Show HN: Minimal native MP3 player for Mac
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You know, iTunes wasn’t so bad before they convoluted the UI/UX to shit...looking at the music app on iOS 5-6 vs iOS 10-11 is like comparing a walkway to a labyrinth.
The amount of steps taken backwards in Apple’s UI / UX is staggering. Even the simple replacement of the Spotlight bar from an unobtrusive widget in the top right corner to a giant box in the middle of the screen, directly covering your content.
Especially on iOS where once I had a friend complain that they cannot see the time that a message was sent or received. I had to show them to hold and swipe so they can see the hidden column of times.
I guess they don’t want to clutter up at the interface with things like labels and options.
But sometimes a quick look at the manual is all that's needed,
> Tip: To see what time a message was sent or received, drag a bubble to the left.
I'd rather every app just have a hamburger menu with a menagerie of settings so that those settings can exist even if they're too hard to design for. Instead designers write blog posts that shame everyone for making those menus in the first place.
Hidden gestures is the worst UX of all. For the same reason Siri will never replace a CLI -- completely probabilistic, unknown interface.
I believe it's smarter knowing how to find things and where. That's what I'm trying to show. That it is documented and where. Maybe someone could benefit from the link.
I don't have any pull with Apple to get them to change. I can just read the manual and figure out how things work.
The problem is, it takes away from power usage, and now that's a lot of users alienated. Another example is the three button mouse. Steve didn't want any buttons at all, remember, but settled on one. So we have command-x/c/v instead of left click select and middle click paste like in X windows.
HN hates election apps :-/
Just because something runs under my id, doesn't mean I want it to read everything I have in $HOME without me knowing about it, and possibly sharing it with the world.
On my systems, every sandbox option I can enable is turned on.
Here's one in Swift.
It has become the definition of feature creep, as it evolved from being a music manager/player for iPod to being the full "everything iPhone" manager, including backups and system updates.
(original author) https://cogx.org/screenshots.php
I really like it, it is still my goto player after 8 years.
Of course it doesn't hurt to have more than one option... but Cog seems slightly nicer of the two at the moment.
First, I went with VLC. It's quite capable.
It turns out there's a native Mac app called 'afplay' and it'll do the trick as well. "afplay foo.mp3" and it'll play that MP3. No frills, no controls. Just plays the file.
I would cd to a directory with the songs I wanted to play, and use a for loop to play them all.
I just pulled all of my content out of iTunes on my laptop about a week ago, but still have it on my iPhone and iPad. Every little move away from iTunes makes me happy.
afplay on Mac and mpg123/mplayer/aplay on Linux can provide a decent start with your own controller driving it.
Gapless playback is high on my personal wishlist as well.
Same goes for additional audio formats. I was actually surprised that the latest macOS had built-in support for FLAC but there are a few others I'd like to add.
Both of these features will require a more custom audio solution, which may take some time to figure out... but it's on the roadmap!
I have been using Cog or Gog or whatever but recently gave up. This thing is exactly what I needed. Not that iTunes shit that tries to move my files around or that electron shit that gobbles 1GB of my memory for just the nice transitions.
But this fork seems really good, too. Thanks, let me use both and see what I like more.
In case you don’t, please support gapless playback. It’s an obvious feature for concerts and live performances, and a lot of software (e.g. whatever Ubuntu uses) doesn’t handle it at all.
The website claims that it's more efficient than running Google Music in a Chrome tab, but I'm pretty dubious; it's running an entire browser runtime!
After I switched from Windows to Mac about one year ago, I couldn't believe I had to abandone foobar2000 and IrfanView. After some try-outs I got a bit comfortable with iTunes to play my local music, esp. different display modes (song list, album overview) of what's currently played is well done.
Your player is a nice little program, I'm gonna keep it on my mac!
My wish list: 1) Browsing by album, with or without covers. 2) Playing a song should queue the rest of the album starting from that song. 3) I'd like to be able to "discover" music I don't listen often to. Like reverse sorting by last play date. To many time I "re-discover" that I have music from artist X. 4) When I press the play media key on my keyboard (and the player wasn't paused), it should start playing something I like/play often. 5) Of course 3 & 4 should be automatic without creating any playlist.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/fraktus/39848081275/
For me, I like to see the spectrum when I listen to music because it gives a good idea of how well the spatialization has been recorded.
Also, thanks to FFmpeg I can display all encoding details right away...
One suggestion though: currently it shows "FLAC" in status bar when I play a FLAC file. But what I really want to see is something like "FLAC 24 bit 96 kHz".
So here comes the problem: audio mixer is usually set to highest audio rate your DAC supports. But for better experience it is recommended to set it to native rate of the source material.
That's why it is very beneficial to know what audio format you are currently listening to. You can then go and adjust the pipeline to match that format.
A mismatch between source and DAC sampling rates leads to an undesirable aliasing. This is the very same effect when you try to watch, say, 1920x1080 desktop screen on 2540x1280 LCD monitor. Audio is considerably more forgiving to such a mismatch comparing to video, but still this is a noticeable and undesirable effect, especially when you have a high-end audio pipeline.
I haven't used it though, I've settled for MusicBrainz Picard for now.
What about OPUS?
The player looks really cool but OPUS (together with FLAC) is the audio format of today, not MP3 (in fact it is plain ancient and the worst option available today, worse than WMA, worse than Vorbis, worse than AAC, worse than OPUS).
As for me I've recoded hundreds of gigabytes of MP3s to OPUS already to save huge lots of space (which is very precious on a 128 GiB MacBook SSD as well as on mobiles) without loosing quality.
Did you know a 32 kbps OPUS podcast/audiobook sounds exactly the same as a 192 kbps MP3? The ratio is not this mind-blowing yet still very impressive for music files too: 128 kbits OPUS music file soudns like 256-320 kbps MP3.
Please add OPUS support and I will start recommending your player to everybody.
Yes, you did lose quality, Opus is a lossy format so whatever your source material is, you will lose some quality.
How important or noticeable that is will depend on the opus bitrate, your hearing and your personal preferences are. But just putting this as a warning for anyone reading.
This is incorrect. Lossy-to-lossy transcodes always incur a quality loss. It is known
It would make sense to speak about quality loss if it was about FLAC originals but not if the originals are already MP3. You can't save what is not there.
To go and convert all these files without saving the best original you have is kind of silly, given that storage is extremely cheap today. But suit yourself.