The My Pod app icon: a white click-wheel iPod on a navy tile, with gold stars and blue music notes above it.

My Pod

Sync music to a classic iPod, on modern macOS. Point it at a folder of music, tick what you want, and it handles the rest — including converting FLAC and anything else the iPod can’t play, so you never have to keep a second, iPod-friendly copy of your library.

macOS 14+ Apple silicon & Intel MIT licensed Built on libgpod

Download for Apple silicon Download for Intel View source on GitHub How to build it

Version 1.9 · 4.7 MB · needs one command after unzipping.
Not sure which? Apple menu › About This Mac — a chip named Apple M1 or later is Apple silicon, anything named Intel is the other one.

The Music tab: a scrollable list of artists with checkboxes, and a side panel showing the selected artist's cover art, sizes on disk and on the iPod, conversion status, and how much of it is already on the device.
Your modern music library
Three iPods on a wooden desk around a coil of white earphones — a red nano, a white classic, and a black one with a red click wheel — each showing a Now Playing screen, the black one with album art.
Your retro music players

What it does

Everything iTunes used to, minus iTunes

Apple dropped iPod support from macOS years ago. My Pod puts a native SwiftUI interface on top of libgpod, so a click-wheel iPod can still be kept in step with a music library on disk.

A sync, start to finish

Nothing is written until you say so

Every sync opens with a plan of exactly what will change. Each phase after that reports its own progress and can be cancelled — cancelling finishes the track in flight and saves what’s already done, so the iPod is never left half-written.

  1. 01

    Review

    What gets added, removed, left alone, and transcoded.

    The sync plan sheet: nothing to add, remove or convert, 3,316 tracks unchanged, and two new playlists to be created, each with its track count.
  2. 02

    Convert

    Only what isn’t already cached, with a running estimate.

    The converting phase, showing 3 of 43 tracks done and roughly eighteen seconds remaining.
  3. 03

    Copy

    Track by track onto the device, naming each as it goes.

    The copying phase, showing 8 of 43 tracks copied and the track currently being written.
  4. 04

    Save

    Writing the iTunesDB and rendering artwork thumbnails.

    The saving phase, writing the iTunes database and rendering artwork thumbnails.
Sync complete: 43 tracks added, 1 removed, 2,839 skipped, and 2,883 now on the iPod.
Done, with a count of what actually changed.

Cover art

A cover for every album, from wherever it lives

Artwork is found per album and written into the iPod’s database as properly rendered thumbnails. Albums missing one are flagged, and Album Art fills the gap three ways: search Apple Music and the Cover Art Archive, drop in a file of your own, or lift the picture back out of the audio files. Whatever you pick is squared — crop or fit, your choice — and saved as cover.jpg beside the music, where everything else can see it too. Nothing is sent until you press Search, and only the words in the two boxes go.

The Album Art sheet over the Music tab, searching by artist and album for Norm by Andy Shauf, with one result found on Apple Music at 1200 by 1200 pixels, and File and In the Files tabs alongside Search.
Search, a file of your own, or whatever is already inside the audio.

Playlists

Ordinary files, not a database

Playlists are plain .m3u files in a folder you control, so anything can read them and they outlive the app. Build them in Finder, a text editor, or any app that writes .m3u. Check one in My Pod and it syncs as a real iPod playlist — along with the tracks it references, so you never have to go and tick those separately.

The Playlists tab: three .m3u playlists with checkboxes and track counts, two of them marked with a dot as not yet on the iPod.

The device

What’s actually plugged in

Model, generation, capacity, and where it’s mounted. On an iPod whose original drive has been swapped for a CF card or SSD, the installed capacity and the model’s stock size are both shown, because they disagree. The rest of the tab is this iPod’s own: which folders it draws from, whether it mirrors the library or is managed by hand, and the quality ceiling everything is converted down to.

The General tab, listing the iPod's model and generation, an installed capacity of 256 GB alongside a 20 GB stock capacity, track and playlist counts, its mount point, the library folders, whether it mirrors the library or is managed by hand, and its Apple Lossless quality ceiling, with a storage bar along the bottom.

Getting it running

Download it, or build it yourself

The download is self-contained — everything it needs is inside the bundle, so Homebrew isn’t required to run it. Building from source needs Homebrew for glib, but still fetches nothing else: libgpod is vendored in the repository and compiled locally.

Download

Unzip it, drag My Pod.app to Applications, then clear the quarantine flag once. The build is signed ad-hoc rather than with an Apple Developer ID, so without this macOS refuses to open it and claims it’s damaged — it isn’t.

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine \ "/Applications/My Pod.app"

Or open it the first time through System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway. Building from source avoids the whole business. Every version lives on the releases page.

Build from source

  • macOS14 or later
  • Xcode26 or later
  • Homebrewfor glib and pkg-config
# dependencies brew install glib pkg-config # first build only — generates libgpod's # configure script brew install autoconf automake libtool \ gtk-doc intltool # build and launch git clone https://github.com/studio-rischio/My-Pod.git cd My-Pod ./build.sh

If the iPod doesn’t show up, put it in disk mode

My Pod finds the iPod the moment macOS mounts it as a disk, so a click-wheel iPod has to be in disk mode to be seen at all. That used to be the Enable disk use checkbox in iTunes — and since modern macOS dropped iPod support, forcing disk mode by hand is what replaces it.

  1. If the iPod has a Hold switch, slide it on, then back off.
  2. Hold Menu and the centre button together until the Apple logo appears — roughly 6 to 10 seconds.
  3. The moment the logo shows, hold the centre button and Play/Pause until the screen reads Disk Mode or OK to disconnect.

It stays in disk mode until it’s reset again, so you can sync as normal from there. Eject it in My Pod before unplugging, then hold Menu and the centre button once more to boot it back to the music menu. Plenty of iPods mount on their own, having had disk use switched on by whatever last synced them — if yours already appears, skip all of this.