Folder Player - 2.0.2

With limited HD space and a gazillion mp3 CDs, I've been looking for something like this for a VERY long time. Importing into iTunes is a great big time-consuming pain in the drain, and so is playing individual tracks in Get Info's preview. This little drag-and-drop gadget is great not only for playing albums as such, but also for batch double checking my own file conversions and compilations.

On rare occasions, I do get the error message the last poster describes, but quitting and relaunching the app takes care of it.

My only quibbles:

[1] It plays tracks out of order - not good with multi-movement works. I listen mostly to classical music, and things like symphonies, suites, and Masses just HAVE to be played in track order. (The same applies to AOR classic rock, my other fave.) For some unknown reason it seems to play tracks in order of modify date as far as I can tell, and I haven't yet found a way to play them in track order. [Note to developer - or any other user, for that matter: Feel free to tell me if I'm blind in one eye and can't see out of the other 3.]

[2] The interface can act pretty funky at times. Adding and deleting folders could be improved - usually it deletes the whole list instead of the individual folder I want to get rid of.

[3] When I delete a folder/folders, it still shows the contents of the last folder played.

(I could add a fourth, that it skips when something else is going on in Finder, but I suspect that's just my ancient overworked slow-dog G4/400.)

#1 on my wish list for this app is a track-by-track on-the-fly volume adjustment (something iTunes tries to do but is pretty half-assed at it). But since this gadget seems to just string together a whole sequence of Get Info previews (very clever!), that may not be possible. No biggie, I can live with it.

The upshot of all this: It's a good concept and a pretty good app, launches in nothing flat, and the price is definitely right. For simple playback, I use it instead of iTunes. (Haven't tried Audion so I can't comment on it.) Could use a few interface tweaks here and there, but what app couldn't?

Despite some negative comments I see in the reviews for FolderPlayer, I'd like to say that I've had positive expriences with it. Several of the new features in version 2 (re-ordering songs) were done at my request. And the developer implemented them within days of my requesting them. Many program developers tell me they'll implement features in their next version of something, and not all actually follow through. This developer was very responsive.

Beyond the good support, I think this program has some good features that make it worth looking into. As I noted in my review on MacUpdate, I tend to listen to a lot of background music, and I was looking for an alternative to iTunes. If I need to burn CDs, extract CDs, listen to radio, download music, or convert music, then I use iTunes. But much of what I do is simply background noise. Any version of iTunes I've used inevitably puts at least a bit of a noticeable strain on my computer's resources, and I wanted something that would simply play music and let me work at full speed. Folder Player does that for me. It has basic bells and whistles, but I'm optimistic that OSS 3D will eventually succeed in its new direction, and I'll have a full-fledged equalizer to go with this player.

And by the way, this program certainly exceeds merely opening a finder window and playing songs that way. That is not what Folder Player is about. At least look into it. I've looked at a lot of playlist players out there, and this one stood out as the most viable.