Music Player?

[keepfrosty]

Ok so I don't really like itunes because it doesn't play all the formats in which my massive music collection is comprised of. I was wondering if there was anything like foobar2000 for mac or should I just install that using wine and go from there?

[maya77]

VLC Player?

[naquaada]

I'm using VLC player for playing single music files with different formats. iTunes is only for my music library which only uses MP3.

iTunes is only fun if you're using correct ID3 tags and covers, but after doing this a few times this will become routine. Download a cover from Amazon or elsewhere, prepare it with Preview and add it in iTunes. After a while it becomes real fun, especially if you have to create covers for own compilations and so on. It's great if you have the cover in the Dock and the title in the menu bar. But it's good to manage the files manually, so you can use them also from a stack. Look at the screenshots from my iTunes library, the shown covers are all made by myself (only with Preview!) and have a size of 200x200 pixels @ 20 kb size.

What audio formats are you using? flac? There are iTunes plugins for these, and it's possible to recode them to AAC with an external converter, this format is lossless too. I'm using MP3 @ 192 kbit, this is good enough.

[naquaada]

One thing: If you're watching out for good sound quality, don't use your internal soundcard. I have an Realtek ALC 850 which only has an fixed output of 48 kHz @ 16 bit, not adjustable. You can check this in Audio-MIDI-configuration. This is problematic because most audio files are sampled at 44.1 kHz. So every sound file has to resampled in realtime, this produces a delay of at least one second if the music starts in VLC, and the sound quality is lower. On videos I even noticed audio dropouts. So it's better to use an external Audio soundcard. But if you're using a 5 Eur USB soundcard with a standard chip you'll get the same problems because the AppleAC97 audio driver seems only to sample in 48 kHz.

I'm not using consumer stuff anymore, using studio quality products only. A good reason for this is the better Mac compatibility, too. So I can recommend the M-Audio Transit USB interface. It's a very small, but powerful interface. It provides audio up to 96 kHz (!) half-duplex, S/PDIF output and input using Mini-Toslink and an additional AC3-Output using a nomal Toslink connector. Input gain allows up to 18 dB amplification, the mic amplifier even up to 26 dB. The USB Transit needs no external power supply and comes with an Mac preferences pane. (screenshot) Some friends of mine have the same interface and are very pleased with it. It replaces the internal device completely, so volume/mute keys on a multimedia keyboard are working. We tested an cheap standard interface, they weren't working with it.

Another thing: Very handy is a little mixer for combining audio outputs. I'm doing some audio editing/processing (the second screenshot shows the audio settings of my M-Audio Firewire soundcard ) and so I'm using some audio mixers at home. This comes very handy if you have various devices, but only one external input in your Hifi set, or if you're using a 5.1 sourround set only. I'm using a small Behringer Xenyx 1002FX 10+2-channel mixer for my hardware. So I'm combining my Mac, a digital satellite receiver, a laserdisc player and a second computer with this mixer. So I never need to switch and can adjust the devices - which have sometimes a very different audio volume - very easy independendly. A little FX processor for hall, delay, reverb (99 effects total) is inbuilt too, adjustable for every input. Maybe the whole knobs and outputs may frighten some people, but if you're using a mixer for some time you won't miss it anymore.

[lanceomni]

Songbird is a great itunes alternative. You may want to check their site for a file format list.

http://www.getsongbird.com/