
Show HN: Minimal native MP3 player for Mac - tomovo
http://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player-for-mac/
======
lostgame
Features: • not iTunes

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.

~~~
lachenmayer
Some really nice folks are trying to figure out the whole "not iTunes" issue -
it's called hyperamp:
[https://github.com/hypermodules/hyperamp](https://github.com/hypermodules/hyperamp)

~~~
jitl
> electron

HN hates election apps :-/

~~~
pjmlp
Electron apps should stay in the browser as the Web apps they are.

~~~
roryisok
And if the browser provided unrestricted file access they probably would. But
we'd all be in trouble

~~~
pjmlp
All apps, even native ones should be forbidden to have unrestricted file
access.

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.

~~~
roryisok
My point was the browser has no file access. Most electron apps work with the
filesystem in some way, and in the browser it's not possible to, for instance,
give a web app access to a folder on the desktop

~~~
pjmlp
HTML 5 File API is a thing.

~~~
roryisok
Groovy

------
ysleepy
Cog is a similarly simple open source player for macOS which also supports
Opus and has a folder pane.

[https://github.com/kode54/Cog](https://github.com/kode54/Cog)

(original author)
[https://cogx.org/screenshots.php](https://cogx.org/screenshots.php)

I really like it, it is still my goto player after 8 years.

~~~
swombat
Yeah, I'm not sure what this one has over Cog, which is mature and well
supported.

Of course it doesn't hurt to have more than one option... but Cog seems
slightly nicer of the two at the moment.

------
akulbe
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.

------
neverartful
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.

~~~
tmalsburg2
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?

~~~
neverartful
Mine is not the pro version, although I was tempted to get it. Mine is just
the DAC+. So far I'm extremely happy with it. It's super easy to attach to Pi
(no soldering). I had to make 2 simple edits to /boot/config.txt and it works.
Sound is very good and I play mostly MP3 and some FLAC.

------
tomovo
Author here, thanks for all the responses.

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
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.

~~~
unicornporn
Why did you give up? I'm a Cog[1] user and I fail to see why this would be any
better than Cog. It looks worse.

[1] [https://github.com/kode54/Cog](https://github.com/kode54/Cog)

~~~
jimmies
Is this the new fork? I thought it doesn't get updated and I think last time
it crashed on me or did something weird, so I stopped caring about it.

But this fork seems really good, too. Thanks, let me use both and see what I
like more.

------
petercooper
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](https://i.imgur.com/YoiWeDz.png) .. bonus is
it'll also play stuff like .mod, .xm and other old tracker formats.

~~~
orliesaurus
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!

~~~
petercooper
Good idea - I just sent some Bitcoin. To be fair, I don't think it _is_ off
topic as I've often learnt about alternatives in threads here. It'd be weird
if it were frowned upon, so I'll happily take the downvotes as the price for
sharing :-D

~~~
orliesaurus
I wasn't implying you were offtopic but rather my comment reply to yours might
have been perceived as off topic reply :)

------
andreiw
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.

~~~
roryisok
+1 for both the simplicity and the gapless playback. I wish software was more
lightweight

------
devindotcom
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.

~~~
pspeter3
Can you link to that client? I didn't know it existed

~~~
_bxg1
[https://www.googleplaymusicdesktopplayer.com](https://www.googleplaymusicdesktopplayer.com)

~~~
jamesgeck0
This is an electron wrapper around the website.

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!

------
_diyu
Hey this reminds me of Bahamut which I made for similar reasons:
[https://github.com/sdegutis/Bahamut/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/sdegutis/Bahamut/blob/master/README.md)

~~~
tomovo
Bahamut looks really nice!

------
subpar
I've been using Swinsian for this. Plays nice with a networked music library
and has excellent tag editing. [https://swinsian.com/](https://swinsian.com/)

~~~
azinman2
Looks nice.

------
tigerwash
Awesome! I really like the minimal interface.

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
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.

------
khazhoux
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.

------
LUVLC
How is this better and / or different from VLC [0]?

[0]
[https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html](https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html)

------
FraKtus
I so much need a music player that fits my needs on macOS that I hacked my own
on top of FFPlay from FFmpeg.

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/fraktus/39848081275/](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
FFmpeg is a great project. Interesting how it interprets the embedded artwork
as 'mjpeg' in your pic.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Well, an MJPEG is literally a stream of JPEGs.

------
z1mm32m4n
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.

------
yitchelle
I mostly use afplay to play mp3 from the command line. It is quick and fast.
Only playlist management is missing.

------
garganzol
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".

~~~
mynewtb
If you can hear the difference then why do you need a display of that?

~~~
garganzol
Huh? Mac OS has an audio mixer that works in a fixed predefined format unless
the audio device is open in exclusive mode.

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.

------
leemailll
BTW, anyone has suggestions for a non-iTunes, non-Vox music player supporting
Applescript?

~~~
nklas
Swinsian[.com] supports "Applescript control" according to their features
list.

------
consto
For something named Tiny Player, it wastes a surprising amount of screen real
estate.

------
tombert
Did you write the decoder yourself, or do you feed it into FFMPeg or something
similar?

~~~
ken
It says "for FLAC support you need macOS 10.13", so it almost certainly uses
the system libraries.

~~~
tomovo
That's correct. I might switch to a 3rd party decoder later.

------
haywirez
Great start! Would need something to easily mass edit ID3 tags and also rename
files based on tags - any good solutions? Surprisingly, I couldn't find a
suitable CLI tool so far either.

~~~
nuxi
There's the "id3" mass tagger utility which supposedly can do that:
[https://squell.github.io/id3/](https://squell.github.io/id3/)

I haven't used it though, I've settled for MusicBrainz Picard for now.

------
spython
They also have the Tiny Player for iOS, which completely bypasses iTunes.

------
carbolite103
This is very nice! I've been using cmus as of late as I can keep it open in a
terminal tab while I'm working, but I will certainly try this out.

------
Crontab
I like minimal players for music. On Linux/BSD, I like mpg123 or mpc. On
Windows, I am a big fan of Foobar2000.

------
mrzool
Very nice! I know this is intended to stay small and minimal, but I’d love to
see at least some rudimental artwork support.

~~~
tomovo
cmd-i to open an extra window with artwork and meta info? I'm working on that.
Still haven't figured out if it should show the info for currently played
track (and switch when next track starts) or the one that's selected in the
playlist. Or some special "smart" combination of the two... what would you
expect to happen?

------
roryisok
I've been looking for something like this for months, ever since I switched
from Windows for work. I miss foobar2000

~~~
sir_brickalot
The developers of Foobar2000 released a Mac app recently [1], not under active
development and with very limited functionality but I hope for more.

[1] [https://www.foobar2000.org/mac](https://www.foobar2000.org/mac)

~~~
seltzered_
FWIW, there was also enqueue app
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/enqueue/id493119959?mt=12](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/enqueue/id493119959?mt=12)
(not maintained since 2012, but still there) which was inspired by foobar2000

------
neelkadia
Simple. Minimal. Functional.

------
5_minutes
Beautiful. Good work man.

------
qwerty456127
> Plays MP3s (also FLAC, AAC, AIFF and WAV)

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.

~~~
mixedCase
>without loosing quality

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.

~~~
qwerty456127
This is obvious. Whoever collects MP3 files already knows what a lossy
compression format means. I don't mean recoding FLAC to OPUS can save space
without loosing quality, I mean recoding MP3 to OPUS can save space producing
a file of the same quality as the MP3 original is. Obviously it will have less
quality than a FLAC/CDDA original but not less than MP3 (unless you actually
set the bitrate too low). E.g. I am sure converting a 256 kbits MP3 to a 192
kbits OPUS means no loss anybody can hear and converting it to 128 kbits OPUS
may only mean tiny loss almost nobody can hear. Speaking about lossy format
implies there is always a loss from the mathematical point of view, no loss
means no perceivable loss in this context.

~~~
drngdds
>Obviously it will have less quality than a FLAC/CDDA original but not less
than MP3 (unless you actually set the bitrate too low).

This is incorrect. Lossy-to-lossy transcodes always incur a quality loss. It
is known

~~~
qwerty456127
The same kind of loss as caused by using cheap audio cables instead of golden
cables perhaps... (sarcasm)

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.

~~~
mbreese
Umm ... no, when you recompress music that was already compressed with a lossy
algorithm, you will have lower quality than if you had just stuck with the
original. You can’t save what isn’t there, but that doesn’t mean that you
can’t lose even more!

