The best music player software for Mac ?

The best imo, and many will agree is the COWON S9 FTW. Simply because its got the BEST sound quality for a pmp

Wow, that reply makes so little sense it hurts.

Anyway, is it just that you don't like iTunes? Because it's pretty efficient, and capable of bitperfect playback. I'm tryin' to dig up some other options, but, really, there aren't many because iTunes is such a powerhouse on a Mac.

VLC player is a decent option, Amarok looks nifty, if you don't mind manually installing it.

I say Play.
Since it is dead simple and support more audio codecs than iTunes.

Cog and Songbird are quite nice as well.

I stick with iTunes myself though, since I prefer to have more features than just straight playback. Library organizer, metadata and artwork editing, audio encoding/transcoding, and more

I've always thought of Songbird as a weird one. Not the most efficient or pretty. But, now that I look at it, it's come a long way, and I'ma download it and try it out. Cog looks pretty nifty too, though I'm not on a Mac.

I would also recommend songbird.

its got a slick, fully customizable interface and has much better file format support than itunes.

You're most welcome.

My main player is iTunes but I also use Neutrino. Neutrino has AU plugin support so you can do quite a bit with it.

+2 but its iTunes for me as well.

I use Neutrino and its great!!! you need to get used to it because it has a LOT of functionality, loops, wraps, effects, but you can access to all AU and 3rd party plugins with it, it can use the iTunes library too, you can feed it with FLACs and a lot other formats... Try it and I'm sure you'll like it, I payed the license even before the trial ended.

 

PLAY is also great, very simple to use but for some strange reason it stopped working on my MacBookPro, so I switched to Neutrino.

After using every audio player I could find for Mac which includes every player listed above plus Amarra and PureMusic.  I found that XBMC provided the smoothest playback out of all the free audio players.  Play is good but it does not support Internet Radio nor will it ever support Internet Radio.  Besides sounding fantastic XBMC does everything else you can think of except provide a TV tuner.  It plays every format you can throw at it, displays album art and even has an iTouch remote.

 

http://xbmc.org/skins/pm3-hd/

 

 

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/xbmc-remote/id289316916?mt=8

 

Also you might want to grab Ayre Audio's new Player developed by the sbooth "Play" people while its still free.

http://sbooth.org/AyreWave/

just listened to "shake you rump" by the beastie boys, and that bass sound that comes in at 40 seconds is fatter, more open and has a lot more "ripple" when i play it through VLC vs itunes... so that's what brought me to this thread. just wondering in terms of sound quality, has anyone noticed discernible difference with the same audio file and different players?

 

listening through grado 325is and a pa2v2 amp.

 

out of sheer convenience i use my ipod/itunes for most listening.

 

for the record, it was the 20th anniversary remastered paul's boutique.

Edited by rataplan - 1/2/11 at 6:59pm

I recently started looking for a new player since iTunes with fluke just wasn't cutting it. My iTunes was hogging cpu and lagging. In my search, I found Vox, it's a light weight player. I like it but your milage may vary. In any case, give it a shot, http://www.voxapp.uni.cc/, I think the developer is a member here too. 

 

Wonjin