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Decaud is a music player for people who care how their files actually reach their ears. The name is the mission statement: DECent AUDio.
It plays your library the way it was mastered: bit-perfect lossless, native DSD, and a signal path you can inspect at any moment, on hardware you choose.
BUILT FOR SOUND
• Bit-perfect playback with exclusive device access: Decaud takes the DAC for itself, so macOS can't resample or mix other audio into your stream
• Native DSD over PCM (DoP): DSD64, DSD128, and DSD256 delivered untouched to capable DACs, with automatic high-quality PCM conversion everywhere else. Decaud asks before sending DoP to a new DAC, so a PCM only device never plays noise
• Hi-res lossless: FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, DSF, DFF, APE, WavPack, and more, at any rate your hardware supports
• Audio Unit plug-ins hosted right in the playback chain, exclusive mode included (Mac)
• Gapless playback, optional crossfade, and headphone crossfeed with three classic presets
• Dithered bit-depth reduction, ReplayGain, and a 10-band equalizer that works on AirPlay and live streams too, and tells you honestly when it's out of the path
• A volume control that works even on DACs without a knob, exclusive mode included, without touching your samples (Mac)
• Roon-style Signal Path: see every stage between the file and the device, with a quality verdict for the whole chain
MORE WAYS TO LISTEN
• Internet radio in real quality: Radio Paradise in FLAC, SomaFM, FIP, and your own stations, with live song titles and covers
• Station: endless play seeded from any song, chosen from your own library by sound, no cloud involved
• Classical browsing that understands works, movements, and composers, even on vinyl rips with messy tags
• The waveform is the seek bar: scrub the track's real shape
KNOW WHAT YOU'RE HEARING
• TrueHz analysis decodes each track in full to verify its real quality: a "lossless" file that was made from a lossy master gets caught
• Real-time analyzer, goniometer, phase and LUFS meters in a pop-out visualizer
• Tempo, key, and tuning detection for every analyzed track
YOUR LIBRARY, ANYWHERE IN THE HOUSE
• Stream from NAS/SMB shares and DLNA servers, including DSD
• Cast to AirPlay speakers in perfect multi-room sync, to Chromecast, and to Sonos and other DLNA renderers, with lossless delivery where the receiver allows it
• Control your Mac library from your iPhone over the local network
• iCloud sync keeps your library, ratings, and artwork on all your devices, in your own iCloud account
A LIBRARY THAT STAYS YOURS
• Local-first: your music lives in your files and folders, organized Artist/Album if you want Decaud to keep it tidy
• Serious tagging: whole-album editing, Discogs and MusicBrainz matching, AcoustID identification by sound, and full DSF metadata editing
• Bit-perfect CD ripping with error-corrected secure mode, and cue-sheet splitting, including bit-perfect DSD vinyl rips
• Smart playlists with live rules, a watch folder that imports whatever you drop in, synced lyrics, compilations
• Your listening history stays private, on your device, with optional export to a server you host
PRIVATE BY DESIGN
No account. No analytics. No tracking. Online metadata lookups (covers, lyrics, tags) are opt-in and send text or audio fingerprints only, never your audio. Decaud works completely offline.
If you have a DAC and a folder full of music you actually own, Decaud was built for you.