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Show HN: Minimal native MP3 player for Mac

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Re: Show HN: Minimal native MP3 player for Mac

#52
post #50
post #40

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!

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.

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

Re: Show HN: Minimal native MP3 player for Mac

#53
post #4

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

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

Re: Show HN: Minimal native MP3 player for Mac

#55
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: Show HN: Minimal native MP3 player for Mac

#56
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://www.googleplaymusicdesktopplayer.com

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!

Re: Show HN: Minimal native MP3 player for Mac

#58

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".

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

Re: Show HN: Minimal native MP3 player for Mac

#59
post #58

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".

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

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.

Re: Show HN: Minimal native MP3 player for Mac

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decoding an MP3 and then encoding the data to OPUS of course incurs generational loss and will sound worse than the original MP3. You should encode from the original or losslessly compressed data.

I have lost (left behind moving) all my CDs a decade ago already and I didn't have enough HDDs to use FLAC back in the days. Now I recode my 320 kbits MP3s to 128 kbits OPUS and can't tell the difference (although I am one of those rare people who can distinguish between high (128+ kbits) MP3 bitrates).

You can distinguish them because you know what the artifacts sound like.

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.

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