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Comment by EC1 | Hacker News Reader

For the love of god, WHAT is a good music player for Mac? Going from Foobar2000 (PC) -> iTunes (MAC) is awful.

J. River Media Center is a fantastic media player for Windows. Recently they have ported it to Mac [2] and an early port is available for Linux. The Mac port was still a little buggy last I tried, but a quick scan of the absolute features identified in the OP blog seem to be covered. I use it on Windows as a Media Center to serve audio/video/pics to all the devices in my home via DLNA.

[1] http://www.jriver.com/ [2] http://www.jriver.com/download.html

iTunes killed all competition for a long time, but a lot of smaller players without all the baggage are popping back up these days.

I haven't tried most of these, but Ecoute is well done.

http://mashable.com/2013/07/31/alternatives-to-itunes/

http://pixiapps.com/ecouteosx/

I just use foobar via Wine.

Some hopefully helpful links:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=7726...

https://github.com/xeoron/foobar2000-mac

What really crosses me about iTunes on OS X is that there seems to be no way to pry the media control keys loose from it, which I found perennially vexatious back when I still had an Apple laptop.

I really like Clementine and since I triple boot (Linux, Mac, Windows) I wanted a player that would work the same regardless of OS.

I agree. Clementine is similar to older versions of Amarok. It's clean and fast, with just the right amount of features.

I didn't realize that it was multi-platform. Anyone on KDE should definitely install it, but apparently it's more widely available than that.

Enqueue is fantastic.

Simple, efficient, plays a wide range of formats (including FLAC, APE), auto-scans music folders, etc.

iTunes is still a serviceable player and works well for standard formats.

Vox is lightweight and can read a ton of file formats, as well as load up your iTunes library. I think you can set it to auto-load a directory at launch as well.

Audivarna is also supposed to be pretty good.

Vox is probably the best alternative I've found, particularly with its support for FLAC (I know I can transcode to ALAC).

I'm relatively happy with Nightingale. Could be better but it works fine for 90% of my needs. http://getnightingale.com/

I used to think Songbird (now Nightingale) was going places. I remember being so excited when Songbird 0.1a came out! Unfortunately things went downhill after a couple of years until POTI killed the project and progress on the community fork has been excruciatingly slow. I want to get involved, but its hard to know where to start.

Nightingale is what I actually ended up using after I failed to convince foobar2000 on the subject of self-signed SSL certs. A little flaky on occasion, sure, but for my relatively simple purposes, it worked nicely.

Alas, I have resorted to using VLC, which really isn't that bad.

It hasn't been updated in over four years, but Cog (http://cogx.org/) is wonderfully simple.

I've used miro - http://getmiro.com.

None. Rdio.

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