Audiofile Engineering

Fidelia. In your car.

Same engine, same signal path, four presets on the deck for playlists or stations. It's with App Review now.

What's the first record you'd put on?

Favorite shirt is showing some wear - hey Moog Music do you still sell these at the factory store in Asheville?

Five reviews came in last week. Five stars each — and every one from a different country: the UK, the United States, Spain, Egypt, and Austria.

Five rooms, in five countries, with music playing in them on Fidelia.

Here's what shipped this month, for anyone who cares about the hard part.

Every player worth using lets you tell it where your speakers are. Fidelia also asks the record where its channels belong — and says so when the record doesn't answer.

That join is the whole thing. Your rig is fixed; what a file says about itself is not. On the same setup, untouched: a quad recording's rears reach your rear surrounds, and a 5.1 recording's surrounds reach your sides — because the two files declare different things about their own channels, and Fidelia reads the declaration instead of counting to four. Four channels is quad, or 3.1, or LCRS. Guess wrong and you play a 3.1 record's bass out of a surround speaker. And when a file declares nothing at all, Fidelia reports that it declared nothing, rather than printing "LFE" as though it were a fact.

Around that: 5.1, 7.1, 7.1.4, up to 9.1.6 — sixteen channels. An Output Dashboard that draws your speakers where they actually sit, with a live meter on every one, so a miswired channel is obvious the moment music plays instead of three albums later. Calibration by measurement rather than arithmetic — give each speaker the distance you measured and the nearer ones are delayed to match. Two subwoofers can have different distances, because that is the entire reason to own two.

And the plug-in slots run a bus up to sixteen channels wide. We've pushed a twelve-channel convolution filter through it and measured equal output on all twelve. We don't know of another player that will host your Audio Units that wide — if one exists, we'd genuinely like to know about it.

Multichannel was always on the list. What moved it to the top was customers asking for it, most memorably in a public forum thread from someone running a 23-channel FIR filter set who wanted to know whether Fidelia could feed it. It didn't change what we were building. It changed when we shipped it.

From the woods of northern Minnesota, still the same family studio.

Fidelia 2.12 is on the Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id416135376 — one purchase, no subscription.

Apple featured Fidelia in "Best New Apps and Updates" on the Mac App Store this week — right alongside Fantastical and Soulver.

Fifteen years ago, Fidelia sat on a shelf of small-shop Mac audio apps. Most of that shelf is gone now. This year we rebuilt it from the ground up — one engineer, start to finish. Seeing Apple's editors put it back on a shelf like this one is something.

To everyone who's kept listening since 2011: this one's yours too.

Free to try for 14 days, one-time unlock, no subscription — https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fidelia-audiophile-player/id416135376?mt=12

Radio, tuned by hand.

We just released Streamside in Fidelia 2.10.0 — internet radio, done the way we think it deserves: on a proper deck, not a scrolling feed.

Sweep the dial by genre — rock, ambient, classical, folk, electronic, news and talk. Pin your nine favorites as numbered presets, car-radio style, and tune them straight from the keyboard. With Fidelia Remote, those same nine buttons ride along in your pocket.

Nobody's algorithm is guessing what you want next. You pick the station — SomaFM, BBC Radio 1, Naim's lossless FLAC stream, MPR Classical, whatever you like — and Fidelia plays it the way it was meant to sound.

Free to try for 14 days. One-time unlock if you keep it. No subscription.

👉 audiofile.engineering/fidelia

In the midst of an AI-music rush, Fidelia is #12 in Music on the Mac App Store.

That feels good.

Fidelia is built for people who still sit down to listen: albums, lossless libraries, DSD, FLAC, internet radio, a good DAC, and a signal path you can trust.

Now streaming internet radio through the same reference playback engine as your local files.

For listeners who’ve always known the difference.

Happy Independence Day! 🇺🇸

Sort your whole music library by color. Because why not?

Fidelia arranges every album by hue. Your entire collection, one clean wall of cover art.

Like walking into a record store staffed by someone very, very patient.

Found this college-era photo and the BeOS lore came back.

My first real engineering project, as a senior electrical engineering student, was a companion app for a custom Analog Devices DSP-powered audio signal-processing device. We could speak into a microphone, use the app to configure the processing, and hear the result in real time.

I picked BeOS because it seemed more interesting than Windows, and because it was built with media work in mind.

At the time it was just a fun, stubborn engineering choice. Looking back, it was a preview: audio hardware, software craftsmanship, and tools for people doing creative work.

Funny how early trail markers only become obvious later.