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Getting started with Odeion music and Symphonia to set up your own music server only requires a few steps. Follow this guide to download and set up Symphonia, then start streaming your music to Odeion.

Download and setup your music server

• Download Symphonia, our music server software and install it by dragging it to your Applications folder on your Mac.
• Start the application and its menu will show up on the right side of your Mac’s menu bar.
  • Opening the first time, macOS will ask you to grant permissions for Symphonia to find things on your local network, this permission is needed to work properly across you home network

• Click the menu and open the settings. Use the file chooser button to set the folder where you have your music files.

• Most of the other settings you can leave set to their default values, but if you want the server to restart when your Mac restarts, check the option to Start Symphonia at Login.
• If you don’t have any music files ripped, you can download our tool The Splitter which will rip your CDs into lossless FLAC files.

Sign up for TestFlight and Install ODEION

• Sign up to beta test Odeion through our TestFlight link, this will require you to install Apple’s TestFlight app which will allow you to install a pre-release version of the Odeion Music app from Apple’s App Store.
• Once it’s installed, open the Odeion app. You will be asked to select a music server. Choose the Symphonia server we set up above.

• In a moment, the Odeion will handshake with Symphonia and you will be able to browse and play your music.
• Odeion will play seamlessly to AirPods, wired headphones and USB-connected DACs. They often take over as the default system output on a Mac, iPhone or iPad.
• Playback on Apple TV will output to your TV or home theater system over the HDMI cable you use to connect your Apple TV.
• The speaker menu allows you to choose AirPlay devices like HomePods and other AirPlay equipment on your network.
• If you have a network streamer like a Denon or Marantz HEOS receiver or other audio gear that can connect to a DLNA / UPnP music server, it should appear in the Speaker drop down within Odeion. This is one playback aspect we’re most curious to hear about from beta testers since we only have a limited number of network streamers to test with.

Odeion Music is something we’re really excited about and we’ve been working on for a while now. It brings all of our apps together. Rip with The Splitter, stream with Symphonia, and now play all of your music on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV.

Odeion music is a streaming music player that works with the media server on your home network. It works best with our DLNA / UPnP server Symphonia, but is compatible with other servers such as MinimServer, Plex, or Jellyfin.

We are currently looking for beta testers to download and install the apps through our Apple App Store TestFlight. It’s simple to set up and you can join from the Odeion product page, or just click the link below to get started. Beta tester spots are limited, so consider joining now if you’re interested. We welcome your feedback and look forward to hearing how you’re using Odeion to listen to your music.

We’ve always wanted a MacOS first media server that’s focused on music and never found something we really liked, so we decided to make our own.

Symphonia shares the music on your Mac with network audio players and apps. It is a UPnP/DLNA media server, so HEOS speakers and receivers, other DLNA streaming hardware, and UPnP control apps can find it on your network, browse your library by artist, album, genre and folder, and play your music.

So, if you have a large collection of ripped CDs or Blu-ray Audio discs, or hi-res audio purchased from sites like HD Tracks, Symphonia can serve all of these audio files without converting or resampling them, so your player gets the original sample rate and bit depth for the most faithful listening experience.

The app runs in the background as a simple menu item extension and has a web-based status page so you can monitor and administer it remotely, see who in your home is listening, and check for updates. It’s the perfect solution for a MacMini running as a headless media server.

Symphonia is completely free and works with any Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 26 or later. Visit Symphonia product page to download it today!

For the Subtitle Lovers

Cinema Text is a new app that we’ve been using internally for a while and now we’re ready to share it with you. If you like watching your movies with subtitles, this app is what you’ve been looking for!

Movies on Blu-ray or UHD discs come with a host of subtitle tracks in a variety of languages. Including them in your rip means they’re displayed in different fonts and positions on the screen which can lead to a jarring viewing experience. Cinema Text creates standard SRT files from the subtitle tracks included in your rips allowing your media player to display consistent, well-formatted subtitles at the bottom of your screen.

Most media players like Infuse or VLC media player pick up these text-based SRT files and use them by default. And these player’s settings let you let you set your preferred fonts styles and sizes, as well as set the background color and transparency to optimize your subtitle presentation.

And since the subtitles are generated directly from your media files, there are no timing issues you might experience with SRT files downloaded from questionable sources. Your subtitles appear exactly when they’re supposed to and exactly where you want them.

After you’ve converted your embedded subtitles into SRT files, the app flags any discrepancies or auto-corrected subtitles for your review. Every subtitle item is fully editable and our editor includes tools to add, delete, split, merge, and time-shift items to ensure perfect and accurate subtitles. You can even load any SRT regardless of the original source.

Download Today

Cinema Text is available to download today. Visit the Cinema Text product page to learn more. It’s free to download and use and if you like it enough, you can always buy us a coffee so we can continue supporting our apps!

Screenshots

What’s Changed

We’ve added some key enhancements to our metadata editor, allowing you to look up release info on Musicbrainz and Discogs to automatically tag song titles and other info on your music files. This is the quickest way to correct metadata and update untagged files. And we’ve added advanced file naming preferences along with the ability to preview the audio on any track loaded into the metadata editor.

The full list of updates is detailed below. To get the update, just choose Check for Updates from The Splitter menu.

Version 0.7.1 Change Log

• Metadata Lookup – Search MusicBrainz and Discogs from the editor and apply a release’s titles, track numbers and album details to the files in one step. Track lengths are compared with the files so a wrong match or a wrong order stands out.
• Advanced File Naming – Choose how tracks are named in Settings > File Output > File Names. Build your preferred file name convention from metadata components like a disc and track number, title, artist and album. Choose how to handle spaces, and whether single-disc releases carry a disc number. Names are kept safe for Mac, Linux and Windows disks and network shares, and long names are shortened evenly to fit.
• Rename Files – Check the “Rename files to match the file naming setting” option and we will rename every file from its tags based on the custom format you define. The new names show in the list before you save.
• Audio Previews – Preview the first 20 seconds of any song to quickly verify and definitely identify any track in the metadata editor.
• Re-order Tracks – Even if your audio files are out of order, the release lookup will match songs based on track duration and re-order them properly. And even if we miss, you can easily drag files into the proper order and use the audio preview to verify the correct order.
• Missing Files – Show potentially missing audio files, based on the release’s track information downloaded from MusicBrainz or Discogs.

What’s Changed

We wanted to make it as easy as possible to keep the app up to date with our latest changes. The application now includes a built-in updater that checks for new versions automatically or you can manually check for updates on demand.

• In-app updates – The Splitter now checks for updates automatically or checks on demand. Future versions install with one click; this is the last one you’ll need to download by hand.
• Beta extended – The update version works through November 30, 2026.

Visit The Splitter product page to download and update now.

What is Hi-Res Audio?

Most audiophiles define hi-res digital audio as anything with a bit depth and sample rate greater than that used on CD audio. Depending on the artist, they may issue updated versions of their releases on DVD or Blu-ray Discs. Because the storage available on DVD (4.7GB) and Blu-ray Discs (50-100GB) are much higher than CDs, these releases can include high resolution audio files that require much more storage that is available on a CD (700MB).

Typically, you will find that the audio formats presented on these discs fall into several categories defined below.

Format	Bit Depth	Sample Rate	Hi-Res Audio?
CD Audio	16 bit	44.1 kHz	No
DVD Audio	24 bit	48 kHz	Yes
Blu-ray Audio	24 bit	48, 96, 192 kHz	Yes

What do I need to extract Hi-Res audio from my Blu-Rays and DVDs?

If you don’t already have the tool MakeMKV, this is the number one tool for extracting the audio tracks from DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. The operation is a pretty simple 2 step process. The process assumes you have a USB blu-ray drive attached to your Mac.

• Load a Blu-ray or DVD Disc into your drive and open MakeMKV

• Click on the drive icon and MakeMKV will decrypt the disc and show you a list of every title on the disc
• Find the title you want, in our case we’re just looking for the title with highest quality stereo track

• Deselect all of the other titles
• Set the output folder and click the MakeMKV button to save the title to your hard drive, this is the .mkv file you’ll be loading into the splitter
• Notice that the title you selected also has 10 chapters, which in the case of the album I Robot by The Alan Parsons Project, these chapters correspond to each track on that album

How to split this into .flac files
Using The Splitter

Once you have your .mkv file exported from MakeMKV, start The Splitter and drag-n-drop the file onto the source file well. These steps will allow you to look up the correct meta data and export your file in just a few simple steps.

• In the Metadata section, enter the artist and album title and click the search button. This will search Musicbrainz.org and Discogs.com for matches on this artist and title.
• The Splitter shows you a list of matches with details indicating when the number of tracks matches the number of chapters in your .mkv file.

• Select the search result that matches the album you exported
• The Chapters and Song Titles section will show you the song title matched to each chapter in your .mkv file

• The Cover Art image well is empty by default, but right clicking on the well gives you the option to download the artwork from Musicbrainz or Discogs, or you can select an image from your computer
  • Cover Art image sizes can be optimized based on the app’s settings.
  • If you’ve chosen to shrink any artwork files that are over a certain size limit, the app will compress or resize them to meet the needs of you streamer or portable device to ensure they can be displayed on the device or streaming app.
• Song titles are automatically matched to the chapters in your .mkv file
• In the left-most column there is a play icon, you can click this to preview the audio for each track to verify that the song title matches the audio for that chapters
• Song titles can be edited in the event that there is any mis-match from the downloaded metadata
• When you’re satisfied with the metadata, click the Encode to FLAC button to export individual .flac files for each chapter on the .mkv title
• When the encode is complete, you can add these files to your media library or add them to a portable media player

In the end you will have uncompressed, bit-perfect encodings of the original hi-res audio from your Blu-ray or DVD source that fit nicely into your personal media server or portable device.

What’s Changed

We’ve been working hard to make this application easier to use. The application now requires no additional software to be installed (aside from MakeMKV if you want to extract hi-res audio tracks from your Blu-ray Audio discs). All of the tools required to read CDs and encode your .flac files are now built in to the app.

Here is our current change log:

• ffmpeg 8.1.2 – bundled with the application, no need for external installation
• cdparanoia III, release 10.2 – bundled with the application, no need for external installation
• Settings Organization – settings options are now organized better by category
• Cover Art Selection – fixed an issue where it may be difficult to open the context menu on the artwork well, clicking anywhere within the well now shows the context menu properly
• Encoding Logs – Updated information in encoding logs to include versions of ffmpeg and cd-paranoia used during encoding
• Open Source Licenses – with the open source libraries now bundled, we offer a comprehensive guide to what’s installed and allow you to review all of the licensing that covers the installed packages

Visit The Splitter product page to download and update now.

We’re honestly just getting started. We are a very small team of developers passionate about music, collecting, and listening. The journey we’ve been on has led us to create what we feel are useful tools to help keep our collections organized and bring the physical media we love into play in a digital world.

The Splitter is out now

The Splitter started as a tool to solve a very specific problem. With all of the Blu-ray Audio discs we’ve been collecting, we wanted to enjoy the high resolution audio without having to start up the entire home theater system, navigate through the Blu-ray menu systems, and have the distractions of the visuals. Our focus was on a solid stereo listening experience.

The Splitter solves this problem by taking the hi-res audio tracks extracted as .mkv files and splits them out into individual .flac files with no loss in quality. It maintains bit depth, sample rate, and most of all uses flac encoding to ensure there’s no compression of the original audio stream.

With the files meticulously tagged with the proper meta data, they can then be added to your media server and streamed to a high quality network streamer. The app even manages the cover art size budget so you don’t go over the limits for your streaming hardware.

As our build out of the product matured, we decided to add CD ripping as well. We’ve built a 400+ album media library with all of our favorites that we’ve collected over the years and continue to add new titles as we acquire them. The same .flac encoding along side cd-paranoia’s verified extraction ensures bit-accurate rips of your CDs so disc transport hardware almost becomes obsolete.

Next up: The Archive

The Archive is a cataloguing solution for your entire records shelf. This one’s not fully cooked yet, but we’re working hard to get it done. At the start, it will be a mobile only app that will run on your iPhone. But having your entire collection in your pocket is our first goal. Once we’ve stabilized there, we plan to move onto iPads and possibly even a desktop app.

Our goal is to allow you to easily catalog all of your physical media, documenting individual releases of every album in your collection. It’ll store vinyl, CD, Blu-ray audio and even digital releases. Plus you can document your physical copies with photos, condition ratings, along with your own personal notes.

Stay tuned and as we have more information, you’ll see it first here.