Sleeve

A native macOS audio tagger that also converts, rips and burns CDs, and splits long recordings.
Everything revolves around one track list: ripping produces files, tagging edits them, converting turns them into something else.
The name comes from the record sleeve: the thing around the music that labels and files it. That is what Sleeve does.

Features · Tag · Convert · Rip · Split · Requirements · Installation · Known limitations · Support · Website · Manual (PDF)

_{The album in the screenshot is made up — artist, titles and cover alike.}

🏷️ One track list Rip a CD, tag what came out, convert it, without importing anything twice.

🔎 MusicBrainz and Discogs Look up the album or the exact pressing, with track lengths side by side before anything is taken over.

💿 Secure ripping Secure mode, read offset, C2 pointers, log and cue sheet, plus gapless disc images and 1:1 copies.

🔒 No account, no tracking Everything runs on your Mac. The network is only used when you look something up.

Features

Tag, Convert and Rip share one list of files; splitting long recordings has a window of its own. The album in every screenshot is made up.

Sixteen tracks selected; the inspector shows the shared tags and the cover. 🏷️ Tag One track or a whole album: fields that differ show <Multiple values>, and only fields you touched are written. Numbering, capitalization, find and replace and filling a field from a pattern, every batch step with a preview.	File naming from a pattern, with a live preview of the new names. ✏️ Rename and look up One pattern syntax in both directions: tags to file names, and file names back to tags. Look Up Album finds the release on MusicBrainz or Discogs and lays its tracks next to your files, lengths included, so a wrong match shows.
Convert mode, with MP3 at 320 kbit/s chosen for sixteen tracks. 🔄 Convert MP3, AAC, ALAC, FLAC, Opus, Vorbis, WAV and AIFF with ffmpeg. Sleeve reads the tags first and writes them back itself, cover included, so the album artist and the disc number survive the trip.	Rip mode, with the disc's album, artist and track list in the sidebar. 💿 Rip Reads audio CDs directly, no helper tool: burst or secure mode, a verified read offset, C2 error pointers, an optional second pass, a log and a cue sheet. CD-TEXT, ISRC and the MusicBrainz disc ID fill in the tags.
Copy CD: read, eject, and burn the copy onto a blank in the same drive. 📀 Image, burn, copy From the File menu: a gapless image of the whole disc (BIN, WAV or FLAC plus a cue sheet), burning such an image back to a CD-R, and a one-button 1:1 copy, with one drive or two.	The Track Splitter: waveform, six titled tracks, and the third one's boundaries magnified. ✂️ Split into tracks An album video, a vinyl side or a live set, cut into tracks without re-encoding. Silence detection finds the boundaries, two magnifiers set them exactly, and the titles come from MusicBrainz, Discogs or a pasted track list.

Tag

• Batch editor – drop in files or whole folders, edit in the table or in the inspector. With several tracks selected, fields that differ show <Multiple values> instead of an empty box. A field is only written if you actually touched it — an empty-looking field is never written as empty by accident.
• Numbering – numbers tracks in their current order, with leading zeros, track totals (03/12) and per-disc or continuous counting.
• Capitalization – Title Case with language-aware exceptions ("of", "the", "und", "der" …), UPPER CASE or lower case, for all fields or only chosen ones.
• Find and replace – "feat." to "ft.", or remove "(Remastered 2011)" everywhere at once; plain text or regular expressions with $1, with a preview of every change before anything happens.
• Fill a field – one field from a pattern: album artist from %artist%, or the title from the file name with %filename%, with a preview.
• Rename and extract – one pattern syntax in both directions: %track% - %artist% - %title% turns tags into file names with a live preview, and the same pattern read backwards pulls tags out of file names. Missing tags drop their separators too, collisions get (2).
• Cover art – every embedded image with its type (front, back, booklet page, disc …), added by drag and drop, replaced or appended, applied to all selected tracks at once, exported as a file.
• Look Up Album – finds the release on MusicBrainz (no account needed) or Discogs (with your own token) and lays its tracks next to your files, with each file's length against the release's. A file more than 3 s off is marked, so a wrong match shows up even when the titles agree. Pick which fields to take over — the front cover included, in the size you choose; nothing reaches the disk until you save.
• Undo – the last save can be undone. Add to Music hands the selection to the Music app.

Convert

Converts to MP3, AAC, ALAC, FLAC, Opus, Vorbis, WAV and AIFF with ffmpeg — and writes the tags afterwards itself, cover included. Generic converters tend to lose the album artist or the disc number on the way; Sleeve reads the tags first, keeps ffmpeg's own tag copying switched off, and writes them back with TagLib. File names come from the same pattern engine as renaming.

Rip

Reads audio CDs directly — no root, no helper tool.

• Burst or secure mode – secure reads every block twice, retries on a mismatch and decides by majority. Unresolved spots are named in the log.
• Read offset, verified to the byte, read speed, C2 error pointers where the drive delivers them, and an optional second pass that reads every track twice and compares checksums.
• CD-TEXT, MCN and ISRC, plus Look Up…: the MusicBrainz disc ID finds exactly this pressing; otherwise search MusicBrainz or Discogs by name. The disc's own track lengths sit next to the release's, so a wrong pressing shows before anything is taken over, and on a box set the disc in the drive is picked automatically.
• Log and cue sheet, any output format the Convert mode offers (WAV works without ffmpeg), file names from a pattern.

From the File menu:

• Create Disc Image… – the whole disc as one continuous audio stream (BIN, WAV or FLAC) plus a cue sheet. Not ISO: an audio CD carries no file system, and an ISO container would throw away an eighth of every sector.
• Burn Image to CD… – writes such an image back to a CD-R, session-at-once so track transitions stay gapless.
• Copy CD… – one button: reads the disc, ejects it, asks for a blank and burns a 1:1 copy. With two drives it reads in one and burns in the other.

With more than one optical drive, Sleeve asks which one to read from and which to burn with.

Split Into Tracks

Splits one long recording — an album video, a vinyl side, a live set — into tracks, without re-encoding.

• Finds the pauses, cuts at the end of each one and keeps everything else, so nothing between tracks is lost. Video sources work too; only the audio is taken.
• A waveform of the whole file, two magnifiers for each track's start and end, draggable boundaries, and a player to listen across a boundary before you commit to it.
• Look Up Titles… – track titles from MusicBrainz, from Discogs, or from a track list pasted straight out of the video description. The list sits next to what Sleeve found, with the difference per track, and can set the boundaries itself — which finds transitions without any pause at all.
• The pieces are written as individual files with title, number, album, artist, year and genre.

Requirements

• macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer
• Apple Silicon
• ffmpeg for converting, for ripping to anything but WAV, for FLAC disc images and for splitting — see below
• Optional: a Discogs personal access token for Discogs lookups. MusicBrainz needs nothing.

External tools

Sleeve does not bundle ffmpeg. It looks in /opt/homebrew/bin, /usr/local/bin and your PATH, plus any path you set in Settings, which takes precedence.

brew install ffmpeg

When ffmpeg is missing, the affected areas stay open and explain what to do, with the command ready to copy — Sleeve never runs an installer itself. It also checks which encoders your ffmpeg build actually has and says so before a batch starts, not after.

Discogs token

Discogs only allows searching with a token. Create a personal access token in your Discogs account under Settings → Developers and paste it into Sleeve's Settings. It is stored in the macOS Keychain, nowhere else.

Installation

Grab the latest build from the Releases page — either the installer (.dmg: open it and drag Sleeve onto the Applications folder) or the .zip (unzip it and move Sleeve.app to your Applications folder).

The app is not notarized, so macOS refuses to open it on first launch. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to the message about Sleeve and click Open Anyway.

The user manual (PDF, English) walks through every part of the app.

Languages

The interface is available in English, German and Spanish, selected automatically from the system language. Unsupported languages fall back to English.

To try a language without changing your system settings, launch the binary directly:

Sleeve.app/Contents/MacOS/Sleeve -AppleLanguages '(es)'

Known limitations

• CD-TEXT is not burned. Images and copies carry the audio and the track boundaries, not the titles stored on the disc.
• No AccurateRip. Rips are checked for repeatability (secure mode, second pass), not against other people's rips of the same pressing. The drive's read offset has to be entered by hand.
• Copy-protected discs are refused, not worked around. Sleeve reads standard audio CDs only — no data tracks, no DVDs.
• Cue sheets mark track starts only. Marking where the pause before a track begins (INDEX 00) would need the subchannel, which drives do not report reliably. The image itself is gapless; only the pause markers are missing.
• Opening a disc image is not supported yet. Sleeve writes cue sheets but cannot read them back.
• Intel Macs are not supported. The bundled TagLib is built for Apple Silicon only.

Building

Requires Xcode 26 or newer (Swift 6).

open Sleeve.xcodeproj

Then build and run in Xcode (⌘R). TagLib is checked in as a prebuilt static library under Vendor/taglib/. To rebuild it from source (needs cmake):

Scripts/build-taglib.sh

Checks from the Terminal:

Scripts/run-bridge-test.sh    # tag engine, patterns, lookup, rip, burn, split — against copies of TestFiles/
Scripts/check-strings.sh      # every string in the code has a translation
Scripts/build-manual.sh       # docs/Sleeve-Manual.pdf from manual/source.html (needs Google Chrome)
Scripts/make-dmg.sh           # Release build → Sleeve-<version>-arm64.dmg and .zip (needs create-dmg)

The app is not sandboxed — required for running Homebrew's ffmpeg, which is linked against libraries a sandboxed child process may not load.

The design document, Sleeve-SPEC.md, explains what Sleeve does, why it does it that way, and what was measured along the way.

Support

Sleeve is free and always will be. If it saved you some hassle, you can buy me a coffee.

License

Copyright (C) 2026 NeonRost

This program is free software, released under the GNU General Public License, version 3 (or, at your option, any later version). See the LICENSE file for details.

Sleeve links TagLib statically, used under the GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1 (TagLib is dual-licensed LGPL 2.1 / MPL 1.1). TagLib in turn contains utfcpp, licensed under the Boost Software License 1.0. Their full texts are in LICENSES/, and all three licenses are readable inside the app under Sleeve → About Sleeve → Show License. TagLib's source is at github.com/taglib/taglib; Scripts/build-taglib.sh fetches and builds exactly the version Sleeve uses.