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.Source files stay put
Indexing (scan) only reads tags and writes to SQLite. fix
edits tags, art, and genres in place. convert
leaves each FLAC source unchanged and writes a separate MP3 copy outside the
music library. Neither command moves or renames source files, so other tools
like Plex can continue to rely on stable paths.
FLAC conversion is explicit
Stock classic-iPod firmware doesn’t play FLAC, so the sync path skips it rather than silently transcoding. Runclickwheel convert when
you want an iPod-playable MP3 copy. The copy is indexed and joins the normal
selection and sync workflow while your FLAC stays untouched.
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.)