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.
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.
Exactly, the problem is that they kept fixing things that weren't broken and making random illogical UI changes until the program got so over-engineered and bloated that it was a chore to use. The program worked fine, but I guess the team of engineers wanted to keep their jobs so they kept including these unnecessary "fixes".
Speaking of terrible UX, I'm not sure what ITunes hopes to achieve by repeatedly asking me to log in while just playing some music. If I'm not using any feature that requires login, and I have literally clicked "cancel" 5 times at the login prompt since starting up iTunes a few days ago, it's just silly to keep asking me to log in.
I wanted to solve this very problem, and use !iTunes to play audio files on the Mac.
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.
Yay for anything != iTunes. I've been contemplating the iTunes dilemma for quite a while and decided that I needed to start moving off iTunes and not be locked onto a specific platform. My approach so far is to store my audio files in cloud-based object storage system, including a SQLite file as my catalog. When I start one of my players, it pulls the latest copy of my catalog and then starts random play. My latest player is Raspberry Pi with HiFiBerry DAC+ that outputs to my home stereo.
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.
Thank you for mentioning the HifiBerry DAC+ which I didnt't know. Looks very interesting. They call the pro version "audiophile" which is hard to believe at $39. How well does it perform in your experience?
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!
Geez, why didn't I know about this earlier? It's a life saving tool.
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.
Tiny Player looks really cool. I really enjoy seeing genuine native macOS software. I feel like it’s becoming a lost art. Is the source code available anywhere?
fwiw, https://github.com/sbooth/SFBAudioEngine is a great library for supporting other formats, helps with gapless, and is reasonably easy to drop in. I've dropped it into an audio player I created with virtually no hassle.
Any chance of adding direct upload over a lightning cable instead of over WiFi? WiFi’s not working for me, though the same http server over WiFi function works fine to load music to VLC iOS. I even tried the Tiny Loader app on macOS but still times out. Thanks!
If you've already got VLC, which is open source, it can work and look similarly, just drag on some MP3 files and it turns them into a "playlist" and plays. Example: https://i.imgur.com/YoiWeDz.png .. bonus is it'll also play stuff like .mod, .xm and other old tracker formats.
Without going off topic and kudos to the developer...however i was thinking exactly the same! I use VLC everywhere because its open source and awesome. I really believed in the project since early on, in fact if you have been using it for 10years or so, like i have, consider donating! Honestly they deserve it!
Nice. Looking at this takes me back to 2000s, and leaves me thinking we’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. Software should be simple - and that means that it should do one thing and do it well, not be stunted for “aesthetic” or other reasons...
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.
I've taken to using the OS X client for Google Music, where I've backed up all my mp3s, but this looks great for when I eventually leave that ecosystem (I still use Winamp on Windows). The simpler the better as far as I'm concerned. Although the ability to search the playlist and queue items would be nice.
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!
I love the "not iTunes" argument, but the thing I miss from nearly all those nice little players is library management. I have a lot of music I like to browse.
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.
Good stuff. For me, Winamp always was "just right." I'm one of the old school weirdos, I guess, that doesn't need endless recommendations from Spotify and Pandora, and just enjoy my enormous (yet growing) mp3/flac collection.
I mostly use Spotify and stream music rather than collect mp3 files, but I still have a couple hundred or so songs that Spotify doesn’t have. Spotify lets you load local files and add them to playlists alongside songs you stream, and I’ve generally been pretty pleased. It certainly beats iTunes, and it’s nice having everything all in one place.
Impressive. The job well done. Since today, Tiny Player will be my player of choice on Mac.
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".
[+] [-] lostgame|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AceJohnny2|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lbotos|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briga|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KMag|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] starsinspace|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lachenmayer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shyn3|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b_f|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ysleepy|8 years ago|reply
https://github.com/kode54/Cog
(original author) https://cogx.org/screenshots.php
I really like it, it is still my goto player after 8 years.
[+] [-] swombat|8 years ago|reply
Of course it doesn't hurt to have more than one option... but Cog seems slightly nicer of the two at the moment.
[+] [-] akulbe|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] neverartful|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tmalsburg2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomovo|8 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] jimmies|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _sdegutis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notjosh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] owly|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petercooper|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orliesaurus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andreiw|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] roryisok|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devindotcom|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pspeter3|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _diyu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomovo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subpar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azinman2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tigerwash|8 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] kuon|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] khazhoux|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LUVLC|8 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html
[+] [-] FraKtus|8 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] tomovo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] z1mm32m4n|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yitchelle|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garganzol|8 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] mynewtb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leemailll|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nklas|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] consto|8 years ago|reply