SQLite FTS5.
The search is keyboard-centric: navigate results with arrow keys, press Enter to play or add to queue - no mouse required.
Tornade, it is
- A native macOS app with a SwiftUI interface and a Rust core
- Lossless audio decoding via Symphonia (FLAC, ALAC, OGG, MP3, WAV, AIFF)
- Full-text library search powered by SQLite FTS5
- Persistent queue, playback history, and track ratings (0-5 stars)
- M3U playlist import and export
- Near-zero CPU at rest, minimal RAM footprint, instant startup
- A free Terminal UI (TUI) version built with ratatui, open-source
Technology: Rust / SwiftUI / SQLite / Symphonia / ratatui