Call me crazy but iTunes/Music has always been one of the things I like most about macOS, at least after going through the settings and disabling all the features trying to push you into a subscription. I still manage my own ~500 file mp3 collection instead of paying monthly.
I used iTunes for a long time with a library of around 1,000 albums. If you weren’t too lazy to add proper covers and ID3 tags, it was actually pretty enjoyable to use – especially together with an iPod. But the problem is that iTunes imposes a very “flat” structure on your library, while for some collections a hierarchical folder/subfolder/file structure just works much better. Not to mention that you can keep all kinds of related files alongside the music itself – booklet scans, lyrics, interviews, links, PDFs, and so on.
I feel like iTunes/Music gets worse with every version, to the point where I've effectively abandoned it finally after macOS 26.
My music collection is some tens of thousands of files served via a DAAP media server - since macOS 26, Apple Music will only play music for 5-15 minutes before giving up and just stopping.
For years, it's had a trivially reproducible bug where pausing Apple Music while playing from a DAAP server, then restarting the DAAP server will crash Apple Music.
After trying basically every airsonic/subsonic/plex/etc. alternative, I finally settled on simply using foobar2000 to play from an SMB share.
I share the sentiment, even with fond memories of foobar2000/winamp/audacious, I've gone the route of just resorting to a "simpler" setup, just a collection of shell scripts to manage mpv to play my files from my disk/shares/http
I buy mostly music on Bandcamp and iTunes/Music is my sole driver for my 30k local song files. It's unfortunate that it has been neglected over so many years. There is a plethora of well known bugs and the sync with iPhone works most of the times, but not always and is in general quite cumbersome. The UI has become ridiculous over time (for example: it features two search/filter fields). It would be an easy mark to simply fix and polish it a bit. Sad.
iTunes/Music has its merits but in my opinion has been in decline since between versions 6 and 10 depending on the aspects being spoken about. For most of its existence it was subject to constant bloat and always felt a bit "off" compared to other Mac apps due to its nature as a cross-platform Carbon app full of bespoke UI widgets, and though its feature set got pared down and it technically became AppKit-dominant in the transition to "Music", it still doesn't feel right and is out of step with the rest of the OS.
A proper AppKit iTunes-style player with the best parts of iTunes across versions but without the bloat would be a beautiful thing. Even better if it's FOSS so it doesn't get abandoned a few years down the road, as paid players tend to. While there's several apps in this general direction like Doppler[0], nothing really nails it satisfactorily.
It seems like most of the iTunes hate has historically come from people who used iTunes on Windows because they needed to use it to sync their iPods. Apparently it wasn't very good on Windows?
I do agree that it had been getting worse and worse on Mac before it was rebranded "Music" in 2019.
iTunes on Windows was horrible and it was even more horrible when trying to use it for managing Apple devices. Obscure errors, convoluted error mesages, slow... I will never miss it. One of the worst software ever created and I'm glad it's dead. I like Music.app under macOS though as someone who used MusicBee under Windows.
iTunes is still the best I have, mainly because it syncs well with iPhone, but also because it (kind) of just works, and I have a pile of applescripts to beat it when it doesn't.
I still wish it was a bit better at finding lost files, but maybe I'll vibe code something to do that for me someday.
(I'll have an album in the folder it doesn't see anymore, point one song at it, and it can't "find the rest" of the album, but I have to point each one out)
I also hate the idea of streaming, but I have been super lazy in the past
I have listened to 44,000 songs on Spotify over the last 13 years. It has brought me a ton of value, but I would love to move back to owning my music as files. I've been getting fancier with managing self-hosted infra at home, especially using AI to help me out.
Maybe I'll get back there, but I also can't imagine only listening to 500 songs!!!!
ITunes and Aperture were the apps that made me buy my first mac. Music and photos were just handled so easily, unlike anything else that came before. Smooth, intuitive and quick, everything else felt stale or broken.
These days Aperture is long gone and Itunes will let me make playlists where if I own the song, I can't play it cause it's not synced. If I don't own the song, it plays fine.
It's like nobody cares anymore, and back around 2008 that was the killer feature of the Mac - it was the computer and OS where it seemed like someone cared, about every little thing.
I imagine the shittiness of iTunes doesn't really show up as much with a music collection as small as 500 files. I remember it being a slouch with more files. I'm currently at 73,000.
Quasi-normie computer users: Linux will never take off on the desktop. I want to use my computer, not spend all day configuring it.
Also quasi-normie computer users: Windows/Mac is great as long as you go into Settings/the registry/PowerShell and disable all the user-hostile anti-features first.
I actually prefer VLC to foobar2000. However, I still prefer classic Winamp to to all other music players, and I wish I could get Apple Music work in the same interface. I like 100% of the classic Winamp player UI/UX.
- I like the separate player, playlist, EQ windows.
- I like that I can re-arrange the windows, and resize the playlist separately.
- I like that the main player has a little EQ built in.
- I like the layout of the main window. It's perfect.
- I like the layout of the playlist window, it's also perfect. I can add "directories", "albums", etc. and again, I can resize the window.
- I like the skins. I like the classic skin, but I also love the Sonicated skin. I still have it on my Windows laptop.
- Conversely, I really dislike the "native" UI elements.
- I like that lack of rounded corners on the classic Winamp windows, such that when windows stick together, they appear as whole, and I can drag them around as one.
Mostly, it's a bunch of seemingly small and aesthetic things, but if a player doesn't have those things, I might as well just use iTunes.
For me personally, the main reason to use foobar2000 back then was FLAC support, which Winamp didn’t have at the time. Out of nostalgia, I downloaded foobar again not too long ago, but I just couldn’t get into it – it doesn’t really jive with me anymore. I wouldn’t have tried to build a new audio player if I felt there were better alternatives already out there, but personally I couldn’t find one. Cheers.
My newest discovery with the iOS version of foobar2000 is that it can read the files for things I have bought on iTunes and downloaded through the Apple Music app without a subscription. I was trying to go back to an iPod but lack of Bluetooth killed me.
The Buy button is kinda signaling, that they don't understand, what Winamp and this whole time was about... New tools with a frenetic mdding scene behind it, max customization, no tutorials, but digging through every file to see what you can change, bulky windows, which all needed to be arranged aside, like browser, napster, icq, winamp, your cs server chat in a thick browser.
I miss these times too. And I’d like to remind you that Winamp used to be a $10 shareware app (that’s roughly $30 in today’s dollars). The first version of Winamp didn't have any windows, it was pure utility application. Do you still think there's value in "max customization"?
Nice build. Will check it out. Winamp had a simplicity to it that made it great to use. Just enough config to not get in the way. I find that most modern players somehow emphasize configuration for the perfect playback experience when all you want is to just launch & listen with minimal involvement. Definitely onboard returning to owning more your own (purchased) content.
We tried to keep it as lean as possible. MacOS itself adds quite a bit, and then there are libraries for format decoding, audio streaming, VST support, etc. Could it be smaller? Probably – but not by an order of magnitude.
answered in show hn post and a github issue. source is coming in a week or so when im back at computer. claude wrote a large portion of the visualizer and im trying to rearchitect how it taps the audio feed and understand it before releasing source. it felt weird to publish code i didnt have a strong hand in. people wanted the player though so i put up the release.
I personally own a bunch of vinyl records and love to change pitch while listening to get a different feel for the familiar music. DJs used to mix with turntables that have only pitch and phase adjustments, it was very minimal.
What for? It's just streaming audio chunks with Core Audio that you cannot bypass. Even if there's resampling of 44.1khz to 48khz (Mac's default nowadays), it's not audible. Bit by bit perfection matters when you do a lot of processing, like in the context of a DAW or sound plugins, but not so much in the listening context. DA (digital-to-analog) end-chain matters much more – the actual audio interface and speakers, where all file-to-sound-wave reconstruction magic happens.
I remember using that "green head" Windows Media Player. It's fun for like five minutes, then you get back to the default, but maybe that's just me. But we definitely need more "weird shaped" apps, that's for sure.
Sigh this is the same insanity that tesla brought into the car dashboard UI/UX, They removed physical buttons and now everyone is bringing them back. Same applies to music players.
Call me crazy but iTunes/Music has always been one of the things I like most about macOS, at least after going through the settings and disabling all the features trying to push you into a subscription. I still manage my own ~500 file mp3 collection instead of paying monthly.
I used iTunes for a long time with a library of around 1,000 albums. If you weren’t too lazy to add proper covers and ID3 tags, it was actually pretty enjoyable to use – especially together with an iPod. But the problem is that iTunes imposes a very “flat” structure on your library, while for some collections a hierarchical folder/subfolder/file structure just works much better. Not to mention that you can keep all kinds of related files alongside the music itself – booklet scans, lyrics, interviews, links, PDFs, and so on.
I feel like iTunes/Music gets worse with every version, to the point where I've effectively abandoned it finally after macOS 26.
My music collection is some tens of thousands of files served via a DAAP media server - since macOS 26, Apple Music will only play music for 5-15 minutes before giving up and just stopping.
For years, it's had a trivially reproducible bug where pausing Apple Music while playing from a DAAP server, then restarting the DAAP server will crash Apple Music.
After trying basically every airsonic/subsonic/plex/etc. alternative, I finally settled on simply using foobar2000 to play from an SMB share.
I share the sentiment, even with fond memories of foobar2000/winamp/audacious, I've gone the route of just resorting to a "simpler" setup, just a collection of shell scripts to manage mpv to play my files from my disk/shares/http
This is how it looks on macOS, and Linux:
https://gmt4.github.io/mpvc/assets/mpvc-fzf-mac.jpg
https://gmt4.github.io/mpvc/
I buy mostly music on Bandcamp and iTunes/Music is my sole driver for my 30k local song files. It's unfortunate that it has been neglected over so many years. There is a plethora of well known bugs and the sync with iPhone works most of the times, but not always and is in general quite cumbersome. The UI has become ridiculous over time (for example: it features two search/filter fields). It would be an easy mark to simply fix and polish it a bit. Sad.
iTunes/Music has its merits but in my opinion has been in decline since between versions 6 and 10 depending on the aspects being spoken about. For most of its existence it was subject to constant bloat and always felt a bit "off" compared to other Mac apps due to its nature as a cross-platform Carbon app full of bespoke UI widgets, and though its feature set got pared down and it technically became AppKit-dominant in the transition to "Music", it still doesn't feel right and is out of step with the rest of the OS.
A proper AppKit iTunes-style player with the best parts of iTunes across versions but without the bloat would be a beautiful thing. Even better if it's FOSS so it doesn't get abandoned a few years down the road, as paid players tend to. While there's several apps in this general direction like Doppler[0], nothing really nails it satisfactorily.
[0]: https://brushedtype.co/doppler/
It seems like most of the iTunes hate has historically come from people who used iTunes on Windows because they needed to use it to sync their iPods. Apparently it wasn't very good on Windows?
I do agree that it had been getting worse and worse on Mac before it was rebranded "Music" in 2019.
iTunes on Windows was horrible and it was even more horrible when trying to use it for managing Apple devices. Obscure errors, convoluted error mesages, slow... I will never miss it. One of the worst software ever created and I'm glad it's dead. I like Music.app under macOS though as someone who used MusicBee under Windows.
iTunes is still the best I have, mainly because it syncs well with iPhone, but also because it (kind) of just works, and I have a pile of applescripts to beat it when it doesn't.
I still wish it was a bit better at finding lost files, but maybe I'll vibe code something to do that for me someday.
(I'll have an album in the folder it doesn't see anymore, point one song at it, and it can't "find the rest" of the album, but I have to point each one out)
I also hate the idea of streaming, but I have been super lazy in the past
I have listened to 44,000 songs on Spotify over the last 13 years. It has brought me a ton of value, but I would love to move back to owning my music as files. I've been getting fancier with managing self-hosted infra at home, especially using AI to help me out.
Maybe I'll get back there, but I also can't imagine only listening to 500 songs!!!!
complete opposite, i hate it
ITunes and Aperture were the apps that made me buy my first mac. Music and photos were just handled so easily, unlike anything else that came before. Smooth, intuitive and quick, everything else felt stale or broken.
These days Aperture is long gone and Itunes will let me make playlists where if I own the song, I can't play it cause it's not synced. If I don't own the song, it plays fine.
It's like nobody cares anymore, and back around 2008 that was the killer feature of the Mac - it was the computer and OS where it seemed like someone cared, about every little thing.
I imagine the shittiness of iTunes doesn't really show up as much with a music collection as small as 500 files. I remember it being a slouch with more files. I'm currently at 73,000.
Works fine for me with my current collection of 21k items.
Quasi-normie computer users: Linux will never take off on the desktop. I want to use my computer, not spend all day configuring it.
Also quasi-normie computer users: Windows/Mac is great as long as you go into Settings/the registry/PowerShell and disable all the user-hostile anti-features first.
> I still manage my own ~500 file mp3 collection
Huh?
Just checked my 'collection':
Not audiophile scale, for sure - but only 500 looks quite low. No wonder iTunes can manage it snorts.I just checked mine;
208,778 Files 1,799 GB
Mostly MP3.
*slightly inflated file/music count due to album covers/metadata.
you're crazy
What's wrong with foobar2000? Used to be one of the best music players and you could infinitely customize it.
I actually prefer VLC to foobar2000. However, I still prefer classic Winamp to to all other music players, and I wish I could get Apple Music work in the same interface. I like 100% of the classic Winamp player UI/UX.
- I like the separate player, playlist, EQ windows.
- I like that I can re-arrange the windows, and resize the playlist separately.
- I like that the main player has a little EQ built in.
- I like the layout of the main window. It's perfect.
- I like the layout of the playlist window, it's also perfect. I can add "directories", "albums", etc. and again, I can resize the window.
- I like the skins. I like the classic skin, but I also love the Sonicated skin. I still have it on my Windows laptop.
- Conversely, I really dislike the "native" UI elements.
- I like that lack of rounded corners on the classic Winamp windows, such that when windows stick together, they appear as whole, and I can drag them around as one.
Mostly, it's a bunch of seemingly small and aesthetic things, but if a player doesn't have those things, I might as well just use iTunes.
Apple has MusicKit now. In theory you can build whatever (Mac or iOS) app skin you want on your Apple Music subscription.
https://developer.apple.com/musickit/
Winamp was synonymous with m3u playlists, how well does VLC handle those?
Ah, fond memories of cron jobs generating m3u playlists for me ...
For me personally, the main reason to use foobar2000 back then was FLAC support, which Winamp didn’t have at the time. Out of nostalgia, I downloaded foobar again not too long ago, but I just couldn’t get into it – it doesn’t really jive with me anymore. I wouldn’t have tried to build a new audio player if I felt there were better alternatives already out there, but personally I couldn’t find one. Cheers.
My newest discovery with the iOS version of foobar2000 is that it can read the files for things I have bought on iTunes and downloaded through the Apple Music app without a subscription. I was trying to go back to an iPod but lack of Bluetooth killed me.
This seems like the best of both worlds for me.
Foobar is what I use to play music. Example of quality, performant, timeless software.
The Buy button is kinda signaling, that they don't understand, what Winamp and this whole time was about... New tools with a frenetic mdding scene behind it, max customization, no tutorials, but digging through every file to see what you can change, bulky windows, which all needed to be arranged aside, like browser, napster, icq, winamp, your cs server chat in a thick browser.
I miss these times too. And I’d like to remind you that Winamp used to be a $10 shareware app (that’s roughly $30 in today’s dollars). The first version of Winamp didn't have any windows, it was pure utility application. Do you still think there's value in "max customization"?
Nice build. Will check it out. Winamp had a simplicity to it that made it great to use. Just enough config to not get in the way. I find that most modern players somehow emphasize configuration for the perfect playback experience when all you want is to just launch & listen with minimal involvement. Definitely onboard returning to owning more your own (purchased) content.
Good retro feel. I don't mean to shift the spotlight away from the topic, but a great lightweight alternative is Tiny Player: https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player-for-mac/
I see little to no information on whether or not it really whips the llama's ass
Jokes aside, 180db also ships with a demo track — a nod to llama.
At 26MB setup package it most likely doesn't.
We tried to keep it as lean as possible. MacOS itself adds quite a bit, and then there are libraries for format decoding, audio streaming, VST support, etc. Could it be smaller? Probably – but not by an order of magnitude.
Pay software that doesn't have anything to do with Winamp.
It's called "inspiration". And if you actually used Winamp in the ’90s or 2000s, you probably remember that it used to be a $10 shareware app.
me too, released two weeks ago on hackernews: https://github.com/chrisallick/light-crime-audio-player getting good reviews!
There's no source code? Why is it on GH then.
answered in show hn post and a github issue. source is coming in a week or so when im back at computer. claude wrote a large portion of the visualizer and im trying to rearchitect how it taps the audio feed and understand it before releasing source. it felt weird to publish code i didnt have a strong hand in. people wanted the player though so i put up the release.
Does it support original Winamp skins?
It doesn't, and I don't think there's value in literal carbon copy of Winamp. You can adjust shader backgrounds to the taste though.
Cog is a dated but pretty good winamp clone that supports mod and s3m like winamp did. Someone should bring that one back to life instead.
Does it support Milkdrop2 visualizations?
Does audacious work on OSX? Theres also xmms if you want to run it in xquartz
If by OSX you mean macOS, yes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45928363
DJ mode seems useless for DJ’s and smells like feature creep. KISS, YAGNI.
I personally own a bunch of vinyl records and love to change pitch while listening to get a different feel for the familiar music. DJs used to mix with turntables that have only pitch and phase adjustments, it was very minimal.
does it support exclusive mode?
What for? It's just streaming audio chunks with Core Audio that you cannot bypass. Even if there's resampling of 44.1khz to 48khz (Mac's default nowadays), it's not audible. Bit by bit perfection matters when you do a lot of processing, like in the context of a DAW or sound plugins, but not so much in the listening context. DA (digital-to-analog) end-chain matters much more – the actual audio interface and speakers, where all file-to-sound-wave reconstruction magic happens.
but there is Vox.
Have you actually used it? I didn't like it that much, and the subscription model turned me off.
Cool. Now please make it support skins that aren’t rectangular. https://warped3.substack.com/p/direct-win32-api-weird-shaped...
I remember using that "green head" Windows Media Player. It's fun for like five minutes, then you get back to the default, but maybe that's just me. But we definitely need more "weird shaped" apps, that's for sure.
Literally just installed QMMP on Haiku with the default Winamp skin because my partner misses the 90s.
I love Strawberry Music Player. Works great and does everything I want.
Vibe coded?
My first thought. The title is so typical for this kind of projects.
Not really, why?
Sigh this is the same insanity that tesla brought into the car dashboard UI/UX, They removed physical buttons and now everyone is bringing them back. Same applies to music players.
You didn't like shader backgrounds?
I recommend IINA: https://iina.io (https://github.com/iina/iina)
MPlayerX and IINA are the best free video players for macOS, hands down. Music mode needs more love though.