I told you the app is free, and that’s true in a strictly monetary sense. But to use it, you’ll need to invest something more valuable: your time.
muwav is built on one premise — curation. You, actually deciding which tracks you love, actually rating them, actually placing them in your waves. That work is the whole engine. Skip it, and nothing bad happens: no nag screens, no locked features. The app just quietly doesn’t work, because there’s nothing in it yet that means anything to you. The price wasn’t paid.
Here’s roughly what the investment looks like:
- Get your files in order before they come in. Titles, artists, artwork — right at the door, once, and muwav never touches your files again.
- Set up your waves. Name the moments of your life where you can listen to music: work, the commute, winding down.
- Rate and categorize as you listen. The mini player is small and can sit in a corner of your Mac; a track plays while you work, you give it a rating and set the waves. Then you move on. Seconds a day.
- Let the library tell you what’s left. Every unrated track, every wave-less track, is just a todo item you haven’t gotten to yet. muwav can show you exactly what remains.
That’s it. Not hard — just honest work, spread over listening you were going to do anyway. I bet you’d be surprised how fast a library takes shape when rating a track costs two seconds and happens where the music already is.
Why the Mac App Is Free
Because I don’t want you trying to buy anything until you’re hooked. Until muwav is so essential that thirty dollars looks like a bargain. Until the old Windows laptop loses its spot on the desk, because there’s only room for one machine and muwav doesn’t run on Windows. Until you trade your Android for an iPhone, just so your waves can leave the house with you. Until you open a new vault in your bank to save for more iCloud storage and the bigger iPhone, to make room for your tracks. Until you catch yourself dreading the day it might not be available.
That’s the user I’m building for. So the Mac app — the whole thing, every feature — is free. Do the work, fall in love, and the day your library needs to leave the house with you, the iOS app will be right there.
That user would probably pay a subscription (I know I would). But I’m not going to charge one — there’s no server farm behind muwav, no infrastructure to feed except this website. Your library lives on your devices and syncs through your iCloud. One-time price, because that’s what it actually costs.