Vox - 0.2.6

Superb GUI, simple, playing everything, much improved (0.2.6, what will it be when it's 1.0?), truly worth a donation !

I love this app. Simple, intuitive, just the right amount of functionality. Like a previous poster said, it reminds me of early versions of Winamp. Please, be very, very careful about adding any additional functionality. Please do not add useless crap like skins or any visualization junk. It's perfect, just as it is.

With that said, the only suggestion I'd have is the ability for the UI to be collapsed (similar to Winamp) into a very thin, horizontal box. As it is now, the player takes up a little too much screen real estate.

Overall, an excellent application!

My biggest complaint about iTunes is it lack of codec support. Although I have been able to add a codec for oggvorbis, I have not found any way to implement flac, Monkey audio or Windows audio in iTunes, all of which I need to be able to play my diverse music collection. Even in beta (alpha?) release, Toolplayer is in many ways superior to iTunes and any other audio playback app on the Mac. This little app plays wav, aix, mp3, mp4, ogg, flac, ape, wa, along with many other types of less commonly encountered audio media. For example, VLC doesn't play Monkey audio nor unitary, multitrac flac files and has limited equalizer support. Cog won't play mp4-encoded files and has an annoying tendency to become corrupted over time, requiring a complete re-install. Toolplayer runs rings around both in its audio quality and memory foot print.

[As a quick aside, I wish Apple would get its act together vis-à-vis codec support in the iPods, especially the inclusion of flac, which is an open standard. I HATE having to rip music twice.]

I have 3 minor nits to pick with the program as it stands. There is no editable playlist; there is no shuffle function; and there is no graphic equalizer. As I listen to everything from early Renaissance and Baroque to jazz, hip-hop, and rock, a one-size-fits-all approach to sound quality really doesn't work well for me. Yes, there are programs I can add (like the program Hear), but they add complication and cost a fair bit of money. A shuffle feature would be nice to freshen up saved playlists (which is the only way currently to play more than one song at a time in this program). Finally, the very lack playlist functionality is the most glaring shortcoming of Toolplayer. I have to create playlists in a secondary app, such as Cog, iTunes or VLC in order to play music sets in Toolplayer. Since this is beta software, playlist functionality is presumable high on the developer's to-do list.

All in all, Toolplayer comes closest to the Winamp of any audio playback applications currently available for Mac OS X. It is free, but I encourage people to donate funds to the developer as both reward and encouragement for further development of work of what potentially may become the single most indispensable audio playback app on the Mac.

I need to look at a huge library of old songs but did not want to have to put them in my itunes library. many things I do not like about itunes. Using this app I was able to quickly screen the library for what i wanted to bring into my main library. very fast, sound quality seems better than itunes on some songs, I like this app very much. Compliments to everyone involved. Mac user since 1988. Itunes is very childish and rigid and yet dominates the market now. before iTunes there were a lot of innovative players in the works, but iTunes won and then killed most of these projects....this app deserves support just for trying to fill a gap and persevering in the face of itunes tyranny and dominance. This is the mac programming community at its best.

I've been waiting for a lightweight, pretty and Mac native music player for a long time, since all previous such projects died. Now ToolPlayer is a real revelation: Slick, small, plays almost everything and it's free!

The two things that I am waiting for still, in terms of features, are a proper playlist editor (currently, files are just played in the order they're opened) and, most importantly for me, streaming mp4 support.