decent macos music player/library application?

morning watmm!

i have a lot of music on my external disks. alot of which is just sitting there waiting to be discovered. i used to be happy with foobar2000 but now i'm on a mac, so i'm stuck with gnarly vlc. vlc is a very good video player, not a very good music player. having used the good itunes (back in the days) and spotify now i'm also realizing that i need more of a music library app – not just a player – to categorize, shuffle, search and discover my music. it's uninspiring and boring to dig through tons of files and directories with no album art or categorization, as you all know. i'd really like to just index a directory with all my files, have the album art and metadata automatically inserted and be presented with something like a grid view with albums/artists/songs.

i've searched the net for something, and i found the open source "clementine" which says it shall do all of this, but it is very in progress, slow and buggy when loading many files.

any tips for a good application out there? i'll give my money for a good, stable application that can handle large amount of files and support all the normal file types FLAC, WAV, MP3, AIFF

i also found some others:

* jriver: looks oldish, but very customizable and does indexing and metadata things pretty nicely. focus on "bitperfect" audio. https://jriver.com/audio.html

* audirvana: looks modern, but a little dummed down interface. i can't customize how it does indexing. also focus on "bitperfect" audio. (not that i need that) https://audirvana.com/

* traktor: i'm currently learning traktor for dj-ing, so i'm considering to just try and use that. but i'm not sure if it will give me artwork, metadata and simple library functions from what i see?

it's honestly a good idea to get a small intel NUC or something for playing music that runs windows 10.

Lenovo M720 + external soundcard + your hifi + foobar controller on your smartphone. boom

https://www.foobar2000.org/mac

swinsian

https://swinsian.com/

i use it, no complaints.

Swinsian looks interesting.


https://swinsian.com

  On 10/29/2019 at 6:34 PM, ignatius said:

Swinsian looks interesting.


https://swinsian.com

its legit. has everything you need. nice grid view, flac support, smart playlists etc. if you're on a mac its the way to go. better than foobarmac or whatever.

  On 10/29/2019 at 6:55 PM, species8472 said:

its legit. has everything you need. nice grid view, flac support, smart playlists etc. if you're on a mac its the way to go. better than foobarmac or whatever.

i've meant ot look into it for a long time but i'm still using itunes basically as something that dumps playlists and library onto my old ass ipod.   doing a full transfer to a new app is daunting because i'm worried about shit just disappearing because fucking apple. i got a new HD for my library because existing one is full up. copied entire contents of the drive to the new drive and directed itunes to find it and still it gives "these songs couldn't be found" type bullshit when syncing to the ipod.. it's like 98 songs or something.  so i need to do some kind of detective work to sort out wtf is happening.. adding a new thing to handle the library has me a bit nervous but i suspect it'll happen sooner or later. 

itunes will still be a thing going forward w/apple but it'll have a new name and 3 different branches for different types of media or osmething.. at least that's what it sounds like. 

i need a do over. 

i gave up wrestling with manually managing / syncing itunes library. i just use apple music with cloud library, and manage all my downloaded media in swinsian and yate for tagging.

ay, swinsian looks good! just downloaded it now, checking it..

does it do auto-tagging, or is that a manual thing you need yate or other apps for?

  On 10/29/2019 at 7:15 PM, species8472 said:

i gave up wrestling with manually managing / syncing itunes library. i just use apple music with cloud library, and manage all my downloaded media in swinsian and yate for tagging.

does this mean you can upload all your files to apple music and sync them to all your devices? no flac support then?

I use MPV in terminal. And my finder

MPV doesn't fuck with the audio. But I have a straight up wav and Flac music catalog. I don't mess with iTunes or Spotify kind of streaming stuff

that sounds very spectrumy

i ended up buying swinsian (24€), and having used it for the last couple of days i must say i'm impressed!

my setup:  three macbooks. old one is sharing the usb hard drive on the local network. (until i can afford something like a mac mini). the two others are "normal" laptops which mount the usb network disk locally and they have swinsian installed and pointed to that disk. indexing happens fast and playback is good!

thanks for the tip @species8472!