Cog for Mac0.08

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.

Great little no nonsense player for FLAC lossless files amongst others. The best sound quality of all the players I tested.

Cog is great. Just stopped working on me though (won't add songs to the playlist). Tried Vox, Taply and Play. Vox and Taply had very high CPU usage in background when not running. Play is a bit ugly to look at but uses .1% CPU in the background and plays the music very well. So if you have trouble with Cog, give Play a shot.

I remember when iTunes first arrived, the problem with iTunes is that it's trying to do it all. That has never worked, that's also the microsoft approach :P. Take a look at the good old UNIX, one app that performs specific functions well defined, and in a very easy and productive way. iTunes has grown to become a beast, for large collections it's REALLY bad, it get's really choppy , and RAM usage goes to the roof. There's nothing close to foobar2k for mac ( I think it's one of the best windows only apps out there ). But Cog, oh dear, Cog is amazing, very fast, can play FLAC flawlessly. This is the ways applications should be designed. It needs work, but it's an amazing piece of software. Keep the good work!

Nice little app. Very useful for me because iTunes takes too much power on my old G4. One comment though: when I click on equalizer, nothing happens.

kknopp: if by "brillant" you mean "massive, clunky, unintuitive and irritating as hell", then you are correct. Cog does not have that sort of interface, and that's why it's nowhere near the p.o.s. that iTunes has become. I don't care about the stupid iTunes Store, I don't care about iPhone syncing, I don't care about sharing playlist over the network... so I don't need any of that extra junk. Cog does what it does very well without all the extra b.s. many of us don't need or want.

I've been looking for years, literally, for a small, low resource music player for OSX. Al the rest are either unstable, bulky, over complicated or all of the above. This little app is *perfect*. I can just drag and drop a folder full of 1000 songs and lots of subfolders and Cog plays it easily and quickly. No importing or forcing me to create playlists. If I don't want to do that, it still knows where my Music folder is without me having to tell it. It's CPU and RAM usage is tiny compared to that beast iTunes. Cog even knows to listen to my MacBook Pro's remote, and the music player keys on the new mac keyboards. This rocks. Bye bye iTunes, I don't need your fat @$$ anymore, and I won't miss you at all.

Indispensable little player, love the fact that no conversion is necessary to play open-source file formats commonly found on torrent sites. Cog and Max are the dynamic duo of open file formats, keep up the great work!

MP3 player? No way! I want my music lossless but compressed if possible like for instance FLAC or Monkey's Audio (APE). And this little gem plays them straight from the files without conversions. Great stuff! Thank you very much and please keep up the good work.

Sweet little mp3 player that is much more lightweight and usable than iTunes. Try it.

An excellent MP3 player! I'm currently listening to the Cog Player which is handling an excellent job with my iTunes play lists, without any problems.

Might we add to the praise the fact that it provides system-wide hot keys? I haven't seen that in any iTunes alternatives. This is a very nice program. I would like to see the addition of an equalizer of the ability to use VST effects. But on the whole, this program gets the job done and doesn't eat up all of my resources when I try to listen to music.

Forgot to vote :-)

Gapless playback is a bliss, love it! And you will, too, if you give it a shot. Take it one step further and add crossfade playback to increase the happiness factor even more. I use Cog to play files off my Linux server via MacFUSE/SSHFS and WLAN - no hickups, no gaps at all.

I really want to like this player, but it has some real annoyances. Pro: + Very simple. + Fast to use. + Stays out of your way. + Low CPU utilization. Con: - *Still* doesn't play AAC encoded with QuickTime/iTunes. - Could be about half the size it is (even and 1600x1200 it's absolutely HUGE). - Doesn't remember shuffle/loop settings between launches. How about a pref's pane to manage UI size, playlist font/size, buttons vs. text, etc.

Works just fine in 10.3.9 The window is too big for me though. I like tiny apps.

Cog is a very tiny and fast music-file player. For the fact, that's a free player, the user-interface is very simple and intuitively. My recommendation. But nevertheless I'm missing the comment-field in the ID3-tag of a mp3-file.

I agree with DOM21. I can understand not supporting an older OS, but come on! 10.3 is not that old. Almost all the mac users I know are still on Panther. It makes me wonder if these developers aren't getting some kind of payoff from apple.

very nice!!! gapless with flac is awesome!!! thanks for the app!

Great app! Easy to use and plays/exports so many different audio formats... and freeware too! Would be nice if Panther users could use this as many still haven't upgraded to Tiger yet because of all the OS bugs.

Great, plays my FLACs gaplessly, with low CPU usage. Be nice to see gapless MP3 playback, I know this is harder to do. One problem, when using my external sound card, the sound disappears when seeking through files, but comes back when I play a track from the beginning.

Didn't this used to work under OSX3.9? Why stop supporting that? Not everybody has moved to Tiger. In fact I suspect most have stuck with Panther.

Obviously the reviewer below has no clue when it comes to why people develop different audio codecs. Cog is a great player for use with higher quality codecs compared with mp3.

I think it's going to be a lovely day when PC people stop creating stupid codecs all the time. Producing result most of the time you can't even differenciate with others. Please just use MP3... Cog crashes when attempting to input files.

Great application! There is one quirk with 10.3.9, and that is when the window is shrunk to the smallest, the up/down scroll arrows disappear. It would also be nice if the window could be shrunk to just the control buttons and volume. thanks for the app!

Oooh, at last I can play my flac folders! Many thanks

Im liking it so far. Just transferred over to mac after 11 years on pc, and there is a distinct lack of decent mp3 players out (i blame itunes) Only thing it needs now is stream support and ill be happy :)

flacs work great, thanks

Very impressed with this so far. It's nice to have one player that can handle all these formats iTunes can't. I'm really hoping you can get the gapless worked out in time as that's one thing I could really use. I know it's probably a bit early for feature requests, but I have two small ones: 1) m3u playlist support. Would be nice to be able to open these as they're pretty common and I always use them in Windows. 2) If you ever get round to implementing album art, could you display jpg files that reside in the same folder as the mp3s? For example, in Windows I have the album cover as a folder.jpg file and when I play any mp3 from the folder it's displayed in WMP. Much neater than embedding art in id3 tags. Keep up the good work. Maybe one day I can get rid of that useless iTunes!

The gapless playback claim is unfounded. It doesn't work with ANY of the supported file types--not even WAV or AIFF. It's rather close, but close isn't "gapless." However, playback support for FLAC, Musepack, etc. make this application worth having.

seems to crash when I try to play anything. Deleting prefs doesn't help. (iMac G5, 10.3.9)

Doesn't play AAC encoded with QuickTime nor couldn't play m4p from itms. So useless. Good bye Cog and say hello to the trashcan.

very promising app! still using macamp lite x for my shn/flac needs but definitely a promising and worthy job! in 0.0.4 i cannot drag and drop files to the playlist window, app crashes...adding files via the "+" button works fine thanks a lot!

For all the praise the Mac gets for it's multimedia abilities, I have been sooo disappointed not being to find ANY program that does gapless playback like Winamp does (REALLY gapless). COG is the closest thing I have been able to find. MANY thanks to the developer! There is only the slightest blip where 2 tracks join. Apple has not been able to do anything that comes close. Thanks again.

OS X 10.3.8, Cog .0.0.1, .0.0.2, and .0.0.3 just bounces once in the Dock and then disapears. I can't see anything :-(

WWWWOOOOOWWWW!!!! MusePack support!!!! AMAZING JOB!!!!

Won't launch! Not with drag-n-dropping a supported audio file to alias or original app, nor double-clicking either. I need Cog, hope someone can help. G5 Panther ver 10.3.8.

Awesome! I can't thank you enough. I've been looking for this software to play all my FLAC files since the first day I got my mac and now you made it... Easy to use plus it is stable (unlike VLC) Great job..can't wait for the next improvment.

by clicking the time field - display remaining time instead elapsed time and vice versa would be useful, having a fade in seconds option between songs, also when skipping to the next song via mouse > would be nice. why not use space for play and pause button and normal (without command) cursor for next and previous track as everyone does? is editing id tags not working or buggy on my system? and finally - two or more simultainiously playing windows would be great, dragging between windows would be great and giving different windows access to different sound devices would be supergreat. then a volume slider could be useful. very good work for version 0.0.2

0.0.2 won't simply run on my computer. It does not even open up when clicked on. I'm running 10.3.7

At last, I can read my flac collection again. Thank you! iTunes is almost version 5 and still can't read ogg or flac files!

FINALY the first feasible FLAC player for OS X (unless you count Traktor - a different category really) it's been a long wait. Gapless playback too, though not for LAME mp3's. CPU usage is about the same as iTunes, forgivable at 0.0.1

Very impressive for 0.0.1 - it is a relief to escape from the bloat and interface peculiarities of iTunes. Hurrah for the front end being a simple list of tracks, and for being able to use OGG and FLAC files straight off!

I wonder why it doesn't use Quicktime to play formats it doesn't know about?

That is the lowest version number I've ever seen.

my favorite thing about this player, is that it has really intuitive shuffle support. I don't know what they did, but it seems truly random! Nice simple interface, without bulky useless skins. good stuff. Hasn't crashed on me yet and I've been using it for a couple months now.