Man I would kill for an ultra-simple, ultra-lightweight, robust music player for macOS that was just like Winamp 2.81, the last good version. No, not foobar.
Personally, I prefer the second definition, but it's the harder of the two to satisfy. I don't really understand why the approach Perian undertook was abandoned when Perian itself was. It'd be very nice to just have macOS "natively" support every media format+codec under the sun, and then just play media files in Quicktime or iTunes or any other player GUI you prefer.
It should not try to categorize my music library by genre/artist/album/whatever. It should not try to "visualize" the audio with crappy abstract art that look like a screensaver. It should not connect to a remote service to download metadata about a song. It need not even support ID3 tags. No, I don't need yet another equalizer. Playlist support would be nice, but not terribly important. Just pipe the damn song to the speaker, period.
I'm pretty sure that if you do this and nothing more, you will end up with a small binary with minimal dependencies that starts playing before you can even lift your finger off the button. Modern music players spend most of their CPU cycles doing something completely unrelated to parsing the actual audio file.
The level of 'it just works' for those 2 products is just not comparable to anything else. Plus they are cross platform, works on pretty much anything in existence.
That is the reason I tollerate UI and use them every day. Also, while it lacks audio management, SMPlayer is the best video player, period.
One example of many [1]:
Type CMD-E (on Mac, or whatever the equivalent is on Windows) to get the video effects window.
Select "Geometry". Now check "Magnification/Zoom".
Notice how you get a picture-in-picture in the upper left corner, with a white rectangle showing the zoomed area, that you can move around by clicking. But if you press and hold, it also drags the entire windows (on a Mac -- I haven't tried on Windows -- VLC's UI and behavior on Mac and Windows diverges widely so I won't try to predict what happens).
Now look underneath the picture-in-picture and notices some ugly upper case pixelated text that says "VLC ZOOM HIDE". See how it's jaggy and rendered at the resolution of the movie you're playing itself, not at screen in a full resolution overlay with readable text?
Now look at the triangle with a jaggy curved hypotenuse below the jaggy words. That is the zoom "slider" (which also drags the window when you drag the mouse, so it's more like a clicker than a slider). See how it gets narrower and narrower in a succession of jaggy stair-step chunks, until it's merely one jaggy pixel wide? Well guess what: the TARGET AREA also gets narrow to match the width of the slider, so it's almost impossible to click on the bottom of the slider, to select the larger zoom sizes! Since the zoom slider is not very tall and its pixels fat and jaggy, you don't have fine grained access to very many zoom sizes at all, either. The zoom pixel steps are much bigger than screen pixels, depending on the video resolution!
What possible purpose could that serve? Why would any user guess that the lower narrow part of the slider represents a wider zoom showing a bigger rectangle over the picture-in-picture, while the top wider part of the slider represents a tighter zoom showing a smaller rectangle over the picture-in-picture? And what slider have you ever used that gets narrower from top to bottom, with a jaggy curve, and an impossibly narrow hard to click target area at the bottom?
This single facet of VLC's terrible UI deserves to be front and center in the User Interface Hall of Shame [2] -- it's even worse than Apple's infamous schizophrenically skeuomorphic QuickTime 4.0 player [3], from 1999! The latest version of VLC in 2017 is still much worse than the shameful QuickTime player was 18 years ago!
Who could have possibly gone so far out of their way to design and implement such a terrible user interface on purpose, then smugly brushed off and ignored 16 years of bug reports and cries for help on the VLC message boards, without harboring a malicious contempt for their users?
That's not even the worst of it. Now check "Transform" and pick one of the transforms like "Rotate by 90 degrees". Guess what? The magnification interface itself is rotated 90 degrees, because it's drawn on the video before it's rotated, so now it appears at the top right of the screen, rotated 90 degrees itself.
And guess what else? The mouse clicks are not even transformed properly, so clicking on the magnification interfaces does NOTHING, rendering it completely useless! Depending on the aspect ratio of the video, you can't even click in the upper left corner where it USED to be and SHOULD still be to operate it, because it is clipped off the right edge of the window.
Are those ugly cosmetic and impossible usability problems not bad enough for you? Then make a playlist with one item. Select "Repeat" mode. Play the movie. Now go to the finder and remove, rename or move the movie you're playing, or just unplug the USB stick containing the video. Not an uncommon occurrence, right? Now VLC will hang up, consuming 100% of the CPU time, often times seizing up the entire Mac, turning on the fan, locking out all user input, and forcing you to reboot! This happens to me all the time.
These bugs have been around for years. The more you fiddle around with it, testing out the edge cases and trying to combine various poorly designed and implemented features, the more bugs you find.
File a bug report, they say. People report these problems again and again. The developers just ignore them and brush them off. I've tried reporting these and other bugs, describing them in meticulous detail, which is frustrating because once I start writing step-by-step instructions to reproduce one problem, I keep finding more and more problems, each worse than the last, and then they just brush me off and ignore my bug reports too.
VLC's user interface is maliciously terrible in so many ways, the developers are careless and arrogant towards their users, and there's no hope of the developers ever changing their ways, acknowledging the problems, and improving it. Instead of improving usability for everyone, they're more interested in adding yet another obscure anime decoder feature so they can watch their AMV cartoon porn [4] [5].
[1] http://imgur.com/gallery/g0acV
[2] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php
[3] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
[4] https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/2.1.5.html
FOR ANIME FANS
New 6.1 downmixer to 5.1 and Stereo from MKV/Flac 6.1. Correct YUV->RGB color matrix in the OpenGL shaders. Improved MKV support for seeking, and resiliancy. Editions support in MKV. Better subtitles and metadata support from MKV. Various ASS subtitles improvements.
[5] https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=208770
Now, if you are an AMV (Anime Music Video) creator and want to edit the video directly, the MKV is your best friend since it's a lossless video-content container due to the fact that you will find yourself adding effects to the video frames/audio. In this case you will want to lose as little as possible in your video, so MKV compression best suits.
TOPIC ANSWER: The reason why MKV is popular for anime is because of it's noted lossless compression. Anime show creators most likely notice this fact and use it to contain their video frames and audio tracks for maximum quality. - it has nothing to do with HD.
Mind you, FOSS is contributed to by people scratching their own itch. It's not so much that VLC has a lot of otaku developers; it's that a lot of people who watch (or subtitle) "AMV cartoon porn" see a problem with, or missing feature in, VLC, and think "I'm a programmer; I can fix that", and dash off one-off patches.
Perian's approach was to implement additional codec/container support as a QuickTime component. QuickTime has been deprecated for several years, and AVFoundation doesn't provide any component or plugin interface for 3rd parties to add codecs.
i think the kids these days just stream everything...
its not on github yet but if anyone is interested in helping out shoot me a line! (stack is js/web audio/electron) -- perhaps not super "lightweight", but its not bad, and its what i know ;$
These days I'm using Clementine though...
While development has slowed to a couple of commits a year, it's a lovely, lightweight, open source MP3 player that has much of the simplicity that I miss from Winamp. Drag files in to the main playlist window, reorder them, click on them, easy.
Not to mention stuff like VOX Agent, and their system preferences panel - why do I want or need either of those things taking up space and resources on my machine? Why is my MP3 player connecting to the internet at all?
Why do so many developers insist on bloating up their software with so much crud that it becomes necessary to use much older versions? Hell, Nullsoft itself was guilty of that exact issue once AOL squeezed out the massive turd that was Winamp 5 - the last sane version was 2.81.