Decibel 1.3 - The First Audiophile Player with Mac OS X ASIO Support > exaSound Audio Design. ExaSound Brings Quad DSD to Mac, Support for Linux and Windows Server Enhancements. Share this comment. Link to comment Share on other sites. Report reply; extracampine. Posted June 14, 2015.
Overview Foobar2000 is a freeware audio player for Windows 8/7/Vista/XP. It supports a large number of audio file formats including MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND and more with additional components. With it, you can custimize user-interface, organise metadata, files, and folders. In addition, foobar2000 supports for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats using the converter component. If you just switched to Mac from Windows system, you may also want to run Foobar2000 on your Mac to take care of music playing on Mac, but only disappointed to find that there is actually no Foobar2000 for Mac. In fact, you are only one of those who search for Foobar2000 for Mac or at least a Foobar similar for Mac, or Foobar replacement for Mac or Foobar alterntaive for Mac.
TechiSky will introduce several Foobar for Mac alternatives and their shortcomings in the following. Free Foobar for Mac Sierra/El Capitan/Yosemite/Mavericks Alternatives. Cog: is a free OS X music player with lots of audio formats supported such as Ogg, Musepack, Monkeys Audio, Shorten, Musepack. Cog cannot convert CD or audio formats.
Though the latest version developed in February, 2009, many OS X Lion users reported it works well in OS X Mountain lion. Some people may find Cog crash on Mountain lion. Play: from Sbooth is an application for playing and managing audio files. It supports playback of FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Musepack, WavPack, Monkey’s Audio, AAC, Apple Lossless, MP3 and various other audio file formats. Sbooth may crash on some Macs running OS X Mountain lion.
Play is unable to convert CD or audios. Play processes all audio using 32-bit floating point precision, providing the highest possible playback quality for files sampled at all bit depths. Songbird: is an open sorce audio player for Mac.
With it, you can play and manage your music and videos, build playlists, browse, and sort. Then sync your music to your portable music player or phone. Songbird does not support converting audio and CD. It was also reported that it crashes in Mountain Lion.
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Some people found that Songbird is too slow and too buggy. Vox: Vox 0.3 Beta is a FLAC player for Mac OS X which can only play FLAC files. Commercial Foobar for Mac El Capitan/Yosemite/Mavericks Alternatives. Decibel: from Sbooth (costs $33) is an audio player tailored to the particular needs of audiophiles. Decibel supports all popular lossless and lossy audio formats including FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Musepack, WavPack, Monkey’s Audio, Speex, True Audio, Apple Lossless, AAC, MP3, WAVE and AIFF. Decibel processes all audio using 64-bit floating-point precision, providing the highest possible playback quality for files sampled at all bit depths.
Play is unable to convert CD or audios. Amarra: by Sonic Studio integrates with iTunes, or can be used stand-alone importing tracks into a playlist with one click from the Finder or iTunes. It supports for sample rates up to 384 kHz. Amarra costs $189 or more and the licence either requires an iLok USB key or the software is locked to a single computer which can’t be transferred.
BitPerfect: is an Mac OS X app available on Mac App Store at the price of $9.99. BitPerfect is a simple, easy to use, audiophile grade music player that works with iTunes to deliver the highest possible sound quality.
Amarra: by Audiophile Engineering has a main window that looks like a piece of high-end hi-fi gear, but far more classy than that of audirvana, it has the ability to play music directly from iTunes playlists without needing to have iTunes running. Also included are a selection of on-the-fly resampling methods, including iZotope and remote control software for the iPhone and iPod Touch available in the App Store. Amarra costs $19.99. Pure Music: ($7.99 to buy) by Channel D integrates with iTunes, running in a window alongside and can re-sample music on the fly. Pure Music requires iTunes to be running to select tracks, but offers a considerable slew of other options.
Swinsian: ($19.99 to buy) is designed to entirely replace iTunes, including iDevice sync support. It has, among other features Last.fm integration, watch folders, device sync transcoding rules, a duplicate finder and Airplay support.
TechiSky’s Favor: iTunes is the best free Foobar for Mac (macOS Mojave, Sierra, El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks included) TechiSky has tried many music players for Mac till he wrote this article and found there is always something missing in the players. Some free audio players crash on Mountain Lion and do not support OS X 10.9 Mavericks or OS X Yosemite 10.10, El Capitan 10.11, macOS 10.12 Sierra or Mojave. The price of commercial audio players for OS X is so high but do not work as expected. So after trying so many OS X audio players, TechiSky found iTunes is still TechiSky’s favor. ITunes may be crap on Windows but is really great on Mac. It’s true iTunes can only play Apple friendly audio formats like MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless ALAC, AIFF, but we can free convert FLAC, APE, CAF, etc to iTunes supported audio.
Considering other audio players may mass your music, costs higher than their price lists, unbearable crashes, etc., it’s deserve to convert to use iTunes to manage your music library, especially you have a large music library. Software to use for convert audio to iTunes supported formats on Mac OS X (Mojave/Sierra/El Capitan/Yosemite/Mavericks/Mountain Lion included) To convert CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND, APE, CAF, etc to iTunes supported MP3, AAC, M4A, AIFF and Apple Lossless ALAC, you can hire the free OS X audio converter. You can also use professional audio converter like to convert your audio files to iTunes supported formats. Visit TechiSky’s article to learn more about best free and professional audio converter for Mac (Mojave/Sierra/El Capitan/Yosemite/Mavericks/Mountain Lion included). Posted by at 3:15 pm Tagged with:, 5 Responses to “Foobar for Mac: Best macOS Audio/Music Player(Mojave/Sierra/El Capitan Included)”.
Over the last few years, the list of 'audiophile' audio players on the Mac has gradually increased. Do they sound the same if set to bit-perfect output? Let's have a look at the candidates I'll be considering here: 1.: I bought this program more than a year ago. It's a no-nonsense program that plays a nice range of file formats without fuss. It's able to take exclusive access of the audio device, and memory playback.
As with all the commercial offerings, it can switch sample rate automatically. PCM only, no DoP for DSD at this time. I upgraded to the latest version 1.2.11 for these tests. Memory playback was activated. 2.: Current version is 1.4.6. I bought this one about 6 months ago.
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125432097/953966648.jpg)
It's got a nice, fancy GUI. Able to handle DSD files with DST and was able to play DSD64 and DSD128 over the USB interface to my TEAC UD-501 without problem. 'Under the hood', it's also got some extra features like memory playback, 'Direct Mode' apparently bypassing CoreAudio as well as 'Integer Mode'. Since the software supposedly bypasses CoreAudio, I would have thought that 'Integer Mode' would be an obvious given.
They also talk about 64-bit processing which is great if one has need for the SRC and dithering (iZotope-based). For these tests, I'm using Direct, Integer Mode with memory playback to the TEAC. The green 'INT' indicator turns on.
Also, I have SysOptimizer turned on (disables Spotlight, Time Machine, some USB tweaks). Well known media player originating from the Windows world. I measured the beta 18.0.177 build for this test. Bit-perfect from the start so I didn't fool with any of the default settings. It's capable of DSD playback to the TEAC using DoP.
I'm not as familiar with this one. I installed the trial version 1.89g. It literally 'wraps' around the iTunes interface. Can handle DSD but I didn't bother trying since it looks like there were some contortions needed to get these files recognized under iTunes. 'Memory Play' was activated for playback.
My subjective opinion is that I did not like the UI and using iTunes means no native FLAC support. Release version 1.0 for Mac. Just a freebie I can run with the TEAC DAC. Handles FLAC.
Will do DoP for DSD playback. Unable to decompress DST though. Does have an 'Expand to RAM' mode which I did not use for these tests. The 'standard' Mac music player.
Should be 'bit-perfect' so long as volume at 100% and none of the DSP plug-in's are activated. A lot of uncertainly out there about this program with folks jumping up and down with each version claiming that sound has changed for better or worse.
Version 11 was released in November 2012 with some folks claiming volume and sound quality changes compared to version 10. The BIG negative about iTunes for audiophiles is the lack of automatic sample rate switching - need to go into the 'Audio MIDI Setup' panel to change sampling rates and bit depth (yuck). IMO, the other BIG negative about iTunes is that it does not support FLAC. Seriously, after 11 versions, to not support the universal lossless audio format is just stupid and has been a reason why I do not buy music from Apple. Over the years I have tried Play, Amarra, and Fidelia as well, but figure the above was enough to look at for a sense of the field out there around Mac music players.
I see there's also for iTunes - again, FLAC limitation sucks. Setup:(Note that this is same as previous.) MacBook Pro (.running audio player.) - shielded USB - TEAC UD-501 DAC - shielded 6' RCA - E-MU 0404USB - shielded USB - Win8 laptop MacBook Pro is the 17' early-2008 model. Nothing fancy, and in fact relatively 'old' 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo processor.
Running OS X Mountain Lion with no OS tweak for audio. Win8 laptop is the Acer Aspire 5552 which has been my measurement 'work horse'.
Again, nothing fancy, just 2.2GHz AMD Phenom X4 processor to grab data from the E-MU 0404USB and process the data through, RightMark, or jitter FFT analysis. Part I: 6.2.5 (PCM 16/44, 24/96, and DSD64)All the measurements done with the test signal encoded as FLAC except for those based on iTunes (iTunes, Pure Music) where AIFF was used. Part III: Time to let the machine have a listen to the music and see what kind of correlation it finds using the standard 24/44 audio sample with. Reference for all these 'correlational null depth' measurements is Decibel FLAC recording. Each audio player was measured 3 times. I threw in comparison measurements for MP3 320kbps and 192kbps. Also to show what happens with some DSP processing - Pure Music with volume reduction of -1dB (with dither), and turned on the EQ in iTunes and dropped 8kHz slider just by 1 'click' lower.
I found it quite remarkable the drop in null depth by just turning on the iTunes EQ plug-in and using it to adjust just 1 notch (don't know how many dB's this is supposed to represent) see addendum! Pure Music -1dB volume control changed the measurement slightly but not much. DiffMaker has amplitude compensation so it is trying its best to compare the audio quality beyond the volume difference. Part IV: ConclusionWell everyone, unless I missed something obviously subtle here, what I see is that bit-perfect is indeed bit-perfect playing the audio through my TEAC UD-501 DAC with all these programs. Now of course I cannot overgeneralize these findings to all Mac computers, all DAC's, all player programs, all drivers, all DAC's, etc. But I think I can say with some assurance given similar setups as mine that: 1. With bit-perfect playback, all the player software performed equivalently.
This is supported by every measurement method used. Subjectively with headphones attached to the DAC, I did not notice a difference listening to the music being played back while doing the DMAC Test. No evidence of anomalies in the Dunn jitter test signal. This is not surprising as I had already previously reported that I was as some seem to believe. From what I can tell, jitter is primarily a hardware property and software timing issues lead to obvious audio drop-out rather than subtle pico- or nano-second changes in the audio output. Although I did not do an equivalent DMAC (DiffMaker) test with the DSD audio, it looks like all 3 programs tested with DoP capability performed equivalently using the RightMark test. Still waiting for more DSD content for this to matter.:-) 4.
I see no evidence that special features like memory playback, 'direct mode', 'integer mode', 'SysOptimizer' made any difference compared to the output from the no-frills TEAC player where I did not even turn on the memory playback feature with the 2008 MacBook Pro. Bottom line is that these programs work well to output bit-perfect audio. The MAIN feature over iTunes is the ability to automatically adjust the sample rate. Beyond that, I'm happy to own both Decibel for its simplicity and flexibility in playing all kinds of formats as well as Audirvana Plus for the full feature set including DSD playback and DST decoding. I just don't see any evidence that they sound any different. Do bit-perfect Mac audio players sound the same? Yes, a s far as I can measure and have personally experienced.
Again, let me know if you have any evidence otherwise. I was E-mailed shortly after publishing the if I've tried JPLAY - not yet, but in the weeks ahead may find some time to hook up the Windows setup and have a look.
Until then, I recommend reading. Enjoy the tunes:-). Addendum - June 9, 2013: To answer that question of why even just -1 click at 8kHz with the iTunes equalizer resulted in such a low DMAC correlation null. Here's the answer.