Cog

I love the application but have one issue. When dragging a list of pre-sorted files onto the playlist (unwanted) Cog auto-sorts these files in alphabetical order :( . Maybe this issue can be fixed by the developer?

more recent and active developed fork: https://bitbucket.org/kode54/cog

Simple. Works. I keep my music arranged in folders and don't care to edit metadata. The left column shows me the list of folders, I double-click on one and it loads everything in that folder to the main playlist and starts playing it, including subfolders. So far it plays everything I've thrown at it. Much easier to use than Clementine.

Light weight, pure music.

love it a lot, can we have hotkeys for adjusting the volume please?

Cog 0.08 Nightly Build, excellent http://cogx.org/development.php

I'm using Cog since years now and it's my preferred player for mp3 because of its simplicity, with just the essentials, but there is something strange about all those "little nice players" (including Play and Vox): while they play aac (.m4a) apparently correctly, they misunderstand tunes'durations (displaying something like 1:13:24 instead of 04:35). It might be boring if you have to go to a precise location in the song, when checking a converted song, for example. The only app displaying durations correctly (except for iTunes or Quicktime Player, of course) is VLC! P.S.: note than I have only checked on PPC :-)

i can't seem to play radio streams (pls, m3u) anymore on lion.

A nice, light, no nonsense player that works with Last.fm, yet bypasses the bloat (and bugs) of iTunes and Songbird.

Version 0.08 is already out.. Look at the "Development" part of the homepage. Love this app for is simplicity - just listening to your music.. PLUS you can scrobble (last.fm) your tracks with it ;)

Solid, minimal player. I've always loved players that open a file browser to navigate on the left panel. The only thing I noticed is when the player is in its minimal state the shortcut keys don't work. I'll try downloading the nightly to see if that helps. Thanx to the developer.

A nice and great player for those of us who don't believe that their music is iTunes ;-) I find it so feature complete and smoothly working that I do not see any reason to ask for any updates of this piece of software.

sound quality is good

Just another thumbs up for this great product. The nightly build updates are appreciated. And, as with Vox, the quality of the sound coming from this is better than iTunes which my iPhone unfortunately locks me into. It's great having an application which just focuses on my music collection and respects my own folder structure. Very much enjoying the Spotlight integration for finding any music file on my HD & compiling playlists. Thank you developer.

COG uses fixed point high quality MAD (Mpeg Audio Decoder) library to play mp3 files, so the sound quality is much higher than played in iTunes and QT. Go to developer's site and download last 0.8x beta.

Excellent Music Player. I like its simplicity. It reminds me of what iTunes used to be. Too bad they evolved into what they are today.

For me, the primary advantage of Cog is that it allows system-wide hot keys. As far as I can tell, all of the other players can only be changed if I first select the player program itself. I like the freedom to change a track while I'm in Safari and such.

vox, cog and play are the most audiophile solutions for audio on a mac. because i like testing new software i just wanna add 2 cross platform suggestions: http://www.clementine-player.org/ http://banshee.fm/ personally, i'm stuck with vox.

At this point, it seems quite clear that developpement is stopped (nearly 3 years now from the last 'news' on the site...). I use and really like it to check an album without importing it in iTunes. I've just noticed a little lack: it does not read m4a (aac) tags.

I just checked the latest Cog nightly, and it's getting better. The last stable release is really old though. Still not better than Vox, but it's definitely getting better.