Add music later without the wait

Choose your music folder once. When you add an album afterwards, press Rescan: Stellody looks only at what has actually changed, so it finishes in a moment rather than reading everything again.

It tells you what it found

When a scan finishes you get a report rather than a message that vanishes: the new albums by name, how many new tracks came with them, then the totals for your whole collection. Albums that have stopped being found are listed too, since a folder you renamed or moved looks just like one that has gone. A scan that finds nothing new says exactly that.

One folder, one album

Stellody trusts how your music is actually filed. Sorting by the labels inside the files was tried and it fell apart on classical music, splitting a single Mozart recording into five different albums. Your folders know better, so your folders decide.

Box sets come back together

A double album filed as CD1 and CD2, else as Disc 1 and Disc 2, shows up as the one record it really is rather than as two strangers sitting next to each other.

Nothing goes missing quietly

Stellody skips a short, fixed list of folders that operating systems, network drives and version control tools create for themselves. It never guesses that something looks unimportant, because an early version guessed and swallowed two real albums.

FLAC, MP3, Ogg, Opus, WAV, AIFF, M4A, WMA, WavPack and AAC

A collection built over years is rarely all one format, so Stellody reads the common ones and treats them alike: a folder of MP3s becomes an album exactly as a folder of FLACs does, with the same titles, artists, dates and track numbers read out of whatever each file happens to carry.

Cover art stored inside a FLAC, MP3, WAV, AIFF or M4A file is read too, including the cover an M4A keeps in its own Apple atom. What is left, Monkey's Audio and a handful of rarer formats, is named in the health report rather than quietly skipped.

WMA, WavPack and AAC arrive on a weaker footing than the rest and it is worth saying which. Every other format here was tested against files somebody owns; there were none of those three, so each is proved against a file the test suite encodes for the purpose. WMA and AAC are lossy, so neither states a bit depth; WavPack is lossless and keeps the depth it states.

The bonus video comes in too

Albums that shipped a video alongside the songs used to have it left out silently: not a track, not a note in the health report, just absent, so the album quietly held fewer tracks than the disc it came from. Those files now scan as tracks in the albums they belong to and play like any other track, with the controls, the queue and the position bar reaching them exactly as they reach a song.

Two songs claiming to be track 4

The number at the front of the file name wins. Whenever labels have gone wrong, the file names themselves have stayed right.

A disc number that disagrees with the folder

The folder wins. A person named that folder deliberately; the label inside was written by software. One real folder holds songs claiming to be from three different discs.

The same song title twice

The file name wins again. When something rewrites labels in bulk it tends to copy the title across along with the number.

You get the full list

Everything Stellody worked around is written down for you in one place, so you can go and correct it properly in whichever program you like.

Or tell it to keep what it worked out

Accept the whole list in one press or one album at a time; those corrections then stop being reported every time you start. Changed your mind? Take back one group of files, one whole album or the lot, each in a single press; the findings they answered come back. Your files are untouched either way: the decision is kept in Stellody's own records.

Or say what it should have been

Where a label is simply wrong rather than muddled, state it yourself: the album artist, the title, the date and the genre. What you state is what the album is from then on, over both the labels in the files and anything Stellody would work out for itself.

One track can be put right the same way: its title, artist, disc number or track number, even on an album held as one file with a cue sheet. Nothing is written into a music file; it is kept in Stellody's own records like everything else, so it can be taken back at any time.

Joining two folders by hand

Because a stated label is what an album is recognised by, giving one folder the artist and title another already carries makes them one album. That is the way to join a release your collection happens to hold in two places under two spellings. The joined album keeps the rating held against the one it joined.

A list, else a wall of covers

Read your collection as a tidy list, else browse it as album art in three different sizes. Click a cover and the album opens underneath it with its songs in two columns, taking no more room than they need, so you never lose your place. Click it again to close it.

Switching keeps your place

Move between the list and the covers and you land where you were. Whatever is playing is picked out in the view you arrive at, with its album already open, exactly as though you had got there that way in the first place.

Open every album at once

The list shows one row per album, opening to its songs when you press the chevron beside it. One press on the chevron at the left of the Title heading opens all of them; another closes them again. It is instant on a collection of any size.

It narrows as you type

Open the search box, start typing and your collection narrows with every letter. Close it and everything comes back.

Instant, however much music you have

Every song in your collection is searched in a millisecond or two, far faster than you can type. There is nothing to build first and nothing to wait for.

Albums stay whole while you search

Find one song and its album stays as it always looks, with every other track still around it. The song you were after lights up and flashes so your eye goes straight to it.

Twenty-one genres, thirty-six styles under them

Fifty-seven boxes in all, in alphabetical order. An album can carry several at once. The names follow Discogs' spellings where Discogs has them, so they are ones you have seen before and ones a label written by another program has a chance of matching. Electronic is split into Dance, Electronic, House and Techno & Electro, with styles for the names MusicBrainz gives the artists a search suggests. Each genre's styles fold away behind an arrow, so the list fits a laptop screen; every dialog offering it remembers which you left open.

Ticking more shows more

Asking for Rock and Jazz at once gives you both rather than nothing, so every tick widens what is on screen instead of narrowing it to the albums that somehow answer to everything.

A style means that style

Tick Deep House and you get deep house, not every kind of house. Tick House and you get the lot, deep house included, because Stellody already knows which main each style belongs to.

Albums with no genre are reachable

There is a box for them, because more than a tenth of a real collection states no genre at all and no other tick could ever reach those albums. An album labelled something the list does not carry is in the same box, for the same reason.

It works with the search, not against it

A narrowed collection can still be searched and a search can still be narrowed. Neither knows about the other, so the two simply compose.

Five stars for a song

The stars sit in a Rating column on every song's row, beside its play count, in the list and in the album open under the covers alike. You can read a whole record's ratings at a glance and rate something without listening to it first. Press a star to rate the song; press the star it already sits on to clear the rating. With a song highlighted, the number keys 1 to 5 rate it and 0 clears it.

Albums get their own rating

Set from the stars on the album itself, labelled so you cannot mix the two up. Neither is calculated from the other, because one weak track does not make a bad record.

Only a finished song counts

Skipping through an album adds nothing to your counts, so the numbers mean something. Each song carries its own count on its row, so you can read down an album and see what you keep coming back to.

Your ratings survive a tidy-up

Rename or move a folder and your stars and counts follow the album rather than getting lost. Neither is ever written into your music files.

It uses the artwork you already have

Whether the cover sits beside your music as a picture file or is tucked inside the songs themselves, Stellody finds it and remembers it. An album with no artwork gets a plain square rather than an ugly gap.

You choose, it never guesses

For an album with no artwork, ask Stellody to go and look. It shows you every cover it found, each labelled with the edition it came from; you pick. It will never quietly attach the wrong sleeve to your favourite record.

The cover you picked stays picked

Once you have chosen a cover it is yours. Rescanning your collection will not quietly put the old one back.

Busy is not the same as nothing

The public archives Stellody asks are often busy. It tries several times, waiting a little longer each go, then tells you plainly that it could not get an answer rather than pretending your album has no artwork anywhere.