Single-tenant
clickwheel runs on your machine and works with your library and iPod in place. There’s no cloud service holding your data. The catalog is built from your local files; the iPod is a USB-mounted volume the tool writes directly. This is why “multi-user clickwheel” isn’t a thing a hosted service could provide: each person’s library and iPod are physically bound to their own Mac. Even the remote/mobile MCP access keeps the Mac as the source of truth and simply exposes the existing local server through a tunnel.Read-only library
Indexing (scan) only reads tags and writes to SQLite. The one command that
touches your files is fix, and it edits tags, art, and
genres in place, never moving or renaming them (other tools like Plex read
the same library and rely on stable paths).
FLAC is skipped
Stock classic-iPod firmware doesn’t play FLAC, so clickwheel skips FLAC when loading the device rather than silently transcoding. Your library keeps its FLACs; they just don’t go on the iPod.No auto-scan over MCP
The MCP server never auto-scans: chat tool calls always serve cached catalog data, so a conversation never blocks on a multi-minute library walk. You refresh by runningclickwheel scan when you’ve added music. (The interactive CLI
commands do auto-scan, via a cheap probe plus a fallback timer.)