One application, nothing else

Spytify records the audio of the application you choose, by its process, and of no other. A notification, a video in a browser or a call never ends up in a recording, and no virtual cable or output device has to be set up.

A file per track, cut at the sample

The cut between two tracks is placed in the audio, at the quietest moment around the track’s expected end. Gapless albums are cut at the track’s length. A pause is cut out at the sample, so it leaves neither a hole nor a click.

Whole tracks only

A file is a whole track or nothing: a track that was skipped, stopped early or moved along its track bar is not kept, and a track already in the folder is skipped (or saved with a number, or overwritten, as you choose). Skip to the next track when already recorded moves the player on by itself. A whole track is kept whatever its length, intros and interludes included.

Changed your mind? The last track cut short shows Keep anyway until the next track is saved: it saves the part that played as “title (partial)”.

Tags and covers

Title, artist, album, album artist, track and disc numbers and the cover come from what the application reports, and go into the file: ID3 for MP3, Vorbis comments for FLAC, MP4 tags for AAC, and a .json beside each WAV.

Formats

FLAC by default, or MP3, AAC and WAV, each track trimmed of its leading and trailing silence and loudness-normalised (both can be turned off). A FLAC or WAV file avoids a second lossy pass but adds no quality: streaming services send compressed audio. The track card shows the stream as it arrives, such as 44.1 kHz stereo.

Ads

Ads and short untitled items are not recorded, and Mute ads silences the application while one plays. On macOS and Linux, Mute the player on this computer keeps the whole session silent while it records.

Library

Every recorded file, newest first, with its cover, a search box, Reveal and Play.

Without a window

spytifyd records on its own: with Minimize to tray on (Settings > App), closing the window keeps Spytify recording in the tray or the menu bar, spytify-cli drives it from a terminal, spytifyd --once records one session without a socket, and spytify-cli service install starts it at login.