Comment by dewey

2 days ago

If you are looking for a “old school iTunes” kind of player there’s also https://swinsian.com/

The Readme mentions that app under "Motivation"

> Motivation

> I have a large collection of music files that I’ve gathered over the years, and I missed having a good offline music player on macOS. I used Swinsian (great app, by the way!), but it hasn't been updated in years. I also missed features commonly found in streaming apps; so I built Petrichor to scratch that itch and learn Swift and macOS app development along the way!

  • For the people interested, Swinsian has a beta version that is actively developed. I got an update a couple of weeks ago. So it is not abandoned.

    • Oh, is there a way to switch to the beta channel? I love and use Swinsian, I know they're actively working on the next major version, but can't get interim ones.

      1 reply →

  • Petrichor shows my albums as a single track. CUE sheet support is a must.

    I also have a hard time seeing myself using a desktop music player without an iTunes-style column-mode browser.

Thanks for the recommendation! This one's the best "old school iTunes" program I've tried so far. I might stick with this one for now. I especially like how I can make smartlists with nested rules.

The main thing I'm missing is volume leveling.

Swinsian is 100% worth the $24.95. It's really nice to have a good system for offline music purchases.

A friend of mine (sound engineer) has been using VLC player for audio playback since forever. I do the same.

The advantage is that you are forced to organize your music in your file system and that translates incredibly well to all other future systems. Want a special playlist? Just copy the files over and name them with a numeric prefix counting up. You can open that playlist ten years later on a different operating system.

Since I tend to listen to full albums, this has been a good way of doing things.

  • There’s a reason library based players were invented and that’s that you don’t need to batch rename files, or tag a file 3 times if it’s part of 3 different playlists.