Rodrigo Delduca's Overdrive Mac Player Asks Last.fm What You'd Like, Then Plays Only the Songs You Already Own

Recommendation engines love to suggest songs you don’t have. Overdrive’s throws out any suggestion that is not already on your drive.

The app, by Rodrigo Delduca, whose GitHub bio asks “Do you know where your stack pointer is?”, describes itself as “A music player for the Mac (macOS 26 or later).” It “uses your music folders,” so songs dropped into a folder show up without an import step. It plays AAC, ALAC, MP3, FLAC, Opus, Vorbis, WAV and AIFF, scrolls lyrics along with the song (and looks them up online if none are stored), and has a “Same volume for all songs” option under Controls. Music videos from YouTube play in a small window that stays on top.

The part worth a look is the endless mode. Per the README, “Infinity is the endless mode at the end of the same menu.” Turn it on and the app “starts a list of 20 songs and keeps 20 more queued for as long as you play.” It adds a new batch when the current song passes its halfway point and tacks it onto the end of Up Next, without reordering the list or touching what’s playing. Switch it off, or start another list, and it stops; the songs it already queued stay put.

Where those 20 songs come from is the interesting bit. Infinity needs “the Last.fm key built into the app and your account connected in Settings > Last.fm,” and is dimmed without them. The Last.fm Artists picker takes the artists you listened to most on Last.fm, then draws one song from each artist’s top five that your library actually has. An artist whose top five you own none of is skipped. A second picker, Top Bands, ignores Last.fm’s data and uses your own play counts.

So the service does the remembering and the app does the filtering. Last.fm’s API lists methods for similar artists and similar tracks, and says “Our API is available to anyone,” but Overdrive’s rule on top of it is strict: every discovered song must exist in your library. Matching compares letters and digits only, ignoring case, accents and punctuation, at 80 percent similarity at least. A long suffix such as “(Remastered)” makes a song count as a different one, so a remaster you never imported will not stand in for the original. Discovery reads the whole library rather than whatever the search box is showing.

The app is also honest about running short. Local pickers dim any count bigger than the number of eligible songs, so a request never quietly comes back with fewer tracks than you asked for. Nothing from Last.fm is cached on disk; each request is made fresh.

With a Last.fm account, the lyrics panel gets a Similar tab with up to ten artists related to the one playing, each with a cover, a top track, a genre and a listener count. Clicking one opens its Last.fm page, which is where the shopping starts, if you want it to. Nothing in the app does the buying for you.

Install is a Homebrew cask, brew install --cask skhaz/tap/overdrive, and the page carries an MIT license (not covering the icon). It lists no price. The README does not say how big a library has to be before Infinity stops repeating itself, which is the one number a person with 300 songs would want.

Taken together, Overdrive points at a design where the cloud service supplies taste and the local disk supplies the music. The likely trouble is the tags: tidy libraries will be rewarded, and a collection full of “Track 01” and mismatched artist names will see Infinity skip half its picks, since the matcher only knows what the metadata says.

Your collection, finally getting airplay.