Abisam — Live Demo

A list is the set of values a field offers while you type in it — your Genres, Moods, Crates and so on. Keeping them tidy is what makes filtering and criteria playlists reliable, because “Hip Hop”, “hip-hop” and “HipHop” are three different values to everything downstream. Editing a list never touches your files; it only changes what Abisam suggests. In use counts entries that appear on at least one track, and not in list counts values your tracks already carry that the list doesn’t offer yet — those are the ones worth adopting.

Your lists

Output

Audio output device

No sound? Your system default may be a Multi-Output or aggregate device, which some apps can't play through — pick a specific device (e.g. Built-in Speakers); it switches instantly and is remembered. Just connected a device? Click ⟳ Refresh. On macOS the list currently shows the active output device; full device selection is coming.

Up Next

Recently-played tracks shown

How many recently-played tracks Up Next keeps visible above the current one.

Cockpit

Auto-follow Now Playing when idle

Selecting a track to edit switches the cockpit to manual. This resumes following the playing track after you've been idle that long (no selections or edits).

Jump buttons skip

How far ↺/↻ (and ←/→ when the player is focused) jump within the track.

Volume normalization (ReplayGain)

Evens out loudness so quiet and loud tracks play at a similar level. Abisam reads the ReplayGain value stored in each file's tags — it does not change the file. Tracks with no ReplayGain tag play at their raw volume.

Normalize volume between tracks

When on, each track's ReplayGain is applied automatically on playback. The volume section (bottom bar) shows the value in use for the current track.

Fall back to album gain

When a track has no gain of its own, use the album's gain instead. Keeps an album's quiet-to-loud dynamics intact. Off = track gain only.

Clip guard

Stops a boosted track from distorting. 0 dB is the loudest a file can play; the ceiling keeps peaks below it. Light leaves a thin cushion (default), Safe leaves more, Off applies gains exactly as tagged. Only ever trims a boost down — quieter tracks are untouched.

Analog Mode (record player)

Play music with the character of a record player — surface noise, crackle, and a little warmth. Subtle by default. Pure local DSP; nothing is uploaded. The record icon in the transport bar toggles it and opens the same controls as a quick popover.

Analog Mode

Apply the vinyl effect on playback. Off by default.

Record style

Which vinyl mark appears in the transport bar. Drawn live, so it follows your theme and accent. Use + to bring in your own square SVG; ⌥-click your own face to remove it.

Spin speed

How fast the record turns while playing — real record speeds (33⅓, 45, 78 RPM), gentled so they stay calm at icon size. Off keeps it still.

Record condition

How worn the record sounds. A starting point — open the Record Sound Simulator below to shape any layer. Adjusting anything switches this to Custom.

Record sound

Shape every layer of the groove — surface floor, crackle, dust pops, groove wear, turntable motor, hum and record EQ — and save your own named profiles. Levels are deliberately generous so you can hear a layer, then dial it back.

Wow & flutter

Pitch drift, like a warped record — a slow wobble once per revolution plus a faster shimmer. Off by default: unlike crackle, this bends the music itself, so it's a love-it-or-hate-it effect. Depth is set in the Simulator; under about 10% sounds like real hardware.

Needle drop

A lead-in when an album starts and a run-out when it ends — not between tracks. Outside an album (library, playlist, shuffle) it "flips" on the timer below.

Flip every…

Side = a 23-minute side (flips like turning a record over); Album = a 45-minute LP, then a fresh drop; Custom sets your own length. Only applies outside album playback.

Volume

Needle-drop volume

How loud the needle lead-in and the run-out "tick… tick…" are, from 0 to 200% (100% = default). Turn it up if you want the drop and lead-out groove more pronounced.

Preview & customize

Hear the needle lead-in (the drop as a side starts) and the run-out groove (the tick as a record finishes), at the volume set above — works with nothing loaded. Customize… opens a tuner where every layer of the drop (click, scratch, thud, hiss) is yours to shape.

Crossfade

Fade between tracks

The outgoing track fades down while the next fades in — on natural track endings and manual skips alike. Applies everywhere: albums, playlists, shuffle. Tracks shorter than twice the fade play without one; Repeat One never fades.

Fade in the next track

A long crossfade can make every song's intro feel quiet. This ramps the incoming track up on its own, shorter clock (or not at all) while the outgoing track still fades gently.

Appearance

[?] helper marks

Floating ? marks near new concepts open styled explanations — hide them once you know the app.

Selected-panel highlight

The thin outline on the panel you've selected (click a panel to select it; also marks keyboard focus).

Panel

Album art behind the panels

The playing album's artwork, blurred and dimmed, on the surface behind your panels — it follows the same rotation the Album Art panel shows. This is a background, not a viewer: to actually look at the artwork use Immersive artwork (⛶ on the album art, or ⌘I).

Strength

Artwork strength

How far the artwork comes up behind everything — from all but invisible to well past what the old “Bold” reached.

Blur

Artwork blur

How soft the artwork is behind everything. All the way down leaves it sharp; the dimming above is what keeps it out of your way either way.

Panels

Panel solidity

How much the artwork shows through the panels themselves — the whole way from fully solid to fully clear. Title bars stay solid at any setting, so panel names never sit on a picture.

Now Playing

Easier 5 Seconds of Summer Now Music · 2019

Colors

Edit the surfaces and the seven accent hues — opens over Settings and previews live; you're back here when you close it.

Scrollbar width

How wide the scrollbars are throughout the app — the Library table, Up Next, Lyrics, album browsers and every dialog.

Scrollbar corners

Corner treatment of the scrollbar thumb.

Scrollbar preview — grab it →

The width applies everywhere:

the Library table,

Up Next,

Lyrics,

album browsers,

and every dialog.

Pick what your fingers like.

Seek bar thickness

Thickness of the playback timeline (and the volume slider).

Library view appearance

Album view layout

STACKED puts the carousel above the tracks; SPLIT puts them side by side 50/50. The ◫/⬒ button in the Library header switches it too — both remember your choice.

Column arrangement

SHARED: one set of columns, widths and order everywhere. CUSTOM: Library, playlists and album view each remember their own arrangement.

Page Up/Down selects

How many tracks ⇧Page Up / ⇧Page Down extends the selection by.

Track list — Path column

The optional Path column shows the folder within your library. Turn the columns on by right-clicking a column header; hover any Path/Filename cell for the full location.

Common folder path in the column header

Puts the shared root path in the Path column's header instead of repeating it in every row, keeping the column compact.

Path shown in each cell

FULL shows the complete folder path with no truncation. SHORT trims it so the column stays narrow.

Library

Library name (optional)

Appears in the exported report’s title and filename (e.g. “Sterling’s Music - Library Report - YYYYMMDD.html”). Leave blank to use “Abisam”.

Music Folders

Scan Relocate Copy path Open folder

Recovery tracking

Add a recovery id to new tracks when folders are scanned

Your ratings, play counts and playlist places live in Abisam's library and are matched to files by where they sit on disk. Move or rename a file outside Abisam and that link can break — usually it reconnects by itself, but not if the file was also retagged or converted to another format. With this on, a small ABISAM_ID tag is written into new music as Add Folder or a rescan brings it in, so the file can say which track it is no matter where it ends up. Other players ignore it, and the audio is untouched. Nothing is written unless you turn this on. This covers new arrivals only — for the music you already have, see Maintenance → Recovery tracking.

File updates

Write tag edits to files

Edits always land in the library instantly; this controls the files. AUTO writes them a moment later in the background — never while a track is playing, and always finished before the app closes. MANUAL holds every file write until you press the button below. Pending edits survive restarts either way.

Remind me about pending updates

Only matters in MANUAL mode — a toast nudges you while edits are waiting.

Backup & restore

Your music files are yours and are never altered by any of this. What lives only in Abisam is the library — ratings, play counts, playlists, crates, and any tag edits still waiting to be written. A backup is a single file you can keep anywhere or carry to another computer.

Use this rather than copying the file yourself — Abisam writes the backup through the database so the most recent changes are actually in it.

Back up the library

Writes one .spbckup file — the library plus a manifest of its checksums, so Validate can later prove it is intact. It is compacted on the way out, so it is usually smaller than the library itself.

Validate a backup file

Checks a .spbckup against the manifest inside it — every file's length and checksum. This is how you find out a backup is good before you need it, and it says whether a failure is a truncated file or altered bytes.

Restore

Replaces the current library with a backup. Nothing is replaced until you restart — Abisam checks the file first, then swaps it in on the next launch, and keeps the library it replaced.

Check for damage

Asks SQLite to verify every page. Read-only — it changes nothing, and on a large library it takes a few seconds.

Library at a Glance

Scan History

Artwork

Your library

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Library at a glance

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Scan history

How long each folder takes to scan, and how that compares with last time. Each folder is measured against its own scale — a network share and a local disk are not comparable, and putting them on one axis would hide a real slowdown.

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Slot coverage

The six canonical slots as chips, then every other slot the files can carry. Percentages are of the tracks Abisam has actually read for artwork — a folder that has not been rescanned since the inventory arrived shows a dash rather than a zero, because a zero would claim knowledge Abisam does not have. Formats below are a filter in this report's export, not a report of their own.

Formats

What the images actually are, across the six formats Abisam accepts. JPEG, PNG, GIF and WebP draw directly; BMP and TIFF are converted once and cached.

Where your artwork comes from

A track shows its own embedded picture when it has one, and falls back to an image in the album folder when it does not. The two behave differently: embedded art travels with the file and is copied into the library; a folder image is shared by every track beside it and is stored as a path, so it disappears if the file is moved or deleted. The two reports say exactly which images those are and which tracks have none.

Coverage by album

An album counts as covered when every one of its tracks resolves to an image. Part-covered albums are the ones worth attention — they look inconsistent while playing.

Risk and housekeeping

Artwork Abisam cannot guarantee it can still show you. Folder covers are stored as paths — a missing or unreadable file means those tracks show no art. In-app lists cap at 10 to give a sense of the data.

Outliers

The images doing the most work. Track counts are per unique image, not per album: identical covers are stored once however many albums carry them, so a compilation series sharing one cover legitimately reaches hundreds of tracks. High numbers mean influence, not a problem.

Most tools here work on Abisam’s library database — the index and cached data it keeps on this machine — and leave your files alone. Two exceptions, both only ever on your click: repairing a file in Tag health rewrites that file’s tag block, and Audit Duplicates can move files you pick to the Trash (recoverable). Nothing here runs on its own. For everyday tag and artwork edits, use the editor in the main window.

Library

Artwork

Tags & files

Library health

Artwork in the library database

Compacting removes leftover artwork entries the database no longer uses (they build up as you re-scan, replace covers, or remove tracks) and shrinks the database file, handing that space back to your disk. As noted above, this only tidies the database — none of your actual music or artwork files are touched, and covers still load from your files exactly as before.

Files not added to your library

When a scan cannot add a file it says so here rather than failing quietly. Nothing is wrong with your library — these files simply are not in it yet.

Duplicates

Match by

How to decide two tracks are the same recording — applies to both buttons below. Find duplicates is a quick look that can gather them into a playlist. Audit Duplicates opens a full-screen workspace with a suggested keeper per set, a review queue, and safe removal (to the Trash, recoverable). Deleting files is never automatic.

Artwork files in your album folders

Abisam follows the usual cover.jpg convention and never renames your files. This points out folders where the cover is ambiguous — two cover files, or several albums sharing one folder — so you can decide what to do with them.

Superseded artwork

When Abisam replaces or removes an album-folder image it never deletes it — the old file moves into a Superseded_Artwork folder beside the album, out of the cover scanner's reach. They accumulate one file per replacement; this is where you review what has piled up and clear it. Clearing moves the folders to the Trash (recoverable), never a permanent delete.

Artwork folders beside your albums

Many albums keep extra artwork in a subfolder — booklet scans, a back cover, a disc label. Abisam can index these so they show in the Album Art and Booklet panels. Indexing records where the image is: no file is copied, no audio file is touched, and nothing becomes a track's cover unless you choose it. A folder is only considered when it holds images and no audio — otherwise it is another album, not artwork.

Folder names to look for. Untick any you don't want, and add your own separated by semicolons. At least one name is needed in each row.

Artwork folders

Booklet folders

Tag health

Scan reads each file’s tags to check they can be read and written, and buckets anything that needs attention. Scanning only reads. Repairing rewrites that file’s tag block — the audio is untouched — and only ever when you click.

Lyric suggestions

Lyrics found automatically while you listened, waiting on your say-so. Nothing here has been written to a file or to the library — accepting one saves it exactly as a manual fetch would. Turn this on in Services → Lyrics.

Recovery tracking

Abisam matches your ratings, play counts and playlist places to files by where they sit on disk. If something moves or is renamed outside Abisam, that link can break — and a file that was also retagged or converted cannot be recognised at all. Writing a small ABISAM_ID tag into each file fixes that for good, unless another tag editor deletes it — the file then says which track it is, wherever it goes.

This adds one custom field to every file in your library, alongside whatever tags are already there. Your other tags and the audio are untouched, and it only happens when you press the button. It works through them steadily in the background, and you can stop at any point and resume later.

If something does strip the id later, Abisam falls back to recognising the file by its size, length, artist and title — that reconnects most moves on the next scan, on its own. But a file that was also retagged or converted can't be recognised that way, and its play count, rating and playlist places are lost. To re-add the id, run this again — it only writes to files that are missing one.

Idle —

Album Art

Preferred art storage

Where artwork should live when you add or fix it: embedded travels with the file; folder images are shared by the whole album. Drives the tag editor's coverage check and its default save location.

Priority when a track has both

Some tracks carry a picture inside the file and sit in a folder with a cover image. This chooses which one the library displays when both exist — it never changes your files. Takes effect on the next artwork edit or rescan.

Keyboard Shortcuts

⌘ Command ⌥ Option ⌃ Control ⇧ Shift ⌫ Delete ⏎ Return ⇞ ⇟ Page Up / Down

Click a shortcut, then press the new key combination. Esc cancels recording. A combination already in use, or one macOS reserves, is refused.

Music identification

Track identification uses MusicBrainz (the open music encyclopedia). Lookups are always user-initiated and go directly from this machine to MusicBrainz — never through us. Its rate limit is honored automatically (1 request/second).

Preferred release country

MusicBrainz lists every pressing of an album separately — the same record can appear as US, GB, Japan and Europe editions. Matches from your preferred country sort to the top in Fix tags / Identify results. (XE and XW are MusicBrainz codes for Europe-wide and worldwide releases.)

Discogs (optional)

Personal access token

Discogs is the collector's database — pressings, editions, labels and catalog numbers. A free personal access token (Discogs' intended way for personal apps) lets the app search it on your behalf: sign in, open the developers page below, and click "Generate new token". Data courtesy of Discogs.

Access token:

Fields to pull from Discogs

A Discogs release can carry a lot. Untick anything you never want to see and the lookup stops listing it — this only decides what the review panel SHOWS you. Nothing is ever written to a file until you tick it there and press Apply.

Lyrics (LRCLIB)

Look up missing lyrics while I listen

A few seconds into a track that has no lyrics, Abisam asks LRCLIB whether it has any. Only the title, artist, album and length are sent, and only for tracks you actually play. A track is asked about once — if nothing comes back, it is not asked again. Nothing is written to a file by this switch alone: what comes back waits for you in Maintenance → Lyric suggestions.

Accept strong matches without asking

A match is scored out of 100 — the title, the artist and the length carry most of it, the album and a timed transcript the rest. 85 or better is accepted for you: in practice the title and artist matched and the length is within about two seconds, or the album agreed as well. A weaker match — the album disagreeing and the length several seconds out — waits for you instead, because that is the shape a live take or a different edit takes. Accepted lyrics are saved like any other tag edit — instantly in the library, and to the file according to Library → File updates. Anything weaker always waits for you in Maintenance → Lyric suggestions, however this is set.

Your details

Enter the name, email, and license key from your purchase. These stay on this machine and are included only when you copy support details to send us.

First name Last name Email

License

License key (paste the full key from your purchase email)

♪

Abisam

Your Music, Curated

Version — · /ˈæb.ɪ.sæm/

So why “Abisam”? What’s that about?
Abisam is named after my two daughters, who love music. The name is a little piece of both of them. This app is built for people who love their music enough to curate it, not just stream it. — Sterling

Abisam, a Steagus Publishing product · © Steagus, LLC
No accounts, no tracking, no phoning home — your library lives on this machine.

Abisam stands on open-source work. Their notices ship with it.

Quick start

1 · Add your music — go to the Folders tab and click ＋, then pick the folder where your music lives (subfolders are included). You can add as many folders as you like.
2 · Scanning — the player then reads each file's tags (title, artist, album, rating…) and album art into its own local library. Your files are never moved, copied, or uploaded — they play right where they are. If you change files outside the player, ⟳ Rescan all folders re-reads them.
Panels — drag by the title bar to move · double-click the title bar to collapse / expand · ✕ hides a panel (bring it back with ＋ Add panel in the top bar) · ⟲ Reset to Default restores the layout.
Albums — click an album to open it; use the shuttle dial (push further = faster) or the letters to flip between albums; double-click a card to play it.
Selecting — click · ⇧ click range · ⌘ click toggle · ⌘A all · Esc clear.
Editing — click a value in a Cockpit field panel to edit in place · right-click tracks/albums → Edit tags… for the full editor.
Rating — click a star (left half = ½) · ⊘ = zero ("ignore") · click the current value to unrate.

Need help?

Email support · support@steagus.com

Copies the address — paste it into your mail app along with the support details below.

Community forum · community.steagus.com

Questions, tips and feature discussion with other Abisam users.

Email us at support@steagus.com — paste the details below into the message, then describe your problem in your own words. It's plain text — counts only, no track names or file content — so it stays readable in any mail app. If we ask for more, use Save diagnostics (.zip) and attach the file; it adds your recent log (with your home folder hidden).

Support details — copy & paste (refreshes each time you open this tab)

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Use this record face

Customize the needle drop

Record Sound Simulator

Vocabulary lists

New Playlist

Pending File Updates

Identify Track

Third-party licences

Fetch Lyrics

Fix Album Tags

New Curated Playlist

Settings

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