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tie app

tie-fm

Two panes. Both worlds.

A twin-panel file manager for your local disks and your tie library, with album import, MusicBrainz matches and tags that behave like files.

Stable LinuxWindowsmacOS GitHub ↗
Install Manual
Highlights

The parts that matter.

Local and tie, side by side
Two panes with tabs, history, bookmarks and a breadcrumb you can type in.
Copy into the library
Choose a dir-type and drop a folder in. Re-imports become versions, not duplicates.
Import as albums
Bulk music import with destination templates, disc placement and MusicBrainz matches.
Tags that filter and edit
Select nothing and tags filter the pane; select rows and the same panel edits them.
Move big things safely
Pause, resume or stop a copy. Conflicts offer skip, rename, overwrite, apply-to-all.
See before you open
A preview grid with an image viewer, video player and archive extraction.
local /home/you/Music
dir The Annealers
dir Ostrander
dir Rook & Rowan
flac 01 - First Frost.flac
jpg cover.jpg
zip artwork.zip
tie tie:/music
audio-dir Slow Cooling 4 tracks
audio-dir Night Ferry 4 tracks
audio-dir The Long Way Home 4 tracks
tags: jazzdemo
48 tracks · 4.2 MiB · deduplicated

A file manager for people with two kinds of files

Panes

Both worlds, side by side.

A twin-panel file manager with tabs per pane, independent history, a breadcrumb you can type into and bookmarks that remember which tie collection they belong to. The left pane can be a local disk; the right pane can be the library; drag between them.

  • Copy into tie as ▸ with the eight built-in dir-types, or one of your own.
  • Pause, resume, stop a copy. Conflicts offer skip, rename, overwrite and apply-to-all.
  • Preview mode turns either pane into a thumbnail grid with an in-pane image viewer and video player.
  • Hand-off: open a tie image in tie-view, or a track in tie-audio, from the row's own menu.
Import

Albums, not folders of tracks.

"Import as albums…" discovers albums from a music root, matches them against MusicBrainz (a local Postgres mirror or the web service), fills missing covers, and places discs with templates like /{albumartist}/{year} - {album}/cd{disc}. The dry run shows you every destination before a byte moves.

  • By directory, by tags, or auto.
  • Use as album cover from any image in the pane.
  • Re-import is a version, not a duplicate: contents are content-addressed.
Tags

The tag panel does both jobs.

With nothing selected, the tag panel filters the pane. With rows selected, the same panel edits their tags. Directories are taggable too, and favourite tags are shared with tie-view and tie-audio.

  • Free-text search in tie panes, ranked, with field selection.
  • Breeze file-type icons in light and dark, with per-extension associations.
  • Devices (Linux): USB drives through udisks2 and MTP phones through libmtp, with a gvfs fallback.
keys
Ctrl+I   filter this page     Ctrl+T  new tab
Ctrl+Tab switch pane          Ctrl+W  close tab
Ctrl+click open in new tab   Esc     leave preview
Shift/Ctrl multi-select       ⌘       the same on macOS

What Delete means

tie-fm is careful about the word “delete”. On a local disk it is the file manager delete you expect. On a tie: row it removes the reference from the tree, keeps the blob (other paths may point at the same content), and the library knows what became unreferenced. The manual has the exact semantics and the roadmap for blob garbage collection.

Where it is

  • Status: stable enough to use every day
  • Versioning: tie-gui is released from the repo; the apps are built from source.
  • Device browsing (USB, MTP phones) is Linux-only.
  • The MusicBrainz mirror is optional; the web service works without it.

Works with

  • tie — Tag it. Find it. Mount it.
  • tie-audio — Your library, on shelves.
  • tie-view — Tag at the speed of sight.
  • imgview — Point it at a folder.
  • tie-browser — Pages made of your library.
  • anneal — The coding agent that anneals.
Keep reading

The manual, the numbers, the source.

tie-fm manual

Panes, tabs, bookmarks, file associations and MusicBrainz.

Album import

Destination templates, disc placement and the album planner.

Delete and versions

What Delete does to a tie row, and where the bytes go.

Try it with your own files.

A single binary, a local library and no account. Keep the originals where they are.

Install Read the docs Source ↗