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I've been trying to use iTunes now for about a year, and we just don't get on. So I tried instaling Windows Media Player for the Mac ... and there's no support for MP3s .. useless. I looked at Winamp, but this has to be run through wine or some other cocktail of programs.

So this leads me to ask, are there a good (native) mp3 player for the Mac? I want something like Media Player on Windows or Winamp. I don't want something to re-organize my music directories, I have put the music in the directories they're in for a very good reason.

Any suggestions?

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Tried finding an alternative to iTunes as well, but gave up. This is the best you can get on Mac Os. Maybe Songbird, but it's not great... – alex Aug 29 '09 at 11:35
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You can turn off the organization feature in iTunes. Go to the "Advanced" preferences pane and uncheck Keep itunes Folder organized". – Mark Thalman Aug 29 '09 at 11:36
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Or, perhaps even better, uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library". That way iTunes will use the music files right from their original location. – Jonik Aug 29 '09 at 11:50
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I have to admit I love iTunes. If it wasn't for iTunes on my Mac I would never have "gotten" it either, now I get irritated if it is not installed. It does have a learning curve. But well worth it. – Diago Aug 29 '09 at 17:52
Out of interest, what reason is that? – Benjamin Dobson Aug 29 '09 at 20:09
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Aug 29 '09 at 11:31

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6 Answers

up vote 8 down vote

It's hard to go wrong with VLC. There are native OSX binaries.

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VLC for music? Interesting, does VLC carry a library ability ? – Chris Oct 8 '10 at 17:44
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VLC is terrible at playing music files on OS X. In fact, it isn't really good at playing anything but on every machine I've ever used it on music skips for no reason under various levels of load or no load at all. (I use VLC for playing .flac files.) – Bryson Apr 12 '11 at 17:26
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up vote 4 down vote

SongBird is a good alternative to iTunes, it looks and has an interface similiar to iTunes, the project is part of Mozilla's many many projects, so it has the firefox browser backbone and many goodies from the open source world. There is also a winamp for mac, its outdated, but if you fancy it its called MacAmp Lite X.(Link here!)

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up vote 4 down vote

Vox:

http://www.voxapp.didgeroo.com/

Unintrusive, with a simple UI. I really like it and was glad to be able to junk iTunes at last.

Doesn't do a great job with audiobooks (you can set it to reload the last file you were playing, but it starts playing it again from the beginning...), but for music it's just the ticket.

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Thank you for this. I wish I could up-vote a million times. – Bryson Apr 12 '11 at 17:38
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up vote 3 down vote

I recommend Clementine. It's based off of Amarok 1.4, and it's a native OS X app (and Windows and Linux). Here are some of its features listed on the homepage:

  • Search and play your local music library.
  • Listen to internet radio from Last.fm, SomaFM and Magnatune.
  • Tabbed playlists, import and export M3U, XSPF, PLS and ASX.
  • Visualisations from projectM.
  • Transcode music into MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC or AAC.
  • Edit tags on MP3 and OGG files, organise your music.
  • Download missing album cover art from Last.fm.
  • Cross-platform - works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
  • Native desktop notifications on Linux (libnotify) and Mac OS X (Growl).
  • Remote control using a Wii Remote, MPRIS or the command-line.
  • Copy music to your iPod, iPhone, MTP or mass-storage USB player.
  • Queue manager.

They even have development builds available for you to try out: http://builds.clementine-player.org/mac/. The latest ones have prettied up the UI a bit.

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I like this one a lot, thanks for the pointer – dland Sep 26 '11 at 10:50
Just replaced SongBird with this, I LOVE it, and I'm only about 20 minutes into using it. – Dillie-O Feb 29 at 22:02
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up vote 2 down vote

I've always been partial to Amarok, and it looks like it's possible to get it working on OS X, but this might not be the easiest option.

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The KDE on Mac OS X website has more up-to-date information about installing KDE applications (such as Amarok) on Mac OS X: mac.kde.org/?id=build The current recommendation is to build KDE 4 and Amarok using Fink or MacPorts. This is time-consuming, but not difficult. – las3rjock Aug 29 '09 at 17:16
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up vote 2 down vote

Cog is a super lightweight (not 64 bit I believe) open source music player for OS X that has been out there for quite a long time. It won't reorg your media files and will actually allow you to view them in a tree like hierarchy.

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+1 for cog. The only thing I don't like about it is that I can't rate songs with it. (At least, I don't think I can.) – DanBeale Aug 25 '11 at 17:54
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